Author:

On the 27 June CBM celebrated the anniversary of Helen Keller’s birth by launching its Guidelines on Best Practice for Persons Living with Deafblindness.

These guidelines, available in English (with Spanish to follow soon), aim to assist governments, education agencies, public and private service providers, professionals and family members to build meaningful and appropriate programmes for persons living with deafblindness in low- and middle-income countries.

The guidelines identify the knowledge and skills needed to enable and empower persons living with deafblindness to reach their full potential and become successful contributing members of society. They outline many considerations for service implementation and contain stories from persons living with deafblindness.

More information about the guidelines, deafblindness and Hellen Keller is available in CBM’s news release.

An article written by members of the EENET team has just been published in the International Journal of Inclusive Education. The article is entitled: ‘Time to stop polishing the brass on the Titanic: moving beyond ‘quick-and-dirty’ teacher education for inclusion, towards sustainable theories of change’.

The article takes a critical look at the way many teacher training programmes for inclusive education are designed. It analyses some of the assumptions that are common in inclusive education training programmes, reflects on why the assumptions may not be accurate, explains the consequences of basing training programmes on inaccurate assumptions, and looks at alternative approaches.

Experiences from a teacher training programme in Zambia and Zanzibar are featured in a case study, illustrating ideas for how to move away from ‘quick-and-dirty’ training approaches towards higher quality, longer-term teacher education for inclusion.

There are 50 e-prints of the article available to download for free from the journal publisher’s website. Please feel free to get a copy.

If you do not manage to get one of these free downloads, you can also find a manuscript version of the article on EENET’s website:

Download manuscript in PDF.

Download manuscript in Word.

We hope you enjoy reading the article and please do share your thoughts on the subject of inclusive education teacher training.

Making a film with a limited budget is challenging and requires a lot of careful planning and preparation. One of the first tasks in our new project to make some inclusive early childhood education videos is therefore to write some storyboard outlines.

The storyboards describe what we want to film – which topics we want to cover and what the main facts or arguments are. We also brainstorm ideas for the sort of footage or images that might help us illustrate these facts and arguments. Because we are making a training video and filming in real-life schools and communities, our storyboards are a bit like wish-lists, showing all the things we hope we can film. It’s not like making a fictional movie where the director can make anything happen, using actors and computer-generated images! In reality we won’t be able to find and film all of the experiences on our wish-list, but we have some extra ideas up our sleeve this time to help with filling gaps.

Once the storyboards have been drafted, we will carry out scoping visits to two countries, so watch this space for news about which countries have been selected.

A few weeks ago we held an online consultation meeting. We asked participants to reflect critically on our existing video-based teacher training resource (‘An Inclusive Day‘) and to help us think about what additional or different messages are needed for a training resource aimed specifically at inclusive early childhood education practitioners.

Through the meeting and written inputs we received loads of fantastic ideas – enough to make 10 more films! We’ve been analysing all the ideas, ready for the next step – developing storyboards.

What is the most important message you think we should include in a video about inclusive early childhood education? Tell us your ideas!

Visit the ECE project section of our website for more information about the project.

EENET has compiled a 5-minute video – ‘Is our Teaching Inclusive?’ – for the British Council based on our ‘An Inclusive Day: Building foundations for learner-centred, inclusive education’ video-based teacher training on inclusion.

The edited video was shown at the British Council’s signature event at the International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language (IATEFL) International Conference in Liverpool in April 2019.

The British Council’s event at the conference was entitled ‘Is English Teaching Inclusive? Do we practise what we preach?’. Videos of many of the sessions from the conference, including the British Council session, are available online.

We also recommend watching the opening session at the IATEFL conference by Paula Rebolledo entitled ‘Teacher empowerment: leaving the twilight zone’. It is a very engaging and powerful analysis of teacher empowerment issues.

During the next year EENET will be developing a new video-based training resource. It will be similar to EENET’s ‘An Inclusive Day’ training resource, but this time focusing on inclusive early childhood education.

We will provide regular updates so you can follow our progress as we develop the storyboards, carry out location scoping visits, start filming in various locations, embark on a huge editing process, write the training manuals, and then build up to launching the new resource in mid-2020.

You still have 2 weeks before our extended deadline for submitting an article for this year’s edition of Enabling Education Review (EER) which will focus on the important role of parents, families and communities in inclusive education.

Find out more about the 2019 edition and read the call for articles (in Arabic, English, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian). The new deadline is 5 April.

If you are interested in submitting an article, but are not sure what to write or need more time, please contact us. We can discuss your ideas, help you to start writing, and even arrange a new deadline for you.

If you know other people who might be interested in submitting an article, or who might be interested in being interviewed for this edition, or who might like to submit a photo story or drawing, please let them know about the call for submissions.

We’re looking forward to hearing from you!

Su and Ingrid, EER editors

African Union Innovating Education in Africa Expo 2019.

Deadline for submissions: 30 April 2019.

This call is for African innovators to submit their relevant ICT-based inclusion and quality focused education innovations that are being successfully applied in African education systems. The innovator may be an individual or an organization, including government, non-government and for-profit agencies.

Submissions will be rated according to their quality, impact and potential for widespread application.

The selected innovations will benefit as follows:

• Presentation of their innovations at the Innovating Education in Africa Expo2019.
• Funding support to participate in the event.
• A chance to receive the AU Education Innovation Prize.
• Publication of the innovations in the Africa Education Innovations Handbook 2019.
• Membership of the Africa Education Innovators Network (AEIN)
• Certificate of recognition for Innovation

Read the full details of the call for submissions.