The right support in early years settings, school, college and university can make the world of difference to children and young people with autism and Asperger syndrome. Manovikas-IGNOU Community College, where the educationally marginalised get a chance to move towards mainstream education. It?s a one-of-its-kind initiative in the country for persons with developmental disabilities including autism offering recognised degree programme to its students.
Students with Asperger syndrome will often need more support or preparation than other people before entering vocational and higher education linked to university credit system. They may need to be offered the chance to get admission into College outside term-time to familiarise themselves before it is filled with people. They may need clear guidance about what to do and when, e.g. attending counselling session, Recognition of Prior Learning (RPL), diagnostic visit for Functional Behaviour Analysis (FBA) and Cognitive Process Inventory (CPI), joining the students peer group interaction etc.
They may need support with daily living skills or specialist equipment. They will therefore need input from personal advisers, course counsellor and mentor to help to ensure this support is in place before the course starts. Manovikas Community College (MCC) provides the opportunities to such individuals to have step by step process for admission in college education system. The curricula has designed to develop foundation of such students in workplace readiness and independent living skills and giving practical and theoretical inputs of core and applied courses along with project works.
The most useful point of contact for accessing support is usually the course co-ordinator at MCC. Each higher education programmes have a programme module, where specialist programme faculty help students to access the support they need.Students with developmental disability including Autism and Asperger syndrome who comes to admissions in Certificate Programme of MCC, ideally through the Multiple Intelligence (MI) test College Admission Team help the parents and students to choose the programme and RPL, according to enabling intelligence areas.
A 19yrs old energetic boy Ravi having Autism and their parents now desired to provide him the higher education at MCC in six months Certificate in Hospitality Training Programme where the linguistic and interpersonal skills are required. According to Ravi?s multiple intelligence tests, he scored above average grading in Bodily Kinaesthetic and Interpersonal Intelligence and he has been suggested to get the admission in Certificate in Office Attendant Training Programme. He is doing well in this programme.
In spite of some of the common language, each year specialists are teaching more about the cognitive strengths of the autism spectrum. In the 1960s, it was a common view that, except for a few high functioning condition, most autistic people were intellectually disabled ("mentally retarded" was the less than felicitous term), and to some extent this stereotype persists today. But a growing body of work pinpoints areas where autistics outperform non-autistics.
A partial list notes that autistics have, on average, superior pitch perception and other musical abilities, they are better at noticing details in patterns, they have better visual acuity, they are less likely to be fooled by optical illusions, they are more likely to fit some canons of economic rationality, they solve many puzzles at a much faster rate, and they are less likely to have false memories of particular kinds. Autistics also have, to varying degrees, strong or even extreme abilities to memorize, perform operations with codes and ciphers, perform calculations in their head, or excel in many other specialized cognitive tasks. The high functioning individuals with Autism, while they are outliers, also reflect cognitive strengths found in autistics more generally. A recent investigation found, with conservative methods, that about one-third of autistics may have exceptional skills or high function like abilities.
In MCC a 17yrs old girl ?Shreya?, is having strength in memorizing, symbolic performance (cipher), and excels in many cognitive areas. Significantly to channelizing the strength areas the Non-Credit Customized Programme in Personal Management and open basic education has helped her to learn the personal presentation, environmental awareness, sex education, safety skills, choice making, team work and self management. Thereafter she is now prepared for the admission in Certificate programme of MCC.
Autistic people usually have a superior desire and talent for assembling and ordering information. Especially when they are given appropriate access to opportunities and materials, autistics live the ideal of self-education, often to an extreme. It turns out that the Manovikas Community College is an environment especially conducive to persons with developmental disabilities including autistics. Many autistics are disadvantaged or overwhelmed by processing particular stimuli from the outside world and thus are subject to perceptual overload as a result. For some autistics, that is debilitating, but for many others it is either manageable or a problem they can work around. The result is that many autistics prefer stable environments, the ability to choose their own hours and work at home, and the ability to work on focused projects for long periods of time.
