The Republic Center for Support of Persons with Intellectual Disability – PORAKA in the past period continued with the foreseen activities one of the partner organizations in a consortium of 10 partners in European project titled “Early Inclusion through Learning from Each Other” supported by ERASMUS+ Programme of the European Union. The project is focused on increased knowledge and shared methods for working and inclusion of preschool age children with disability or being at risk of disability. The project aims to transfer information, concrete methodologies and to assess competencies.
In direct communication with the consortium of partner organizations led by the Austrian organization S.I.N.N. – Evaluation, the Team of the Republic Center – PORAKA has been working on advancing the tools provided by this project. The activities refered on adaptation and managing the online platform www.early-inclusion.eu aimed at exchanging experiences among the professionals and posting positive experiences and practices from the work with persons with intellectual disability. More precisely, the activities were focused on advancing the tool “Inclusion Method Market”, which is self-organized methodological online exchange market-place. Also, numerous technical activities have been taken, primarily for translation and adaptation of briefing materials.
In accordance to the foreseen programme goals and activities, on 26th of April and 5th of may 2017 in Hotel Kapros – Skopje, the Republic Center – PORAKA held two informative events for multiplication, i.e. presentation of the online platform www.early-inclusion.eu and the learning tools elaborated by project partners. 45 teachers from kindergartens participated on the two events, which operate within the Municipalities Karpos and Cenar, as well as representatives and officials from both municipalities.
With the inclusion process, children with disabilities are included in kindergartens without making the essential preparations and educating the personnel, which largely contributes to contra-productive effects due to the fact that the kindergarten personnel is not able to face the challenges brought by the inclusion. Therefore, the project activities were aimed for the teachers in the kindergartens, in order to offer information, protocols and briefing packages for different diagnoses and conditions, as well as concrete methods for work and inclusion of children with disabilities in everyday activities within the groups and kindergartens.
To our great pleasure, the participants opened discussion for many important and crucial issues, and the offered information and methods through the online platform were assessed as useful and employable in their work. The two events ended with an agreement for further direct communication, cooperation and consultation in order to improve the inclusion of children in the educational process.
