UNICEF in Action
Inclusive Education UNICEF is currently cooperating with the Ministry of Education to promote inclusive education for children with various disabilities by providing technical assistance to the reform process. Pilot projects involve rehabilitation activities within kindergartens, where children with various disabilities can learn with the assistance of pedagogues. Teachers from selected kindergartens and schools have been trained on inclusive education. Moreover, parents have been trained to comprehend and cope with the problems they face as a result of their child’s disability, thereby allowing them to properly take care of their children. The new law on education has foreseen the rights of disabled children to education. The Georgian Institute of Teachers Training is actively involved in the process of introducing inclusive education. The expert group prepared a teachers’ manual focusing on methods of teaching mathematics and Georgian to children with disabilities in the first grade. Similar manuals are currently being developed for teachers working with second and third grade students.
Life Skills In 2000, UNICEF invited experts from a British NGO and TACADA to Georgia in order to facilitate the integration of a new interdisciplinary course, ‘Life Skills’, into the Georgian school curriculum. Working together on the programme concept, syllabus and course outline, Georgian experts, including medical professionals and psychologists, set up an initiative group, whose members were offered special training courses regarding the programme concept and curriculum. The purpose of the initiative group was to facilitate and establish the integration of the new, Life Skills discipline into the Georgian curriculum. The discipline comprises four basic strands: Civic Education, Me and My Sound Body, Emotions and Relations, and Healthy Environment. The project developed a syllabus for 1st through 9th grades and prepared 40 model lessons. A methodological manual and training module, designed within the project’s framework, was used to train 270 teachers to facilitate the integration of the new discipline in schools. Pilot lessons were held in 17 schools in Tbilisi along with other regions of Georgia. Impact Life skills-based learning and inclusive education practices, developed by pilot projects, have been systematised and incorporated into the national training curriculum.
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