Diana Agudelo Rojas

During 62 years, ICAL has strongly worked on the inclusive education of deaf children and adolescents - 3 to 25 years-old-, who belong to socially vulnerable families. Specialized models for students’ communication skills development have been integrated: Verbotonal method and bilingual method (Colombian sign language). ICAL was the first organization in the country to have a Verbotonal unit to attend the population with this kind of disability. Focusing on meaningful education, rights-approach, and life’s project has been transversal to the whole education model, considering all the learning particular needs of the students. A relevant issue to highlight is that the school has successfully operated via its own and innovative approach of Inverse inclusion education. This means bringing together students with hearing disabilities and some cognitive ones with students with no disabilities. There, the majority (72%) is integrated by a traditionally minority social group: deaf and mild-cognitive-disabled children and adolescents. This is a distinctive factor that expresses the real purpose of inclusion in the organization. Likewise, part of the teaching staff (30%) is composed by people with hearing disability. Until today, more than 2700 children from Bogota and other 10 small municipalities of the Cundinamarca department have studied there. 97% of them live in low-income and high psycho-social risk contexts. 82% of the graduated ones are occupied on academic or working activities. It is a positive number when compared to the national occupation rate (34%) of the hearing disabled population.