Unveiling the Prospects of General Teacher While Teaching Students with Visual Impairment

Abstract

It is a common practice around the world to teach disabled students in regular classes using transformative pedagogy. One of Nepal's inclusive education strategies for implementing the Basic and Primary Education Master Plan (1997) is to teach visually impaired students in regular courses using an integrated approach. Students with a range of needs, interests, and learning capacities make up the general class. Students with different needs attain learning at different rates. The teachers in integrated school use traditional methods to teach, which results in low achievement among the visually impaired children. This study aimed to explore the lived experience of a general teacher while teaching in an integrated classroom and the challenges faced by teacher in serving students with visual impairment in the mainstream classroom. The research design employed for this study is qualitative with interpretative phenomenology which depicts the perception and challenges experienced by teachers while teaching in the general classroom. Four general teachers who teach Nepali and mathematics were purposively selected from the integrated school located in the Bhaktapur district with voluntary participation. The participants were interviewed to share experiences via semi-structured guidelines. The interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed by the thematic process. The transcription was read and reread more times and categorized to generate a basic theme. The themes are further reorganized by searching commonalities to extract a global theme which was described by linking with theoretical insight. The challenges explored from the perception were problems of class control, content modification, excessive workload, inclusion problems, problems of classroom discourse, assignment and assessment, lack of professional development opportunities, difficulty to engage learners, inflexibility in time and resource lack of knowledge for instructional planning. The finding contributes to adopting instructional strategies and creating an inclusive environment in classroom instruction. This also becomes a milestone for implementing diversity management for addressing the diverse needs of learners.