UF signs cooperative agreement with Polish university to advance inclusion of students with special needs
Ryndak
The UF College of Education has signed a cooperative agreement with a leading teacher education academy in Warsaw, Poland, to advance the inclusion of students with moderate to severe disabilities in the Polish general education system. The partnering universities will collaborate on both the development of teacher preparation programs in special education and school-based research on the effect of inclusive education.
The agreement expands ongoing work between Diane Ryndak, UF associate professor in special education, and her Polish colleague, Anna Firkowska-Mankiewicz, a top administrator at the Maria Grzegorzewska Academy of Special Education. The academy is Poland’s main university that prepares special education teachers.
Ryndak and Firkowksa-Mankiewicz also will collaborate with educational professionals at the Centrum Metodyczne Pomocy Psychologiczno-Pedagogicznej, a Polish Ministry of Education agency that provides special education-related training and technical assistance. The Centrum works with schools and parents to develop services for children with special needs in general education classes on regular school campuses. The Centrum has invited Ryndak to meet with them and a national government-appointed council that is charged with reviewing all aspects of special education in Poland.
Ryndak will work with faculty at the Grzegorzewska Academy to create a pilot teacher-training program and expand its special education research agenda in Poland so it more closely matches the comprehensive educational studies being conducted in the United States and other western countries. Together they will forge a more integrated relationship among the faculty at the academy and the technical assistance providers at the Centrum.
Ryndak met her Polish co-researchers in the late 1990s at an international conference where she presented her groundbreaking seven-year case study of a special-needs student’s progress before and after inclusion. A 2003 Fulbright Research Award allowed Ryndak to spend that academic year in Poland working on collaborative projects.
“Education in some former Communist bloc countries has a top-down, ‘learn-it-or-don’t-learn-it’ attitude toward teaching,” Ryndak said. “In Poland, education for children with disabilities follows a medical model. A doctor diagnoses a disability, and parents must find a school that will accept and work with their child. Until recently, parents could only place children with moderate to severe disabilities in either institutions or schools where only life skills were taught. The service emphasis was on caretaking rather than educating.
“Often the only available school was far from the family’s home – very rural, in the middle of nowhere,” Ryndak said. “These parents have been pushing for their children’s inclusion in regular schools, because they want their children to stay at home and attend the same school as their siblings and neighborhood friends.”
Ryndak plans to return to Poland next spring, and discussions are underway to bring faculty members from the Warsaw academy to UF to experience firsthand UF’s teacher preparation program in special education.
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Renée Zenaida, rzenaida@coe.ufl.edu, 352-392-0726, ext. 274
Diane Ryndak, dryndak@coe.ufl.edu, 352-392-0701, ext. 266
