© Rohan Hande
Culture & Living
Vogue Warriors: Meet the resilient team that is teaching students with learning disabilities through the lockdown
The all-woman team of special educators at Goa’s The Owl House is finding inventive ways to reach their students
Can TikTok be the answer to navigating distance learning in such an unprecedented time? We can’t be certain and unlikely as it may be, the short-form video app, universally acknowledged and derided as the cure to 21st-century ennui, was the starting point for a bunch of special educators in Goa during the lockdown.
Taking off from TikTok’s #PassTheBrush challenge, the teachers at The Owl House (TOH), a special education school in Aldona, envisioned a means to address the importance of face masks and hand sanitisers. The video, shot across homes of students and teachers and clocking over seven minutes, patches vignettes from a game of catch, where a bottle of hand sanitiser is tossed and caught, frame to frame. “The intent behind the video was to engage the students,” says Renuka Figueiredo, a Clinical Psychology graduate, and project leader at the school. “The idea was to accustom them to the new safety and hygiene practices.”
Home school
It’s hard to explain the mysterious coronavirus, especially to children in lockdown, as they traverse the world of online education. To be fair, distance learning is new for everyone—students, teachers and parents, but it’s harder for a certain set. For neurodiverse children, transitioning to online learning means grappling with new technology as they swap in-person therapy for a virtual consultation. For their parents, at-home learning doesn’t just mean that they moonlight as pedagogues but also take on the role of a carer in the absence of specialised teachers. And for their teachers, it means forgoing deeper connections of daily interactions to explore new ways of communicating virtually.
Try explaining to a child why an unseen virus has made their world so topsy turvy that even hugs and handshakes are now outdated, and you’ll understand the struggle. So naturally, step one was to address this disruption of their daily life. “Neurodiverse children thrive on consistency,” says Priya Kataria, instruction and learning design manager at The Owl House, who has been working on bringing a routine back into her students’ lives.
By March 21, a few days before the national lockdown was announced, Kataria and her all-woman team of special educators (comprising Figueiredo, Vivien Vaz, Priya Babu and Charlene Pereira), along with co-founder Pria Sule, had already sprung to action to rethink the curriculum for remote learning. “Our first video for our students was on coronavirus—not the science of it, but the circumstance around it—what it means for them and what they need to do,” says Figueiredo, “Most importantly, it was about assuring them that this break from school was temporary, that things will go back to normal and we will find a way to meet again.”
A special place
The Owl House, which started in 2018, was designed as a support centre for people on the autism spectrum but is now also a sanctuary for anyone with a neurological diagnosis (like Down or Williams syndrome), who learns differently. It’s truly a special place. Unlike uniformed regimented schools, students here are free to wear what they like (including their school T-shirt), while their 6:1 student-teacher ratio ensures a personalised learning experience.
Housed inside a charming Portuguese bungalow, a tour of TOH opens to a garden space (where students exercise with their sports coach) at the front, a vegetable and herbs patch (where students learn to grown their own food) at the back, and a dark sensory room (where anxious and overstimulated students can find relief) indoors.
Also with its interiors is a large room where students learn pottery, dance, music and recyclable art and craft through the week, and a small room which operates as a student-run, pop-up outlet of EcoPosro (Goa’s first zero-waste store) and offers them the at-hand experience of managing a store.
On some days, their balcao transforms into a makeshift restaurant. With the help of culinary mentors, students take on kitchen duties to cook and serve meals to donors for their fundraising events (TOH is a community initiative, run on donations, that offers free services to all students).
With all of this on pause, the teachers have now developed a digital curriculum that focuses on communication, motor and educational life skills. “We now have a full-fledged learn-at-home program,” says Figueiredo, whose team has scoured the internet for free educational resources from Khan Academy and Vedantu, and created an expressive communication course via the learning app, Rise 360, that makes teaching interactive. “We also host webinars regularly, and make videos with teachers and mentors recommending at-home activities for children as well as share videos by parents where they talk about what is working for them at home,” adds Figueiredo about their knowledge-sharing approach.
Motor skills they once learned at school, are now nurtured at home. While mentors like Sublime’s chef Chris Saleem Aga and designer Jolynn Carneiro of Nonsense Curry, conduct DIY sessions on Instagram, TOH teachers also suggest easy home activities like setting a table or folding a piece of cloth. “One parent makes her child wear a TOH T-shirt at home while teaching to bring a semblance of school at home,” shares Kataria while explaining how parents have taken the lead as educators.
All for one
On April 1, the TOH team launched a pan-India helpline (07264938800) with the two-fold purpose of providing education and support to their students (and parents) as well as to reach out to any family with a neurodiverse member. “We have received many calls since the lockdown,” says Kataria, “and two more students for TOH virtually, from Mumbai and Faridabad.”
Most people will agree that our instantaneous turn to digital classrooms has made education today a global experiment. “We are adapting to this new normal,” says Figueiredo, “Just like our classes have changed, so have our goals. These days, our goal is to make students independent with technology—using the phone to make a call, setting up a video call or using an app on their own—these are different points of learning for them that didn’t exist pre-COVID.”
Their 45 students run the age gamut—ranging from age 2.5 to 40 years—so the teachers recognise that each student’s progress and need is idiosyncratic. “Some students are not receptive to technology, some cannot even look at a screen for over 15 minutes, so we are working on tools to make their education seamless,” says Kataria. These students also come from varied economical backgrounds, so few of them don’t even have access to the internet. In those cases, educators do weekly calls to check on them, or even try home visits on special requests.
Fill the gap
In April, the UK decided to relax their lockdown rules for people with learning disabilities or autism, allowing them to use open spaces for exercise. In India, which is said to be home to over 27 million people with special needs and 3 million people on the autism spectrum, the awareness around learning disability is so limited that most states (barring a few metropolises) do not even have comprehensive data on people living with autism. According to the Rehabilitation Council of India, one in 500 people is on the autism spectrum, and while cities like Delhi (Tamana Autism Centre) and Mumbai (Aditya Birla Integrated School and Gateway School of Mumbai) have access to autism schools, India has a severe dearth of schools that cater to children with autism, compared to the need. So often, rules and considerations are overlooked. “We’ve written to the Social Welfare and Social Education Department to consider classifying special needs schools as essential services, and allow us to operate at a minimal capacity of 20 per cent with all the safety protocols in place,” shares Figueiredo, who has now been conducting in-person sessions to put some students at ease.
In the small village of Aldona, the crisis has seen students, teachers and parents leaning on each other for support while finding innovative solutions to fill the gap in our system. “Our job is very on-site; we are not trained to teach online, so this has been a result of great teamwork,” says Kataria. “They say it takes a village to raise a child, but our village has taken it on to enhance the lives of these children.”
Vogue Warriors shines the spotlight on the women at the medical frontlines and essential services—doctors, nurses, scientists, innovators—alongside behind-the-scene heroes working tirelessly to help us through the ongoing pandemic.
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