Los procesos de inclusión e integración deben ir de la mano, la inclusión contempla no solo la igualdad en los derechos sino que va más allá y requiere de equidad la cual consiste en procurar las condiciones necesarias para gozar el derecho de igualdad. En el caso de los niños con necesidades educativas distintas, al asistir a una escuela regular, se le está validando su derecho pero cuando no le das las condiciones que requiere para que desarrolle sus capacidades, destrezas y habilidades, la igualdad desaparece.

Volviendo a la historia de Rubén pienso que fue un niño que corrió con suerte: una madre comprometida al 100% con su proceso de aprendizaje, una docente que asumió su formación educativa a lo largo de sus seis años de primaria y hoy, la imagen que me llega es la de un niño alegre y feliz con sus compañeros de clase, inteligente y creativo, creado para el arte.

Pero no es una cuestión de “la suerte que me tocó” deber ser el compromiso de una sociedad sensibilizada en la inclusión e integración, así como hacer valer los derechos de igualdad y equidad de todos sus miembros.

Gracias a la comunidad @mundo.autismo por esta importante propuesta, a mi amiga @parauri totalmente comprometida con el mundo azul y difusora de conocimiento para comprenderlo. Gracias, gracias. Aprovecho la oportunidad para invitar a la amiga @belkisa758 a compartir alguna experiencia sobre el tema.

In English

We are in the registration period. Today is the day when the new children are enrolled in the school. We teachers are standing in the long, cool hallway attending to the representatives. I am sitting next to a colleague helping her organize the papers received, she is attending to a mom.

Usually, the representative takes her child with her at the time of registration, the idea is that she gets to know her child's teacher. In this case, the lady did not bring the child and when the teacher asked her about him, she justified that the child was indisposed that day. The report from the preschool showed a child who was initiated in reading, with habits to sit down to do the activities, with excellent fine motor skills and that he should be stimulated more to establish relationships with the other children.

In the interview, the lady noted that her child is quiet, sometimes distracted, that she spends a lot of time with him and that he has made progress in reading and writing as well as in basic addition and subtraction, that he likes open spaces and coloring. Everything fits perfectly for a 6-year-old who has done preschool and is ripe to start first grade. Enrollment goes off without a hitch.

On the first day of class, gathered in the central courtyard with more than 650 children, we all met Ruben, a boy who kept screaming, while clinging with his two little hands to the bench where he was sitting and rocking hard. His mother tried to calm him down and the teacher, perplexed, did not know what to do, whether to attend to the other 31 children in the class or help Ruben's mother to calm him down and convince him to join her and his new group of classmates. It was there that we learned that the boy was autistic.

I am talking about more than thirty years ago, when here in Venezuela, and in most of the world, inclusion was not yet contemplated and children like Ruben went to schools or centers for special children, as they were called at that time.

The process of Ruben's integration into a regular school was not easy, neither for him nor for all the members of the school community. More out of intuition, maternal affection and, if you will, compassion for the child and his mother, the teachers involved in his educational process "took him along" in the most convenient way possible.

I must recognize that his teacher, an admirable teacher for her patience, affection and group control, soon found the weak points that could "trigger an uncontrollable behavior" in Ruben and the specialist teachers in the complementary areas such as physical education, music and education for work and arts and crafts, which was the one I attended, together with her, we were discovering how to treat him.

I must also recognize that Ruben's autism could be said to be mild, since he was a child who understood and followed learning instructions, he often went to my classroom to do the activity that any group I was attending was doing, the other children were also learning that they should not scandalize when Ruben was in the classroom, that the door should be kept open or, for example, that no one could touch the materials on his work table.

In all of this, everything was more intuition than knowledge and training, since the teachers who studied pedagogy did not have any subject in the curriculum that had to do with learning disorders or difficulties. And at that time, it was not easy to access such specialized information.

Inclusion and Integration