Special Education Referral, International Edition

My next participant in my interviews comes from Taiwan and gives an international perspective to handling Special Education in systems outside of the United States.

Can you please introduce yourself and describe your professional involvement with education? How do you specifically interact with special education programs?

I am Josephine from Taiwan. My career as an English teacher began with 1 year teaching at Taiwan Matsu Dong Ying Junior High School. ... During my stay at Dong Ying Junior High School, I was engaged with few cases of "special kids" at school. Limited by its geographical isolation to the mainland Taiwan and comparatively small population of the school, the school failed to reach the minimum requirement of setting up a special education department. We were desperate for special education specialists to help us with some tough cases. And it turned out that teachers from other subjects had no choice but to cover for those special needs, which took away a lot of advantages of early treatments for the kids.

How do schools in Taiwan handle students with learning difficulties or other disabilities? Does the system have programs for special education? If yes, how are students identified for special education referral/recommendation?

Fortunately, Taiwanese government has been promoting the importance of special education by all means, specifically to say, for both the disabled and also gifted. The ministry of education has been holding events, seminars and teacher development workshops to improve educators' skills, ensure parental participation, provide medical assessments and medical care.

What are the signs of a struggling student?

     As a general educator, I learnt a lot from professional developments workshops and frequent connection with my co-workers on how to tell a student is probably suffering from disabilities but wasn't obvious enough to be assigned to a special class. Subtle observation is highly required on every single individuals in my class. There are some aspects to look into, for example, their learning abilities comparing to others, interaction with their classmates, test results, handwriting in their assignments, and interpersonal interaction with the teachers, etc. A decent amount of observation will help to exclude the possibilites of the fact that they are just acting out or reacting weird because of emotional unstability.

     One of my 5-year-old student has surprisingly low level of speaking ability. He talks like a 3 year-old boy. He couldn't give proper answers to simple questions and failed to focus on the person who is talking to him. When he wanted to draw people's attention, he would always talk to people with very limited sentence patterns repeatingly, like, what's the color of it? Is it red? Is it black?

     Another student in my grade 8 class seemed to suffer from emotional disorders and ADHD, he couldn't help himself from swearing nonstop for 2 hours, attacking classmates and teachers, and always bombing his father with filthy statements, which sounds just like what a normal punky self-centered teenager will do, but he is a bit too much and it doesn't really look like it's just because of hormones.

Are there alternate methods of instruction tried out before referring the student to special education? If yes, what are they?

I believe there are. But I have to admit that it's a little bit of out of my reach.

Are there any other things you would like to add about the education system in Taiwan, and how it handles students with disabilities and special needs?

Despite the overall efforts of the government, private institutions and social resources, we are encountering the shortage crisis of educators and specialists that are willing to devote themselves into special care areas. According to the ministry of education, in the year 2013, there were 258 special educators vacancies waiting to be filled in. Ridiculous ratio of special educator to disabilities is indicated as 1:38.

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Josephine's answers provide a good perspective into the handling of Special Education students and programs in other countries. It seems refreshing to be made familiar with Taiwan's programs for special education, as we have seen in discussions with the TN Cohort this week, not all Asian countries/societies have the same progressive ideas about serving individuals with disabilities and other barriers to education.

In addition to her personal insights, Josephine was able to direct my attention to the Ministry's Profile on Special Education, found here: Ministry of Education, Republic of China (Taiwan)