Actualizing Swami Vivekananda’s educational vision of imparting life-building and character-making education through harmonious blend of the two sciences, ‘natural and humanistic’ impregnates the body of university’s vision, priority, and thrust. In retrospect the year 2019-20 can be said to mark the epoch of a new era in global cooperation in health sector. Never before in century’s time health and well-being has been feared about. Hence we have chosen the following best practice in the field of unified sports for the special children as that which embodies our vision, priority, and thrust for this year.
Physical activity is fundamental to health and individual well-being and participation in quality physical education, provides a good opportunity to benefit student’s health. Students with disabilities experience restricted participation in extracurricular activities due to weaker in the functional motor skills.
For more than thirteen years, our institution has been dedicated to providing unified mode of sports training and conducting adapted sports competition for persons with disabilities. The main aim of this unified mode of sports training was to bring together children with and without disabilities of similar age and ability to participate as a team on an equal playing field.
Objective
- To empower students with disabilities to achieve their potential growth in all developmental areas: cognitive, physical/motor, social-emotional, and approaches to inclusive learning.
- To design a package of synchronized physical activities and functional motor skills for disabled and non-disabled students through unified mode of training in inclusive school setting.
- To make disabled children perform their functional skills along with their counterparts through physical and rhythmic activities.
- To enable the disabled students and their parents to understand the supportive role played by the integrated approach using various therapies for reinforcing functional skills.
- To create a common ground between physical & special educators and parents to understand various collaborative strategies available for strengthening overall development of the disabled child.
- To identify the strengths and weaknesses of the unified physical activities program and how well this program caters to the developmental needs of the students with disabilities.
It is a massive inclusive extension program organized for more than 500 students every year. Functional skills of differently abled children are developed through physical activities. The differently abled children studying in inclusive and special schools of the age group 12 – 17 years are included in the training program. In inclusive schools, this training is provided to both differently abled and non-disabled children spread over to 20 weeks. After training, they are brought to the institution for exhibiting their skills before the audience.
Evidence of Success
- Students with and without disabilities found improvement in the control of gross motor skills and coordination during large movements.
- Promotes independent functioning through development of functional skills.
- The students with and without disability enjoyed playing with each other and strongly they felt developing better friendship with students with disabilities in the inclusive setting.