Inclusive education for students with disabilities

Quito, jueves 29 noviembre 2018
Students presenting one of their projects
Students presenting one of their projects

 

Students and professors in the university's branch campus in Quito presented their experiences and opinions during a seminar on diversity which was organized by the education undergraduate program, the inclusive education research group and the UNESCO chairs program on technologies for inclusive education. The event was attended by speakers from Argentina, Spain, Ecuador and Peru.

The topics covered during the seminar were philosophical, anthropological and historical aspects of diversity, autism, media construction of diversity, high intellectual capacities, giftedness, interculturality and inclusion and school inclusion.

The opening conference was presented by Nelson Reascos, a professor at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Ecuador, who made a review on Greek mythology, "The Greeks thought that all those human beings who had diminished in their being, would be closer to not being", he said. In relation to exclusion categories he mentioned the minority means inferiority, weakness or limitations.

UPS celebrated the second anniversary of the UNESCO Chair Technologies for Educational Inclusion, a program of community engagement that seeks to improve access, learning and participation rates in education of historically excluded populations, with special emphasis on children, youth and adults in situations of vulnerability by effectively employing innovative support tools based on ICT.

Fernando Pesantez, academic vice president of the university, said "We work with quality, which means equity to guarantee higher levels of access to people who have been historically excluded." He spoke about the projects developed in the program and with research groups on topics such as: rescue of cultural values, assistive technologies and support for education and disability (17 projects), web accessibility (2 projects) and virtual environments ( 4 projects)