Remedial & Special education blog

The Association for Autism have elected to postpone our Autism: Towards the Future Conference.

In deference to three other Autism conferences taking place in the last quarter of 2010, and in order to best benefit the Autism community, the Conference has been rescheduled for 3 – 4 March 2011.

Again, we welcome you interest and contributions in furthering our understanding of Autism Spectrum Disorders – please note that the revised deadline for the submission of abstracts is 25 OCTOBER 2010.

The Association for Autism thanks all those who submitted abstracts and expressed their interest in attending and/or participating at the Conference.

The abstracts that we have received, will remain on the reviewing list.

We hope to collaborate with ALL major stake-holders in the South African Autism community, to the mutual advantage of all.

Thank you for your understanding – we look forward to welcoming you at our conference next year!

Kind regards

Anna Atkins
Director
The Association for Autism
012 9934628

This is a question which we regularly have submitted to our “Ask RemSpecED” column and it is one that needs to be approached on a case-by-case scenario.

One of the discussion board scenarios we have on the RemSpecED Facebook group is as follows:

My daughter has been in a very good remedial school for the past 2 and a half years, and the school has recommended that she is ready to mainstream for grade 6. Though we are all a little anxious this is a very exciting time. She is still struggling a bit with working fast enough, but everything else has clicked into place! Lets hope that she can work as fast as the others next year! Please tell us your stories…

If you would like to contribute to this discussion board topic you can do so via this blog or via the Facebook group.

One of the most topical posts which we had on this site before Bundublog.com ran into its technical issues was a discussion around Outcomes Based Education (OBE) and how it had influenced learning in South Africa.

The general consensus from all parties was that OBE had failed South African learners and while it had merit as a system, the practical implementation had been far off the mark.

The question that was left hanging was what the alternative was and how do you implement whatever this alternative is?

Considering the popularity of the previous thread we are going to re-open this discussion subject and we invite teachers and education officials to comment on where education is headed over the next decade and how this will impact on schools pushing an “inclusion” policy and those learners who migrate from remedial to mainstream education.