02/05/2024
Two days ago, the Kano team visited the Gobirawa Project primary school special needs section. We entered classes 4 and 5 which are in one classroom, separated by a gap.
We plan to come up with a conventional strategy for teaching Deaf children, so we went to the above school to have a session with the pupils. The session aimed to observe and identify the different learning needs of the pupils, which we would use to establish the right method by which a teacher should approach them.
Thanks to the session, we learned that most pupils in classes 4 and 5 have a learning disability – dyslexia. The children could not differentiate between capital and small letters. Some of them confuse b with d, n and u, n and h, and vice versa. Some of them can not finger-spell their names. Some just don't know anything. Yet these are children of classes 4 and 5! What have they been learning in the previous classes, please?
This is not just because there is no single employed teacher in the whole special needs section of Gobirawa Project Primary School; even in the Special Education schools that have teachers, the case is the same. Please go and see it for yourself. Due to the disarrangement of those schools, the difference is narrow.
No special education school in Kano has conventional teaching methods for Deaf children. They are special education schools but they barely utilize special educational approaches in their structures. They work just anyhow. Most of those deaf students in senior secondary can not list the eight parts of speech. Are the teachers even aware of this not talk of being concerned?
Children like these in the video shouldn't be in primary 5. But please visit Special Education schools like Kuka Bulukiya and see kids like them in JSS, and the teachers think there's nothing wrong there.
We urge the Kano State Ministry Of Education to urgently send teachers to Gobirawa Primary School's special needs section.
Abba Kabir Yusuf
Musa Abdullahi Sufi
Aliyu Dahiru Aliyu
Jaafar Jaafar
