Online Training Programme on "Inclusive Education: Best Practices"

Centre for Disability Studies & Educational Research (CDSER), [Under the aegis of School of Education (SoE)], Netaji Subhas Open University (NSOU), Kolkata, West Bengal With the support of Commonwealth Educational Media Centre for Asia (CEMCA), New Delhi organized an online training programme on “Inclusive Education: Best Practices”. The Training duration was for Two Weeks from 17 May 2020 to 31 May 2020. 230 participants participated in this training programme. Educational Leaders, Teacher Educators, Teachers, Pupil teachers and practitioners participated in this programme.

The training programme was designed, developed, and conducted using social media in synchronous and asynchronous manner. For this training programme, WhatsApp and ZOOM was used for content delivery and interaction and discussion. The Google Form was used for assessment and evaluation to check the progress and achievement of the graining objectives.

In these two weeks training programme covered two Modules viz: 1. Understanding Diversity & Inclusion and 2. Pedagogy for Inclusive Education. Prof. S. K Sarkar, Prof. S. Chattaraj, Prof. S. K Ghosh, Dr. Piku Choudhury, Dr. Parimal Sarkar, Ms. Swapna Deb, Dr. Papiya Upadhyay, Dr. A. Panigrahi, Smt. Antara Choudhury, Smt. Alakananda Bandopadhyay, Sri. Prabir Naskar from NSOU were the trainers/teachers for both the module.

During this training 4 Webinars were organized on the different topics such as:

Webinar-1: Rights and Entitlement to Education of Persons with Disabilities was presented by Dr. Aloka Guha, Senior Advisor, RCI and Former Chairperson of National Trust, New Delhi.

Webinar-2: Barriers in Learning was presented by Prof. Preeti Verma, from SNDT Women’s University, Mumbai

Webinar-3: Inclusive Teaching Strategies was presented by Prof. Amitava Mishra, Professor of Special Education, IGNOU, New Delhi.

Webinar-4: Whole School Approach: Concept and Development was presented by Prof. Debasri Banerjee, Dept. of Education, University of Calcutta.

A panel discussion also conducted on the topic Inclusive Education is to be made a mass movement in India where all the eminent educationists participated and had a interactive session. Two Quizzes released to understand the achievement of training objectives and maximum participants participated in all the activities of the training programme.