Dubai: Autism experts highlighted the importance of making mainstream schools autism-friendly and how this could be achieved during the Autism/Asperger's Syndrome conference organised in Dubai yesterday.
Internationally renowned experts addressed teachers, autism specialists and parents and offered guidelines for autism child's behaviour during the one-day conference and workshops organised by Ishara Consultants.
Prof Rita R. Jordan, Professor Emeritus in Autism Studies, Birmingham University, UK, gave a presentation titled "Educational Provision: making mainstream schools autism-friendly & inclusion," in which she discussed some of the fundamental differences in development that characterise individuals with autism spectrum conditions and the implications these have for teaching and learning in inclusive environments.
Teaching children
Dr Heather MacKenzie, best-selling author, speech-language pathologist and educator from Canada, gave a presentation titled "Guide to How to behave — teaching children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) behavioural, cognitive and emotional self-regulation."
She reviewed self-regulation and its major components and presented an innovative model for progressively teaching self-regulation of behaviour, cognitive processing and emotions. Dr Jordan told Gulf News that although there are good people working with children with autism, integration of these children into mainstream schools needs more work to find the right structure, although the core to build on is available.
She said there are good people who can diagnose, but diagnosis without proper support and services is not a good idea because it is distressing for people to find out that their child has a difficult condition and they have no help, so it is important to have a structure of services.
"You have some inclusion [in Dubai) but you seem not to have sufficient information in mainstream schools about this condition and how to help, so you are setting up for failure because these children are not being able to cope.
"There are people here who know about autism but their skills are not being utilised. What is lacking is coordination. We need to think of how we can get them to work together and plan," she said.
