Background

The project STEAM in the secondary school with no barriers for blind and visually impaired pupils, has been created to generate in Spanish schools, including the partner university, inclusive classrooms with a diversity of students with different profiles, especially students with visual impairments. The school partnership includes three schools specialized in this student profile, the collaboration and exchange of practices will serve to generate experiential classrooms within technical subjects such as science, technology, engineering, mathematics and arts (STEAM), subjects that have often been cited as difficult for students with visual impairments.
The centers specialized in students with visual impairments, the partner university, the Canary Islands high school with students with various disabilities, including severe disability profiles, and the coordinating center in Burgos will generate classrooms of full integration, with students of diverse profiles, working in STEAM subjects in a cooperative system and seeking a full integration of all students, working on equal opportunities without differentiating students by abilities, religion, sexual identity or gender.
Within the specific needs for STEAM material for visually impaired students, the project will address the following needs;
1.- Generation of material with technical notation in audio and Braille format and to be able to include it in conventional schools.
Access to visual resources. To develop online and public formats accessible to visually impaired students in STEAM subjects in an alternative format to the usual one.

2.- Development of oral explanations for the understanding of visual concepts.
Experimenting without vision: some aspects of participation in classroom activities, inclusive experiments among students with and without disabilities.
3.- Creating teaching methods for STEAM subjects and being able to develop activities in integrated classrooms.
4.- Real experimentation in integrated classrooms and generation of teaching strategies, highlighting in this the need for teacher training to equip teachers to overcome these problems.

There is also a need to generate a specialized training for undergraduate and master students in teaching within the profile of students with visual impairments, this project addresses this training through specialized partners and the O.N.C.E., collaborating entity.

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Objectives

1.- Design inclusive classrooms including all types of profiles. Inclusive classrooms that show the development of STEAM subjects and workshops between students of different profiles integrated and working in a cooperative system.
2.- Adapt classrooms, resources, means and methods in social schools to be able to design inclusive educational projects in the classroom.
3.- To train undergraduate and master's degree students in methodologies for students with visual impairment through the experience developed in the project in the partner schools.
4.- To disseminate the project among professionals in the area through the teacher training centres in Burgos and Lanzarote, through international seminars generated by the University of Burgos and through the etwinning forums and the twinspace among European educational professionals in order to create future synergies among them and thus improve the development of a diversified education.
5.- Generate audio-visual material among partners that can serve as a source of resources to improve and design specific workshops in each school.
6.- To evaluate the application from an experiential perspective to STEAM subjects in inclusive classrooms.
7.- To reinforce the Erasmus network between schools for the participating partners.
8.- To reinforce the networking of the participating teachers and students and to motivate this way of working among students with visual impairment and other disabilities.
 

Implementation:

The schools will design STEAM activities for students of different profiles and abilities, obviously Lanzarote IES and specialised schools will focus on the profile of their students. The schools will publish STEAM activities and subject development through the project twinspace, and these publications will serve to generate learning and exchange of good practices in the schools. The activities will be designed so that students, regardless of their abilities, can acquire key competences in STEAM subjects, generate inclusive classrooms for all types of students and design activities for cooperative work between students.
The project designs three LTTs between students in order to develop in an experiential way all this shared online experience, these three LTTs will be used to evaluate the shared online activities, to evaluate the real effectiveness of these activities and to correct and improve their application, being absolutely necessary these experiences in order to evaluate in a real way an inclusive classroom formed by European students, globalizing in this way the education in Europe, both by nationalities and by abilities.
The whole experience will be public, open to comments, trying to make European teachers aware of the need for training and adaptation of the classroom to an inclusive system.
In the LTTs for teachers, the aim is to train teachers from the partner centres, but also to disseminate and have an impact on the professionals in the surrounding area through training sessions held at the Faculty of Education in Burgos and the teacher training centres in both Burgos and Lanzarote.

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Results

1.- Document good practice guidance on converting technical information into accessible formats and, where such guidance is already available, ensure that it is widely publicised and used.
2.- Document good practice related to the creation of visual resources for learners with visual impairments.
3.- Document good practice related to cooperative work in classrooms with diverse learner profiles.
4.- To investigate in a practical way the effectiveness of tactile materials and whether students are equipped with the appropriate knowledge for the effective development of workshops designed to use them efficiently.
5.- To generate dissemination through etwinning among European education professionals about the possibility of creating classrooms with the participation of students with visual impairments in practical lessons such as experiments and observations, integrated classrooms among students with different abilities.
6.- Identify or offer guidance on teaching methods to optimise the experience of students with visual impairment in the classroom.
Develop training to increase the confidence of teachers/lecturers in teaching technical subjects to students with visual impairment. The design of this training through the creation of networks of teachers, getting them to share ideas and good practice, workshops or online courses and sessions between undergraduate and masters students, professionals from specialist schools and the O.N.C.E team led by D. Jaime Muñoz in the two LTTs in Burgos and Lanzarote.

7.-  Improve communication between students and teachers so that teachers are aware of the needs of students with visual impairment.

To carry out and publish the effective interventions in the teaching of STEAM subjects to students with visual impairment and integrated classrooms carried out in the LTTs among students.