Children with Disabilities in Bhutan: Transitioning from Special Educational Needs to Inclusive Education
With Bhutan fully invested in international conventions and initiatives such as Education for All and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, getting all children in school has recently become a priority for the Royal Government. Despit
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Abstract With Bhutan fully invested in international conventions and initiatives such as Education for All and the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, getting all children in school has recently become a priority for the Royal Government. Despite the intention, there have been many challenges around developing quality inclusive education due to teacher quality, personnel and administration, curriculum, pedagogy, and student physical access as well as a lack of resources. A new inclusive education policy is in the process of being approved by the Bhutanese parliament. This chapter will focus on the challenges and possibilities of how inclusive education can be fully realized in Bhutan through a focus on the context and history of education for persons with disabilities and an analysis of the current relevant policies. In our exploration of pre-service teacher training provision we argue that there are tangible and realistic steps that can be undertaken by the Ministry of Education and the Royal University of Bhutan to prepare Bhutanese teachers better to navigate heterogeneously inclusive classrooms. Our suggestions include a greater integration of inclusive practices across all teacher education programs and a more explicit focus on interacting with students with disabilities during pre-service teacher placement.
Introduction Government is bringing people from outside. They share their ideas from their country. That’s how our people’s way of thinking about disability … I think … is slowly changing. It will take time – many, many years – I don’t know. Acceptance is there now. In the school itself, we can find out that more and more children are coming in. Parents are more accepting. Now they know that these people can do. – Bhutanese Special Educational Needs Coordinator (Schuelka 2014, p. 136, emphasis added).
Rinchen Dorji (*) School of Education, University of New England, Armidale, NSW 2351, Australia e-mail: [email protected] M.J. Schuelka School of Education, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, B15 2TT Birmingham, UK e-mail: [email protected] © Springer Science+Business Media Singapore 2016 M.J. Schuelka, T.W. Maxwell (eds.), Education in Bhutan, Education in the Asia-Pacific Region: Issues, Concerns and Prospects 36, DOI 10.1007/978-981-10-1649-3_12
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Rinchen Dorji and M.J. Schuelka
Given its relatively short history of formal ‘modern’ education, Bhutan has progressed quite rapidly from an early education system focused on human capital development to a system also aspiring to incorporate human rights, equity, cultural relevancy, and Gross National Happiness (GNH). As other chapters in this volume have discussed, this progress was not steady, nor was it inevitable. One particular area of challenge to the Bhutanese education system is how to provide a quality education to a heterogeneous group of students – those of varying ethnic groups, mother tongues, interests, and abilities. As several authors in this volume have recalled (e.g. Jagar Dorji), at the beginning of educ
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