Opening doors and mediating practices: Working toward inclusion in Tajikistan

• In Event: Inclusion and diversity in global and local educational contexts

Proposal

Inclusive education has a firm place in the global discourse of education reform and development. Children with disabilities, and in particular children with intellectual disabilities, face stigma and discrimination to varying degrees in every part of the world. Developing and low-income countries have particular challenges including children with disabilities, who may never have been included in any schooling previously, because of the need to expand and retrofit the existing system to meet their needs.
In Tajikistan, similar to other developing countries, mainstream schools are not designed to work inclusively to accommodate children with disabilities or other special educational needs. Furthermore, the practice of education for children with disabilities in general are heavily influenced by a medical approach to disability, a preference for special schools or residential institutions for children with disabilities, and the legacy of defectology. As the poorest republic in the Soviet Union, Tajikistan’s education system inherited this way of thinking about programs for children with disabilities but did not have a strong system of special schools at independence. As a result, children with disabilities in Tajikistan have limited options for education and related support services that would normally be connected to special schools. There is also significant stigma attached to having a child with a disability that can motivate some families to hide these children from public view. In this context, several members of a national coalition of parent organizations are developing relationships with local schools in hopes of securing an enriching educational experience for their children, many of whom have never had the opportunity to attend school despite having already entered adolescence. This chapter develops an illustrative case study based on the relationship between two parent organizations and local schools: IRODA, an association of parents whose children are neurologically atypical, and School #72 and the organization Rushdii Inkliusiia and School #28. Both are located in Dushanbe, the capital city of Tajikistan.
Based on semi-structured interviews and focus groups conducted in spring and summer 2015, this case study explores the benefits to the schools from their hosting relationship with the parent groups as well as the potential for the catch-up program to change teaching practice in the school as a whole. Benefits to the school include direct and indirect financial benefits of providing the school with a source of unrestricted funding and attention from the same iNGOs and international donors who support the parent groups. Despite the stigma attached to disability, hosting a resource center also has a signaling value, helping the school to compete for students by projecting an image of prestige and progressiveness related to the attention from international organizations. Finally, there is some evidence that hosting a resource center generally and the integration of children with ASD in classrooms with assistants who have some training in the pedagogy of inclusion provides an important resource for the classroom teacher who may not have such training but may still be working with children who have unassessed learning delays, difficult home situations, and challenging behaviors.

Author

• Kate Lapham, Open Society Foundations