Mrs.Sridevi Prasad is a Special Educator with over 35 years of experience. She earned her post graduate degree in psychology from Osmania University. Her areas of expertise involve working with diverse students with special needs, including intellectual challenges, autism, emotional disturbances, and learning disabilities. As a special educator, she has guided parents and staff in determining an appropriate education for each student both in regular or special school settings. She has also assisted students in finding support services in order to obtain educational qualifications and gain employment in the community. Mrs. Sridevi Prasad loves to follow-up with her students when they become adults and accentuate their skills in education, vocational careers and prepare them for independent living. Mrs.Prasad has authored many educational programs with the aim of mainstreaming children at different levels of education and skills. She is the founder of Shankar Foundation, enabling 245 children and youngsters to reach their full potential.
In this curriculum series, we will concentrate on SMART (Sensory motor and remedial teaching), a curriculum developed by her. Here is the interview.
1. Could
you tell us about SMART?
SMART (Sensory Motor And Remedial Teaching) is a concept developed after observing occupational therapists working with children who have a variety of sensory issues.We
have a unit called Saaburi that functions as a multidisciplinary clinic. I
realised that professionals from various disciplines all work in different
areas. Why not integrate all the areas and develop a curriculum?
Suppose
you want to teach a child the colour concept. The special educator is working
on colours. Colors can also be worked on by speech and occupational therapists using various modalities. For example, if the special educator
is working with the colour Red, the OT can work with blocks of red colour. We
also have our own sensory motor assessment and a checklist to serve as a guide.
This is happening concurrently, so we can assess their processing capabilities.
Similarly
olfactory-gustatory, proprioceptor, interoception skills everything will revolve around a single topic: colour. We realised working on these lines yielded
fantastic results. The child is having a good time
learning.
Interoception
skills are a new addition. So, if you are angry, we work on showing a red colour
card with an angry face, or a yellow card with a happy face if they are
happy. Then we go on to talk about strategies, such as what you would do
if you were angry. How can you calm yourself? It is a beautifully connected program. We can
call it a remedial support for therapeutic interventions.
2. What
age group do you begin with this program?
We
work with the SMART program for children in the age group 4-12 years.
3. How
were you able to integrate during covid time when access to OT and ST was not
possible?
The
special educator took on the additional responsibilities. In fact, we now only
do special education and collaborate with other therapists working elsewhere.
We are comfortable sharing our program, which has made it accessible to more
professionals. As a result, we've formed alliances to coordinate the programme.
We have also been able to introduce this in regular schools that practise
inclusion and have SMART classrooms.
Our assessment helps us find the weak links in the child’s processing capabilities and we target that. We do it in a play way. We attempt to overcome the challenges in order to help the child process better. For instance, if one looks only at visual perception skills, we can broadly classify it into 8 areas. The ability to distinguish between different shapes, colours, sizes, and other visual characteristics.
Visual : closure, discrimination, perception, spatial, memory, sequential memory, figure ground, form.
Auditory: discrimination, memory sequential memory, analysis, synthesis, foreground and background.
Tactile: Mehano receptors, Thermo receptors and pain receptors.
Auditory and gustatory: identification, perception, memory.
Vestibular: gaze, posture, spatial and alertness.
Proprioception: position, movement, force, velocity.
In the future, these serve as the foundation for many tasks, including reading, writing, and visual problem-solving, and can be evaluated and developed using a variety of methods.
Usually, in therapeutic interventions, there is no joy at the child’s end. Here it is interactive, and the child is learning. Assume the following instruction is given: "Come and place the block here." It is a passive learning method. These interactive concept oriented activities enable children to consciously participate and learn easily. It is an interactive learning, while their specific therapeutic needs are addressed. This approach helped many to move forward from concepts to academics. It also helps to mainstream them at a young age as basic skills have been worked on. This approach has helped many children to graduate to recognized certification courses. Initially, their abilities were deemed unsuitable for academic achievement.
