International Education: Disabilities Inclusive Education
Photo by USAID/Cambodia All Children Learning project
Photo by USAID/Cambodia All Children Learning project
In collaboration with funders such as the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and host governments at national and sub-national levels, RTI implements programs that promote equitable, quality, and inclusive education for all children. At the heart of our activities is a commitment to Universal Design for Learning (UDL): an approach to teaching and learning that explicitly supports all learners, especially those who are struggling, by giving children options for how they receive information and how they demonstrate what they know and can do and that finds ways to include and engage all children in a classroom.
All the teaching and learning materials we co-design and co-develop with local stakeholders embed best-practice UDL principles, differentiated teaching strategies that enable teachers to tailor instruction to children’s needs, and opportunities to build social-emotional skills. They also portray and engage all children—girls and boys, children with disabilities, and children from all social, religious, and linguistic sub-groups—in empowering and inclusive ways.
We are adapting and, where needed, developing low-cost and open-source tools to enable teachers and schools to reliably screen students for disabilities in low- and middle-income countries. As examples, we are integrating screening tools for vision and hearing loss into the Tangerine® suite of tools and have piloted the use of easy-to-administer assessments to screen for students who might have dyslexia. Using these latter assessments as part of an Early Grade Reading Assessment can flag for teachers which students would benefit from more explicit instruction in phonics.
At the system-level, we use findings from national-scale disabilities-inclusive education sector assessments to help host governments refine their education sector plans. We also help governments develop and implement policies and mechanisms to achieve equitable and quality primary and secondary education for all children—an objective outlined in the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.