The epistemological path to inclusive education: an essay on visually impaired children

Abstract

The discussion of inclusive education involves the understanding of education as a universal right resulting from gradual social changes that open up to difference as a natural part of human experience represented in the practices of school education. Inclusive education opposes classical theories and epistemologies of education that use homogeneity, functionality, and evolution as basic assumptions and that are associated with knowledge considered universal, resistant to attributing veracity to other (original) knowledge. Inclusive education assumes that differences constitute a constructive factor and that life (knowledge) is made of these social differences and singularities and from the exchange between different experiences. Reflecting on inclusive education and considering the ways that knowledge is a collective construction, I studied the path that made possible the construction of geographical knowledge by blind children. The paper describes two different moments of the research. First, the analysis of epistemology converges to a perspective of Humanist Geography, at an initial moment in which tactile teaching materials were built for 6th-grade students. In a second moment, methodologies and resources were presented that culminated in the construction of a tactile book with blind children in a class of 1st year of Elementary School at the Benjamin Constant Institute (IBC). In dialogue with the literature and the literacy process, the path taken in the research identified the spatial expressions of these children in the Geography of Childhood in line with Vygotsky’s Historical-Cultural Theory, showing the importance of listening to children’s voices as language creators. Other geographic.