www . ICEVI - Europe . org Report

3rd Workshop
on
Training of Teachers of the Visually Impaired in Europe

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1 Introduction

ICEVI is an organization of professionals involved in the education and rehabilitation of children and youth with a visual impairment. Originally it was an organization consisting mainly of teachers of the visually impaired, because of their important role in the educational process of these children and youth. As the quality of the education of these pupils largely depends on well trained, expert teachers, a discussion about the training of these teachers is very important.

Against this background, ICEVI Europe organized a small-scale invitational workshop about this subject for persons involved in the training of these teachers in 1997 in Budapest, Hungary, followed by a second one in 1999 in Bratislava, Slovak Republic.
Both workshops were highly appreciated by the participants.

In the first workshop the emphasis was primarily on the exchange of experiences whereas the second workshop was characterised by more in-depth discussions on the standards of the training and the implications for the curriculum.

Traditionally, the training of teachers of the visually impaired focussed on classroom teachers of the special schools for the visually impaired.
The fact, however, that all over Europe, albeit in different stages of development, more and more visually impaired pupils visit mainstream schools instead of special schools, has consequences for the role of the special teacher of the visually impaired: from classroom teacher in the special school to support teachers - in many countries known as itinerant or peripatetic teachers - in mainstream schools.
This change of role has consequences for the content of the profession, and connected with it, for the preparation to this profession: it requires additional competences which must be translated into the curriculum of the training.

Therefore, the initiators of the third workshop thought it would be wise to focus this workshop on the training of these support teachers which is reflected in the title of this workshop:
"Preparing teachers of the visually impaired to support integration / inclusion".

The programme was prepared in consultation with Mrs Emmy Csocsan, professor at the University of Dortmund, Germany, and Mrs Chris Arter, senior lecturer at the School of Education of the University of Birmingham, UK.
Five themes, clusters of questions, have been distinguished which require specific attention in the training of the category of teachers in question.

On the basis of experiences gained in the second workshop, the participants were allowed to sign up beforehand for one of the five themes. During the workshop the participants worked for two days with colleagues who had chosen the same subject.
In the second workshop, the use of different working methods proved to be satisfactory which is why we used this method again in the third workshop.

During the preparation of this workshop we came into contact with two projects that focus on (aspects of) the same themes as the subject of this workshop:

• the ISaR-project: Integration of Students with V.I. at Regular Schools at the University of Dortmund and
• the FLUSS project: Fortbildung von Lehrkraften fur gemeinsamen Unterricht mit sehgeschadigten Schulern (Further educational courses for teachers of mainstream schools who have a v.i. pupil in their classroom), an EU-project in Austria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands.

Representatives of these projects have been invited to present these current projects with the intention of finding connections with the results of the workshop.

Finally, two important aspects which may be important to the outcome of the workshop:

1. In the participating countries, the process of integration/inclusion is in a different phase which had an effect on the contribution of the participants.
2. In a number of countries, there are formalized training courses of teachers of the visually impaired at a University, Academy, College etc. In other countries, often the smaller ones, the specific part of this training is restricted to activities by teachers and other staff of the special schools of the visually impaired which resemble a kind of in-service training. Naturally, this also influences the contribution of the participants.

This report does not profess to be an elaborated blueprint for a curriculum for the training of itinerant teachers. However, in combination with the reports of the previous two workshops, we hope to contribute a number of building blocks which, hopefully, prove to be useful in the ongoing discussions in this field in Europe.

Herman Gresnigt

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