Taking charge at school
SPECIAL EDUCATION
Bharthi Prabhu writes about the Mothers Training programme run by the Dr SRC Institute of Speech and Hearing
Children in small groups of two and three are huddled around a teacher. One group is listening intently to the story being narrated with the help of a picture book. Interestingly, the pictures are of the children themselves and the script is handwritten.
Little Aadithya is curious about this visitor in his class room. “What is your name?” he asks and, at the teacher’s behest, even manages to write it down. Three-and-half-year-old Suhail wants to know what his friend has brought for lunch. The child’s reply leads to a conversation about various lunch items. Then they recite and enact a rhyme.
It is the scene from any typical pre-school but wait, this is no ordinary pre-school. For one, the teachers are mothers of the pre-schoolers themselves. They are here to teach hearing impaired children. “Hearing impaired children can develop their speech and language if they are given appropriate amplification and intense speech and language stimulation. Here, we train the mothers to train their children,” says Rathna Shetty, the co-ordinator of Mothers’ Training programme, run by Dr SRC Institute of Speech and Hearing since 2007.
In the classroom
Most often, children in the programme are taught in their mother tongue as that is the language the mothers are most comfortable in. Hence, speech stimulation can be easy and enriching. Continues Rathna Shetty, “Audiologists at the Institute test the child’s hearing and recommend suitable hearing aids or cochlear implants (which are surgically inserted in the ear and are recommended for those do not benefit from hearing aids).
We assess the child’s level of hearing and draw up individual plans. A new volunteer mother starts off by observing other mothers at work and then we guide her to start teaching children to speak. Children are rotated among mothers so that they learn to comprehend everyone — not just their own mothers”.
Kavitha, a young mother of five-year-old Skanda says, “When I first learnt that my son was deaf, I stopped speaking to him. I thought there was no use in speaking to a child who cannot hear. It was here that my child was fitted with hearing aids and I realised that deaf children can learn to speak and attend school. I interacted with other mothers who shared their experiences with me. Skanda has slowly learnt to listen. He started with a few words and now speaks in small sentences. He is reading and writing Kannada. Eventually I plan to put my child in an English-medium school.”
The training spans over three years for children below five years of age. Importance is given to activity-based learning. The mothers are taught how to talk to the child in order to facilitate language development. Reading and writing are introduced early on as therapists feel that it makes integration into a regular school easier. Nearly 90 per cent of the children from this programme have joined mainstream schools.
The institute offers training at concessional rates, in order to reach out even to the underprivileged. Parents have sponsors for the hearing aids/implants and even provide transport for the mothers and children who travel from far-flung areas.
The effort continues...
Rathna Shetty also runs a Mothers’ Training Programme in Mysore with the help of Rotary Club. “It is essential that programmes like this are started in Bangalore and in smaller cities. The younger the child, the better the prognosis. We must have programmes that are close to a child’s home.” The youngest child in the current batch is 18 months old.
Rathna Shetty points out that training empowers mothers in more ways than one. Not only do they learn how to deal with their hearing-impaired children, but many of them embark on a path of self development, often going on to learn new things, finding employment, etc.
Some have started similar programmes in places like Bijapur, Davanagere and Puttur. For the dynamic Rathna Shetty, the wheel has come full circle. It was in 1987 that she attended a mothers’ training programme in Mysore for teaching her then four-year-old son. The young lad is now not only fluent in Kannada and English but holds a job in an MNC.
Training programmes for mothers of hearing impaired children are not new. As families, especially mothers, play a very important role in the hearing-impaired child’s development, there have been such training programmes since the 1940’s in the US. Our country too has a couple of them but many more are needed, considering that one child in a thousand is born with hearing loss.