19 yrs old Sonu is living in Manovikas Independent Living Center (residential care) and attending MCC programme, his time schedule and stimuli provided during training now his hyperactivity and repetitive behaviours has channelized into manageable communication activities. He expresses his choice and communicates the needs.
Does that sound familiar? The Manovikas Community College is often ideal or at least relatively good at providing those kinds of environments. While there is plenty of discrimination against autistics, most people in Indian education process are so blind to the notion of high-achieving autistics that one prejudice cancels out the other, to the benefit of many of the autistics in higher education programme.
MCC programme don't push too much in the direction of stereotypes. Some people fitting that profile may well be on the autism spectrum, but the spectrum also includes beautiful women with charming smiles, enthusiastic extroverts, people who cannot produce meaningful speech, and people who make very clear and effective public speeches from memory alone. The service delivery system and evaluation of the skills with extensive analytical experience of Manovikas Community College, believes that any single profile of autistics or to replace the old stereotypes with new ones in the students. Rather, we keep on learning that the diversity of autistics is greater than we used to think.
There is no doubt that many autistic people have very troubled lives and are unable to move into positions of high achievement or even contend for them. Problems, such as very obvious social atypicalities, acquired social anxiety or various perceptual hypersensitivities ?found among many but by no means all autistics ?may hamper their ability to obtain ordinary jobs or rise in social status.
20yrs old Josef having desire to work in corporate sector and after completing the Certificate in Hospitality Training Programme, he received the Marks sheet, and Certificate under the seal of IGNOU, one of the prestigious People?s University. He attended the interviews at various corporate sectors and got the job in Barista (International Coffee shop) and earning the mainstream salary with all the paerks alike mainstream employee. The confidence and commitment has proved that yes ?they can? so ?can you?.
Current prejudices are based on at least two mistakes. First, too often autism is defined as a series of impairments or life failures, thereby ruling out high achievers. It is more scientific and also more ethical to have a broader definition of autism, based on differing and atypical methods for processing information and other cognitive and biologically defined markers. That way we do not label autistics as necessary failures, but rather we recognize a great diversity of outcomes including successes.
Second, diagnosed autistics are very often those people who encounter major problems in life. Most higher-status autistics don't ever show up for diagnosis or intervention, and many of them have no great need for it or no real awareness of it, or, even if they are having difficulties, they fear the stigma of a diagnosis.
Manovikas-IGNOU Community College also learning that a lot of the stereotypes about autistics are false or at least misleading. It's been suggested, for instance, that autistics don't care much about other people, or that autistics lack genuine emotions or are incapable of empathy. The relevance of the autism spectrum for higher education isn't just about particular individuals on the autistic spectrum. The very nature of higher education shows how much we, often without knowing it, hold up autistic cognitive profiles as a partial educational ideal. In "special needs" education, there is plenty of effort to teach the skills of the nonautistic to the autistic, but in the regular classroom we are often doing the opposite. I view higher (and lower) education as teaching people to be more autistic in many of their basic cognitive skills. Again, some key cognitive features of autism are the ability, and desire, to process lots of information across widely different scales, from tiny details to overarching structures; focus and the mental ordering of that information; a relatively high degree of scientific objectivity; and the presence of some highly specialized cognitive strengths, even if they are accompanied by some areas of poor performance. To an educator a lot of that list ought to sound pretty good.
Another way of putting it is to note that all students are special-needs students requiring lots of help. The nonautistic students do not represent some ideal point that everyone is striving to attain, but rather both autistic and nonautistic students are trying to learn the specialized skills of the other group, as well as perfecting their own skills.
When it comes to public and academic discourse of condition of developmental disabilities including autism, while getting admission at Manovikas IGNOU Community College, we look at the strength and needs alike mainstream students. Manovikas Family believes in evolving skills of the persons not in the label of persons as a disabled.
Name of Individuals are changed to respect the person and celebrate the diversity as a role model.
Dr. Alok Kumar ?Bhuwan?
Specialized in Rehabilitation Science and Special Education
Managing Secretary, Manovikas Charitable Society
Please visit us: www.manovikas.co.in,
Call us on Help Desk: 011-65422367,
mail us: mcc@manovikas.co.in
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