Library including Students with Dyslexia

Abstract

Inclusive education policy and practice hold great promise for, improving educational equity and promoting child-friendliness in schools. Though there are many policy declarations to support every child’s inclusion in regular educational setup, the implementation is still challenging. Inclusive schooling is conquering the attention of all countries around the globe. These schools can make a difference by putting heavy emphasis on bringing forth a positive learning environment to make all the children, whether abled or disabled, to participate actively in the everyday classroom activities. Inclusion paves way to ensure a change in their lives by removing the barriers to learning, widely ranging from factors like attitude of the teachers and parents, rigid curriculum, absence of infrastructure to lack of accessible resources. Inclusive schools should be manageable and fully accessible for children with disabilities. There must be flexibility in curriculum and all resources needed for learning should be focused on each child’s specific needs. It should also be assured that all children can partake in all the classroom activities. Schools should be furnished with all equipment, technological devices and library resources to cater the needs of these children. There must be provisions for barrier free availability of Braille books, Smart boards, Interactive white boards, Magnifying lens, Reading Machines, Talking Text Books, Sign language interpreters, Computers with speech software and Transcription services for children with disability. Dyslexia, a specific learning difficulty, is one of the most common invisible, hidden learning disability and is one of the most common difficulty prevailing all over the world regardless of culture and nations. Educating these children is a great problem as it mainly affects the basic literacy skills like listening, reading, spelling and writing. British Dyslexia Association, 2013, reported about 8% of the world population has dyslexia and 4% is severely affected. A child with dyslexia has to continue as a lifelong dyslexic as it is neurobiological in origin. The child with dyslexia can only develop individual coping strategies to overcome the barriers to learning. With normal intelligence, these children often experience difficulties in reading, a crucial literacy skill which is needed to acquire information from the diversified resources. Reading is very essential at all learning environments for becoming proficient at the content. The Charter for the Reader in 1992, states that reading is the key to cultural and scientific heritage and promotes international understanding. Information searching needs word recognition and spelling skills for exploring relevant documents by using various platforms. Difficulties in reading and spelling that exist throughout the life period of a dyslexic learner, affect the way in which they search information. Libraries are the main information resource centres for reading and accessing the written language. So, the complete portrait of how dyslexics are learning should be considered by the libraries. Libraries should, for that reason, be in the lead in supporting dyslexic users to overcome this disability. There should be pleasant surrounding with needed materials for these children in a library, so that they feel enthused to visit the libraries. This paper aims to review the extent to which libraries should be inclusive in taking efforts to meet the needs of the dyslexic children. The paper also examines the best practices essential to meet the needs of dyslexic individuals, the materials that can be made available and its potential role in serving the needs of the dyslexic community. As dyslexia is as an educational issue, libraries should provide accessible materials needed for enhancing the active reading process of these students. By addressing the special needs of children with dyslexia, library continues to have an important role in self-improvement, literacy and lifelong learning of children with dyslexia. Moreover libraries should be encouraged to be inclusive to help children with dyslexia in accessing information and becoming information literate-like the non-disabled peers.