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Physical education is a subject that takes an important role in the education process of the visual impairment child, because in the psychometrical education area, it is the base for the child’s whole development. The intervention must happen early, through precocious stimulation, the child should have opportunity of safely live all the motor development steps in order to acquire basic notions to her future independence without traumas. Running, playing, jumping, swimming are simple activities to a child and extremely necessary to her development. With a visual impairment child, these activities are possible of being fulfilled, certain adaptation have to happen for the child herself feel stimulated to do. For instance: using a ball, this ball has to be produced or wrapped with any kind of material which makes noise for the child follow it and be able to find it through the sound. Toys must be exciting, coated with textures specifying different colors and shapes and respecting child’s age and the level of details. Jumping is a step we should pay close attention, we have to transmit total safety because this action requires the concept of depth, which the visual impairment people don’t frequently endure. However, a well-oriented job always turns out right. Physical exercises, also with good orientation, will make the child have the notion of her body, space and temporal orientation which will build the base for her orientation mobility learning.
According to Kephart and Schwartz (1974) and Webster (1976), “orientation and mobility limitation is considered the worst blindness effect upon human being.”
Lowenfeld (1948) and Gokmam (1969) consider that a visual impairment person, who is not able of moving independently, is deprived of taking spontaneous decisions, of accepting or fulfilling activities of knowledge and personal fulfillment. The dependency in the orientation and mobility area of a visual impairment person can take her to isolation and discredit.
Suterko (1967) quotes that abilities development in the orientation and mobility area happens within the own family and through stimuli at home, thoroughly participating of familiar activities, being the orientation and mobility development of abilities an essential part in the educational process of visual impairment children and graduated teacher in orientation and mobility when taught the most advance techniques, aiming a whole and possible independence, preparing that being to the real integration and inclusion in society.
Total inclusion suggested by worldwide laws does not only include students physically presented at regular schools. Inclusion has a wider meaning. Education right does not only mean the right to attend school together with other pupils, to afford adapted textbooks, or adaptation of paths; it is the complete right to citizenship in the widest concept. Respect to handicapped citizen, within his limits and opportunities of showing his abilities, adapted syllabuses and pedagogical policies counting with the inclusion of these human beings not just as students, but also as citizens.
The act of moving is a major feature among living being in the animal reign. From the largest species to the tiniest organisms is a main survival condition in each group. Specially, to the human beings, the concept of mobility is deeply linked with the idea of freedom. It is not acceptable a free man with his steps surrounded by any kind of impossibility, being this principal emblazoned in all present constitutional legislation, the well-know coming-and-going right to any place, at any time by each spontaneous desire. Such importance is widely highlighted by its antitheses: the punishment way of criminal acts is, the majority of times, in the omission of freedom, that is, the restriction of mobility of the guilty, bordering upon the limits of a cage in a prison.
The inclusion process of a visual impairment patient in a usual classroom goes against those educators who defend the existence of a SPECIAL EDUCATION, being a segregation instrument. Nowadays it is said that SPECIAL EDUCATION would be the right term to call EDUCATION, and this EDUCATION should face diversity of beings, since each one of us is a distinct human being. It is crucial to know that the process of education is as essential to “normal” students as to those with any limitation.
The process of inclusion aims, primarily, the reduction of the existing gap among normal people and handicapped, since the very first beginning of the educational process.
Some premises in the teaching and learning process, with visual impairment people, need to be established to facilitate a more precise understanding of inclusion. First a correct evaluation of the real necessities of a visual impairment student shall be promoted, in order to take to the conclusion that these necessities are not complex at all or hard to happen in classrooms of regular teaching. It means that great part of the necessary resources to visual impairment people can be easily obtained or produced by regular teaching schools.
Through the dynamic vision of Mazzotta, it is understandable that each student, in the concrete relation with formal education, can demand a usual situation of teaching and learning, a special one, or a combined situation (usual and special). Yet, it is possible an understandable situation (inclusive).
Inclusion is not utopia. It can and must be applied in the regular teaching process. Though, society needs to believe that is the clearest way to gather human beings in an effective way, since it banishes prejudices which have always followed those who present any kind of limitation, promoting this through education. The end of any kind of discrimination as part of this species is dealing with. Through education it will be possible to integrate handicapped people in the productive process, having in mind that nowadays this is a very demanding condition of well-living.
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