- Հայ
- Рус
- Eng
2 April is the World Autism Awareness Day, within the scope of which the ASPU Faculty of Special Education and Inclusive Education organized a conference.
The Dean of the Faculty Siranush Karapetyan outlines the importance of organizing the conference headed “Autism, Challenges, Key Issues”, which will give a chance to discuss autism issues through reports, and to find solutions to problems transferred from and left undiscovered in the 20th century.
Similarly, the Dean highlighted that even though various fields of science, including pedagogy, dealt with autism challenges, and there were diverse approaches of formulating the problem, however, no clear method or a model had been found for the solution of these issues.
“We need to share with the observations in regards with defining autism, and the students will introduce in their reports pedagogical approaches to understand the path that a person with autism has to pass through”.
“There are no disabled people, there is just the society that is enabled”, this was the slogan of the day, the symbol of which was a hand with an open palm showing that the other hand should also be used to inform the society and to emphasize its vitality.
Further on, Siranush Karapetyan presented the statistics registered by the World Health Organisation, according to which the number of people with autism is increasing annually, with the number of males prevailing therein. It’s time to join the scientific potential from various fields and in addition to diagnosing the symptoms to also find prevention methods.”
In their reports the students referred to the importance of having the set of knowledge required to overcome autism, to the significance of teamwork, to the reasons and causes of the issues. Adding up, the Head of the Chair of Logopedics and Rehabilitation Therapy, Professor Stepan Grigoryan in his turn spoke about the physical development and rehabilitation issues of persons suffering from autism, as well as introduced ten symptoms for early identification and diagnostics of autism.
In around twenty reports, reference was made to the set of tools applied for diagnosing autism, speech peculiarities of persons with autism, extra-therapeutic techniques as communication development methods, the difference of children with autistic spectrum disorder from children with supersonic syndrome, and other matters.
Among those participating in the conference was the Deputy of the RA National Assembly, Member of the Committee for Education, Science, Diaspora and Cultural Affairs Sofia Hovsepyan, who had worked at schools for many years as an art-therapist and psychologist, worked in various development centres, and had raised these issues on many platforms, had informed the society that those children had a specific feature, that they differed from everybody, but at the same time being similar to everybody.
“We need to see the problems, where we do not understand them. When we solve these issues, we will be available for them, and they will start understanding us”, mentioned Sofia Hovsepyan and stressed out that the law on common inclusion needed amendments, and that it was more visible in practice.
