Collaborative Learning Community Facilitating Inclusive Learning Settings: Providing Reasonable Accommodations

Introduction

A disability can be defined as being a condition judged to be significantly impairing, or a function which is significantly impaired, relative to the usual standard of an individual or group. The term is used to refer to an individual’s functioning—including physical impairment, sensory impairment, cognitive impairment, intellectual impairment, mental illness, and various types of chronic disease. On the other hand, learning disabilities are neurological-based processing problems. These processing problems can interfere with learning basic skills, such as reading, writing, and/or mathematics. The problems can also interfere with higher-level skills, such as organization, time planning, abstract reasoning, long- or short-term memory, and attention (Learning Disabilities Association of America, n.d.; American Psychiatric Association, n.d.).

In some children, the loss of language is a major impairment. The inability to communicate often leads to intolerable frustrations, which in many students with severe cognitive disabilities leads to temper tantrums, screaming, biting, and self-abusive behavior. Each student with autism spectrum disorder also has some problematic core verbal and nonverbal communication symptoms (e.g., a delay in learning to talk or a complete lack of verbal ability) (National Institute of Mental Health, 2018; National Institute of Mental Health, n.d.; WebMD, 2018). The students having “reading-impaired” have obvious trouble with learning sound-symbol correspondence, sounding out words, and spelling words (Moats & Tolman, n.d.).

An inclusive setting in education is usually defined as a place such as a school or college where children of all abilities learn together. Namely in an inclusive classroom, children with learning disabilities, such as dyslexia, and physical disabilities, such as deafness, learn alongside children of both average and exceptional ability (Koenig, 2020). In Japan, this inclusive setting in education is tried at the public schools but being not widely spread still now.

Japan still has 1,149 separated schools for children with special needs; 144,823 students are enrolled, and 85,336 permanent teachers work in these schools. Almost half of such special needs schools is for students identified with intellectual disabilities (Ministry of Education, Culture, Sport, Science, and Technology, Japan, 2020). Outside of these special needs schools, Japanese public schools offer three methods of assistance that vary according to the severity of the children’s disabilities. The lowest-need group is taught within regular classes. The next approach is the resource room system, which such special needs students attend several times a week for special instruction. The third method includes special needs education classes. These classes are for children with relatively mild intellectual or physical/motor disabilities, autism/emotional disturbance or health, visual, hearing or speech/language impairment (Kawano, 2016; Isogai, 2017).

The schoolteachers, at the schools for special needs and the classes for special needs in public schools, have created self-made teaching aids and materials by using woodworking and metalworking for daily lessons. These teachers deeply feel that a teaching aid and specific materials suitable for one student may not serve another student. Indeed, they consider that each student with a disability may need individual self-made teaching aids and materials. Therefore, they need software and tools that are cheaper than the commercial ones and more user-friendly to create their own content for each student in their classes.

To proceed the inclusive learning settings, the useful and attractive technologies and tools that can be used to provide the disabled students with reasonable accommodations and help them join in the class in inclusive settings are needed. The newly developed technologies and tools described in this paper are helpful for such students and the schoolteachers as one of the indispensable assistive technologies.

In this chapter, the authors briefly present basic information on newly developed multimedia-enabled dot code, and then, describes in detail three activities performed at two special needs schools. They introduce the positive benefits and importance of collaborative learning community in providing reasonable accommodations for students with disabilities. They also describe the present technologies are quite useful for such students in inclusive learning class.