Responses, coping strategies and needs of primary and secondary caregivers of children with visual impairments in Namibia

teachers and parents perspectives

Abstract

Since becoming signatory to the Salamanca Declaration in 1994, the Namibian education system has been battling with the implementation oj inclusive education. It is taking the country a lot of efforts to move towards inclusive education approaches as the process is faced with various challenges including a lack of a commonly agreed upon conceptual understanding of inclusive education by stakeholders; lack of human and material resources and clinging to segregated approaches by stakeholders. One effort to implement inclusive education was to include learners with visual impairments in mainstream education systems. At the same time, special schools for learners with severe special needs continue to function and receive high preference from parents and caregivers. Teachers in mainstream schools do come across learners with visual impairments in their classes. In special schools into which learners with visual impairments are integrated, teachers also have the primary duty to teach all learners, including those with visual impairments even if they have not specialized in the field of visual impairment. While teachers have their own share of experiences related to their roles as teachers of learners with visual impairments, parents have experiences which influence their decisions to accord or withhold their children from education and social participation. In the current paper, which draws from two separate research exercises, one . that focused on teachers' experiences and another on parents' experiences,primary and secondary caregivers share their experiences of caring for children with visual impairments through the narrative approach. The researchers simply represent and re -tell those stories.