As they say “Seeing is Believing”. We started with colors, but moved on to shapes, sizes, body parts, alphabets, numbers, mathematics, but the process is the same. . We took upon it a challenge to see how far we can go. This year, we have integrated 4 of our students into mainstream schools. The assurance we give the schools is we will work along with you and do the required hand holding for a period. As the child gets more capable, we withdraw our support. It is a very smooth transition, as we have given a strong foundation and the teacher in a mainstream class finds it easy.
SMART
works best at the primary level. As I said earlier, we are willing to share, how the resource rooms are modelled to create a happy learning environment for
the child matters. To teach colour alone, we have made 375 cards.
4. Do
you have any curriculums for the older students?
If the child has completed SMART, his sensory system is tuned to handle greater challenges, and he/she is ready to begin academics. I am not saying every child who has done SMART will join a mainstream school. Society has not opened up so much. So children do come back to us. We have an OBE program under NIOS and we prepare them for that.
Once the SMART is done, we look for inclusive set ups. If the child remains with us, we slowly tune him/ her towards Open Basic Education. As an accredited school, we adapted the curriculum to create a life skills-oriented programme with strong literacy skills in order to pass the National Open Schooling's secondary and senior secondary exams. It is helping children to read, write, and calculate. Children are writing their 3rd, 5th, 8th,10th and 12 th class examinations and getting certified.
In
Hyderabad alone, 5 schools have signed up for the SMART program. That helps in
an easy transition.
5. You mentioned that you have been in the field for 39 years and have witnessed many changes. What would you choose if you had to pick just a few?
I
have seen so many. We used to do home visits, seen children being constrained
in a room in their houses. We used to beg parents to send them to schools.
Slowly parents agreed to sending them to special schools. Then vocation
happened, sports activities. Now we are trying to mainstream our children.
We started the Sankar foundation, 23 years back. I started with a curriculum to help the academically oriented special needs children. When I started, people used to laugh at me. Again, people in society, and even professionals, differ when it comes to teaching academics to them. The majority of them used to say that if a child can write his or her name, the address, it would be their highest academic achievement.Today, I can proudly say that our curriculum( A- H Levels) helped many students to complete certified educational levels. We made computer education also as a subject.
The happiest news is now my children are working with decent salaries at big multinational companies like Wells Fargo, S & P Global, Tata Advanced Systems. Academic achievement, in my experience, significantly boosts their self-esteem. The way they communicate, introduce themselves, conduct themselves changes.
Academics we start with phonics,short vowels, diphthongs, and comprehension. We have lots of groups and the training is child specific. We have made curriculums from level A- level H. Level H is class 9.
6. What
is the curriculum for vocational training?
Once we identify the child’s academic limitations in the journey, we slowly introduce skill oriented training. We teach the basic skills, prevocational skills, task oriented skills though lot of task boxes. It helps the youngsters to transform and adopt work oriented skills. Today, our vocational products are much in demand by the brand name S Crafts.
I have to mention that some mothers from our organization have taken up the beautiful step of creating working and earning platforms from within fo our students. They created an organic goods packing unit. They are involved in making organic cold press oil, and managing the shop. Ten of our children, have gained employment in this process. Partnering with parents in creating in house employment is our biggest strength .
This is a synopsis of our programs. And the progress we have achieved over the years with our students.
Saaburi–Smart Program–(4-10 age group) 43 children trained–17 main
streamed–21 enrolled in OBE
Shraddha–Academic Program–(10–20 age group) 249 children taught–56
main streamed–24 are into open employment
Samardh–Skill development–(16- 25 age group)- 183 youngsters trained–47
are earning–15 establish on own set ups -
Saakaar–Computers training–(16- 25age group) - 75 are CSI certified–28 are
Data entry operators–2 are employed in Wells Fargo, 4 in S& P Global–3 into employability
training
Sannidhi–assisted living Program- residential–79 students trained - (18 to 54
age group) 19 sheltered employment –
Swanthana -Independent living program 30 Students trained–(20 to 35 years )
12 employed at Tata Advanced Systems.
We have received no government or agency funding. Our biggest strength has been the rock solid support of both parents and professionals. We are now building a parents' community around the residential centre.
It is an impressive figure that you have shared with us. Thank you, Sridevi mam, for taking time out of your hectic schedule, and doing this interview.
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