Effective Communication within the Professional Team in Special Education

The project aimed to solve the communication problem regarding the nature of illnesses and disabilities of students, children, and adolescents among teachers, healthcare professionals, caregivers,...

The project aimed to solve the communication problem regarding the nature of illnesses and disabilities of students, children, and adolescents among teachers, healthcare professionals, caregivers, and the students themselves. Different professional figures use different styles and approaches in their work, but they need to communicate with each other, with caregivers, and, above all, with the children. The latter need help to be able to accept themselves as they are and to communicate with their peers in a simple way without feeling discriminated against. The general objective of the project was to collectively determine the best ways of communicating among the different professionals who work around the child, to share good practices and methods currently used. The specific objectives were to share the best practices of the partners to design a common guideline based on day-to-day experience; to create (and test) an engaging asynchronous online course to share this guideline, addressing all target groups (teachers, professionals, caregivers, students).

The activities implemented were as follows: The partners exchanged their expertise during observation visits. The Italians from Casa Santa Rosa traveled twice to Salon-de-Provence to the premises of the ESPRE association, and conversely, the French from ESPRE traveled twice to the premises of Casa Santa Rosa in Rome. The diversity of experiences and approaches to inclusion, a theme in which Italy is very advanced, allowed both communities to reflect on their own practices. We collectively created a shared document that serves as a reference for an online course on effective communication, constructed in the form of simple, short, and impactful videos. The videos were created, tested, and made available to the public. Dissemination activities were carried out in both involved countries, in France at Salon-de-Provence and in Italy at Casa Santa Rosa. Facebook and Instagram pages were created, as well as a web page presenting the project and its results, jointly hosted on the ESPRE website for the French version and on the Casa Santa Rosa website for the Italian version.

The concrete achievements of the project are: the bilingual web page (French and Italian), the Facebook page, and the Instagram account, which will continue to be visible beyond the end of the project; the reference document on effective communication in structures supporting young people with disabilities; the illustrative videos, which, together with the reference document, constitute the self-learning course per se.