New Perspectives in Science Education

Most of the programs and systems created to help disabled people are targeted to subjects who have certain abilities. People with severe intellectual disability are really at risk of being the most ignored since approaches devoted to cater for successful communication are not generally present in their everyday life scenarios. EC+ European project developed a mobile app to cater for the communication with this group of subjects and to empower professionals from various disciplines with the necessary tools (scientific materials on syndrome characteristics and intervention, multimodal resources and sign language) when they need to interact with intellectually disabled subjects in their professional environments. The interdisciplinary approach of total communication adopted as methodology for the EC+ project proved to have a promising outcome with different professionals. Specialists from the educational field who are obviously the groups who usually should lead the knowledge for intervention with special needs subjects put forward valuable suggestions and feedback. However, since training activities were offered to university students and professionals from the fields of healthcare, education and interpreting, it should be highlighted that the engagement of community interpreters and healthcare professionals was also really remarkable. This was manifest both in dealing with the contents and strategies of training courses and in their eager compromise to practice with disabled population in workshops.

Keywords: Apps, interpreting, education, healthcare, total communication;

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