The teaching of physics for young people with intellectual disabilities: a proposal to facilitate inclusion in the Regular School

Abstract

This work is a research that aims to find and disseminate methods that facilitate the learning process in physics teaching, for young people and adolescents, with intellectual disability and/or cognitive deficit. The project was developed with students from the third cycle of public education in Portugal, aged between fifteen and seventeen, attended by the school's special education and also attending a regular classroom. The general goal was to understand the methods and pedagogical tools that promote or facilitate the scientific learning considering the teaching of Physics. Three students from different grades were chosen with intellectual disabilities of different levels and individual meetings were done and assessed how the different methodologies could help in the understanding of the concepts that had been worked in the room. We used different teaching methods with different pedagogical tools, based on Vygotsky's work and, through the Bloom Taxonomy, we defined the level of learning for each topic. It was confirmed that actually to promote an inclusive school it is necessary that the methods are changed, the group work and technologies are used in the classroom and are also considered tailored curricula for each case.