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Dear Readers,
Hello once again. As usual, I am happy to
meet you through The Educator. The last couple of months have been hectic
with so many activities happening around the world. I thank Larry Campbell,
President, ICEVI who attended the executive committee meeting of the World
Blind Union held in Sofia in September 2003 and shared so many valuable
ideas. Following the success in developing the ICEVI WBU joint position
paper on ?Inclusive Education for Children with Visual Impairment?, ICEVI
and WBU have again come up with a comprehensive policy paper on education
covering Braille literacy, orientation and mobility, technology, teacher
preparation, etc. I am glad that the Principal Officers of ICEVI have
endorsed this paper which is going to be placed before the Executive Committee
of ICEVI in February 2004. The position paper will be placed before the
Officers Meeting of WBU to be held in Cameroon in May 2004. While I went
through the minutes of the Principal Officers meeting of ICEVI, my joy
had no bounds when I read that ICEVI will be looking into the salient
features of the ICEVI-WBU joint policy paper on education in its process
of developing a perspective paper on Education for All Visually Impaired
Children by the year 2015. I am looking forward to this paper and wish
that all Governments and organizations working for the blind should be
determined to achieve the goal of education for all.
The current issue of The Educator is devoted
to Human Resource Development. In serving persons with visual impairment,
human resource development plays an important role, and therefore, we
have to ensure quality in our teacher preparation programmes. Besides
special education teacher preparation programmes, general education system
should also be revamped to include special education components as these
general teachers play a major role in inclusion of visually impaired children
in mainstream education. Developing countries should come up with cost-effective
strategies in teacher preparation approaches and also explore the possibilities
of alternative methods such as open school, distance education etc., for
addressing the human resources requirement. Unfortunately most developing
countries first need to establish adequate infrastructure before measures
like distance education can be instituted. In this context, the collaboration
of ICEVI with the Hadley School for the Blind to provide distance education
courses is a timely intervention, and I am sure educators, parents, and
visually impaired persons will take advantage of this facility.
The collaboration between ICEVI and WBU
at the global as well as at the regional levels will be a formidable force
to urge Governments and the larger education system to include disability
issues in the priority list so that millions of visually impaired children
in the developing countries can be brought under the umbrella of education
in the decades to come.
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