Abstract |
The latest decades, inclusion for students with special needs has drawn the attention of the Greek educational system and has become one of its main priorities. Thus, the aim of this paper is to design and apply an intervention in two classes of a Greek primary school in which there are two students, who have been diagnosed with Autistic Spectrum Disorders, followed by their special education teachers, in order to promote their social skills and make their interaction with their classmates more efficient. We used the elements of communicative musicality, rhythm, quality and narrative, while we were structuring the intervention. Also, we incorporated the elements of music and dance, while the feedback from the students with and without ASD was used for the creation of the contents of the activities of the intervention. Taking in regard the difficulties that children with ASD face when communicating and interacting with their peers, the intervention was aiming to improve those aspects. This paper, describes a qualitive research, which used three tools for collecting research data, a journal, questionnaires and interviews. Through the acquired data, we tried to define if such an intervention will enhance the social skills of children with ASD, if there will be any difference in the way the behavior of the typically developing children towards the children with ASD and if the relations will change between the typically developed students. From the results, we figured that the students with ASD that participated in the intervention have improved some of their social skills, with bigger impacts being made in the ability to start up a conversation or an activity and the ability to cooperate in a group as part of it. Those changes have impacted on the behavior of the typically developed students towards them, because the communication and the collaboration with the children with ASD have improved.
|