A Tecnologia Assistiva para alunos com deficiência intelectual: saberes docentes e práticas pedagógicas

Abstract

Working as a Special Education municipal coordinator and monitoring the difficulties presented by students in Elementary School, especially students with intellectual disabilities, made me interested in investigating: What changes do Assistive Technology resources bring about in favor of learning for students with intellectual disabilities? Based on this assumption, this research aimed at analyzing how the use of Assistive Technology is inserted as a daily practice in the teachinglearning process for students with intellectual disabilities at a school in the final years of Elementary School in Pedro Canário, ES. The study is characterized as a qualitative participant research, outlined by means of focus group, classroom observations in Portuguese and Mathematics classes, focusing on the student with intellectual disabilities and analysis of official documents. The theoretical and methodological framework is based on the cultural-historical approach to human development developed by Vygotsky (1991, 2000, 2001, 2008, 2011). His studies between the decade of 1924 and 1934 signaled a change in the way of understanding disability, in order to free the child from the biologizing bias of learning and consequently develop their potential. It became relevant the discussion of methodologies in the context of the teaching process in order to investigate the issues inherent to the legislation through a bias based on official documents, focus groups, classroom observations, mediated by the construction of knowledge that teachers use in the daily school routine to perform their tasks at school. In this assumption, it is suggested that the interweaving of the Assistive Technology fields with intellectual disabilities, if planned by teachers and appropriate to the students' learning needs, enables advances in the development processes of their potentialities. It can be noticed that this is a little-discussed path, but one with great relevance and many contributions. Thus, the use of Assistive Technology nowadays is associated with what Vygotsky (2011) said about the indirect ways, so necessary in the life of a child compromised with some deficit, when encountering some difficulty, he seeks an alternative way to overcome the obstacles. These paths need modifications, such as an accessible curriculum for the construction of a truly equitable education.