An eleven year old girl with a brain tumour and so low defences that she can not go to school. The blindness provoked by this disease which complicates even more her relationship with the environment. And a public school, the Río Chico de Cádiar (Granada), willing–with the approval of the Andalusian Council- move the lessons to the girl’s house, where she remains convalescent and isolated from society and the other children. They are the main figures of the doctoral thesis ‘School at home: attention to subjects with visual disability by disease. A case study’, carried out by Antonio López, a researcher of the Universidad de Granada.
Under the supervision of Manuel Lorenzo Delgado, professor of the department of School Didactics and Organization, López carried out his work during the last school year 2004-2005. At that time, the child had to abandon her sixth year of primary lessons in the school centre due to her condition of oncologic ill person, aggravated by a blindness acquired as a consequence of such disease. The idea of connecting the school to her house started from the professor that the Spanish National Organization for the Blind (ONCE) put at the minor’s disposal, and could be set in motion thanks to the absolute collaboration of the student’s mistress, Alicia Mayobre, and the help of her parents.
According to Antonio López, the first difficulty of this pilot project was the impossibility of installing an ADSL line in the town, located at the heart of the Alpujarras. They resolved it by installing optical fibre to connect the school with the girl’s home. The following step was to establish a videoconference system to receive lessons through a computer.
The blindness of the child forced the persons in charge of the project to adapt the devices to the Braille technology (tiflotechnology), using a talking computer (access system) that allowed her to access school written texts while se learnt her new communication code. The importance of videoconference lied in the fact that the girl could participate in the atmosphere of the classroom (where the sound had a vital importance due to her blindness), allowing to connect the child to the class group.
From a pedagogical viewpoint, the repercussion of this experience lied in the return of the girl to everyday life and social inclusion, according to the UGR researcher. The fact that her ‘cyber classmates’ could see her through a ‘web cam’ forced her to get up early everyday, getting herself ready and following a timetable: the girl could not go to school, but the school managed to go to her home. This way, the girl recovered her motivation (obtaining excellent academic results), came out of the strong crisis she had been immersed in and, at present, she is attending her lessons of Secondary in the Institute of Cádiar due to an improvement in her disease
With this research work, Antonio López wanted to study in depth this unique experience, and analyse its pedagogical, functional, organizational and technological aspects.
Reference: Antonio López Martín.
Department of School Didactics and Organization of the Universidad de Granada.
Phone number. 958 520 144. E-mail: lopezmartin@andaluciajunta.es
