IDF 2019 Pitch Competition Winner: Sri Widuri: Say No to Children Labeling: Identify the Needs in Inclusive Education

Sri Widuri with the students.

The most important thing in inclusive education is to raise the awareness that there are children with special needs and there are ways to identify their conditions and needs. This is what the 2019 Indonesia Development Forum (IDF) Pitch Competition Winner, Sri Widuri stated in her short presentation entitled "Leave No One Behind: The Experience of INOVASI in Central Lombok".  This theme is consistent with Sub-Theme 8: Improving the Quality of Human Capital.

“Once identified, we have to give an opportunity that suits the children’s needs and help them overcome obstacles! We want them to optimize their potentials. Inclusive education will help them achieve the learning outcomes according to their abilities and potentials," said Sri Widuri, the Education Adviser of Innovation for Indonesia’s School Children (INOVASI), West Nusa Tenggara (NTB).

Sri has more than 15 years of experience in the field of formal and non-formal education for children, adolescents, and adults. She started her work as a teacher, principal, curriculum development specialist, and education specialist and researcher.

Sri had experience working for Coffey International, International Labor Organization (ILO), Save the Children, UNICEF, and the University of New South Wales, Australia. Her work with UNICEF was as an education specialist, in charge of managing large-scale education programs in NTB, Papua and West Papua in the area of school management, teaching and learning, literacy, and school leadership.

The Innovation Program for Indonesian School Children (INOVASI) is a partnership program between the Australian government and the Indonesian government with a focus on education. This program seeks to understand ways to improve student learning outcomes in schools in various districts in Indonesia, especially in terms of literacy and numeric skills. The program handled by Sri was implemented in Central Lombok.  According to Sri, the identification of special needs in inclusive education became an important part of the program. 

“Sometimes in the context of public school education, there are still teachers who like to label children. When children have concentration problems, teachers immediately conclude this as low academic competence, or misbehaviour," Sri continued.

This is triggered by the fact that many teachers were oblivious or misinformed about children with special needs that need to be treated differently.

Local Solutions for Local Problems

INOVASI in NTB developed a simple tool so that teachers can identify children who have to learn obstacles and classify them into categories: mild, moderate, heavy, or severe.

“Severe is for those who have disabilities, for example, the blind, or deaf, and they are usually easy to identify. Those with learning difficulties are often hard to identify. So that is what I meant by identification tool," continued Sri

The locally-based approach is called Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA), which means local solutions to local problems.

Sri pointed out that in Bima, many children find it hard to understand grade 1 elementary school material conveyed in Indonesian languange. That's because they don’t speak Indonesian. Therefore, the local language should actually be used instead. So when we talk about inclusive education in this case, we don’t talk about disability: it is ethnicity. What is the solution? Use their mother tongue.

“The challenges children face in learning vary from one district to another”, Sri said. "We don’t provide solutions. We share about what other regions have done when faced with similar cases," Sri added.

In Central Lombok, there are students with disabilities. Through PDIA, INOVASI helped teachers in 19 schools to identify children with special needs. For example, some children have total visual impairment, while teachers cannot understand braille. The step taken was to help teachers to expand their network. INOVASI provides information in finding co-teachers from Schools for Students with Special Needs (SLB).

In the process of implementing PDIA in Central Lombok, teachers routinely gather and reflect on their practice and experience. They go through what has worked and what has not and look for solutions to overcome challenges. Every month, local facilitators meet to review the progress and record feedback. The goal is to evaluate material and improve learning in the future. These facilitators are teachers, principals, and supervisors from various institutions in and around the district. They are local assets in developing teachers’ capacity.

The Change in Central Lombok

"This change may be small, but meaningful to me," Sri said. 

According to Sri, the Head of the Central Lombok Education and Culture Office, H. Sumum, has succeeded in improving access to education among children and reaching out to those that had previously not been able to attend school. Parents used to feel ashamed to send their children to public schools if they had a disability. But now things have changed. In the past, parents believed that children with special needs could only go to the special school (SLB).

“To see them in school uniforms is great, but it turns out that many who arrive at school cannot learn effectively as their special needs are not taken carefully into account. Worse, they often become subjects of bullying by their peers, and even teachers," Sri said.

Some teachers even said that disabilities are a curse. 

"So, when we implemented PDIA with the teachers, the biggest problem found was the lack of understanding of teachers and other school members, children with special needs are not a problem. They just need to be treated specially," she added.

PDIA helps teachers realize that they can put pressure on children with special needs, making them depressed and eventually drop out of school. They will then stop labeling children with special needs and advocate for similar attitudes from other children.

“This change of attitude is a great achievement.  It may look trivial, but the impact is huge as children with special needs are longer labelled and bullied,“ she added.

During IDF 2019, Sri spoke at the Ideas and Innovation Marketplace, Capturing and Sharing Knowledge Session on July 22. The main theme of IDF 2019 was "Mission Possible: Seizing the Opportunities of Future Work to Drive Inclusive Growth." 

Congratulations to Sri Widuri for winning the Pitch Competition!