It is a deep honor for me to be invited to Australia. When I received the invitation, I faced a very ambivalent situation. I had resolved to bring my life into some form of sanity and to reduce the amount of traveling that I was doing; but to receive an invitation to Australia, even though I had been here three times before, was to me an opportunity that I could not pass. Australia is a beautiful country and contains a beautiful people, and I thank you for inviting me.

My subject is “Curriculum for the Intellectually Handicapped,” and in an hour and one-quarter there is no way in which I can possibly cover the range of handicapping conditions, requirements, and needs for such a curriculum. I have, however, selected some areas that I should like to discuss.

The social acceptance (by non-handicapped children) and classroom and playground social behaviour of the five former special class pupils was studied. Six months prior to the study the pupils had been transferred to an experimental mainstream special educational programme within the same school. At the time of the study, the mainstreamed children were all maintaining or surpassing the rates of academic progress they had shown in the special class and they were well accepted by their classmates. Their social behaviour during unstructured classroom and playground activities closely approximated that of their classmates, but in the case of playground activities differed markedly from that of pupils who had remained in the special class. The results indicate that mainstream special educational facilities can work effectively — i.e., academically and socially, for at least some mildly retarded children. Where resources permit and the support of regular class teachers is available, there would appear to be some advantages for the children concerned.

The view is put that the least restrictive environment and the most appropriate climate for intellectually handicapped adolescents and young adults can be found or created in Colleges of Technical and Further Education in New South Wales and indeed across Australia. Such provision may also be the most appropriate for other categories of handicap, disability or disadvantage.

There is still a tendency for the community at large to underestimate the potential of handicapped young people for development. Research, not generally well known and therefore not acted upon, shows that despite poor initial performance, many intellectually handicapped people show substantial improvement with learning.

The characteristics of computer-assisted instruction (CAI) which makes it so worthy of consideration for use by the teacher of pupils with special needs, whose time for individual attention with her pupils is limited, are briefly discussed, and comment is made about the limitations of this approach. Attention is drawn to the alternative approach of peer tutoring, where the desirable one-to-one characteristic is attainable, and where there is the possibility that the sensitivity to the quality of the computer program, which is one of the limitations of the approach of CAI, may be contrasted with the not-so-sensitive-to-quality-of-program characteristic of peer tutoring. This possibility is examined in the context of a sample of poor reading Year eight pupils who were given a period of peer tutoring by Year eleven and twelve pupils in the same school, where the demonstrably not high quality program consisted of relatively few meetings between tutor and tutee, of short duration, at which it was expected that there would be talk, reading and being read to. Use of a control group enabled the conclusions to be reached that this peer tutoring resulted in gains for the tutees in reading ability and in attitude towards and behaviour in school, this being suggestive of the power of this low staff input, low cost, low technology technique in the area of special education.

Repetition has been extensively employed as a remedial tool for low achieving students. Test results on children’s learning report that approximately one third of students benefits from repetition while the remaining two thirds make fair to poor academic progress. This study attempts to define the characteristics which differentiate those students who respond favourably to repetition from those who do not. Sex, I.Q., the grade in which repetition occurred and the reason for repetition were the variables selected for investigation. Students were 78 boys and 54 girls who repeated in either grade 3, 4, 5 or 6. Position in year for the year before repetition, the year of repetition and the year following repetition were examined. The results indicate that the outcome of repetition cannot be predicted from sex, I.Q., grade in which repetition occurred, the position in year before repetition or the reason for repetition. It was hypothesised that non-intellect factors such as motivational and characterological variables may affect the outcome of repetition and therefore need to be explored further.

The author wishes to thank the dedicated coordinators Pam Kontaratos, Maria Movromattis, Diana Gizzi, Debbie Brown, and Lisa Whitbread who gave so much of their time and energy to the program. Special thanks go to Sandra Doyle, senior co-ordinator who competently undertook the major task of training all other co-ordinators in the exercise routines to a high level of competence.

This paper examines the use of self-control techniques as a teaching tool to change children’s behaviour, and to generalize that behaviour change to other settings. Four case studies are presented to illustrate the use of self-assessment, using the child’s own criteria for rating behaviour, self-modelling with videotapes of the child in the classroom, and self-monitoring using a wrist counter. It is concluded that self-control techniques can be a valuable way of teaching special children to discriminate and evaluate how they are behaving.

An earlier article (Hallinan, 1984) introduced the important role of media in teacher education concerning children with special needs. This follow-up article briefly reviews some currently available media in Australia, on the topic of identification and assessment issues in special education.

The aim of this paper is to bring together recent research that illustrates society’s attitudes towards disabled people. In so doing historical and traditional attitudes — and consequent service provisions are examined briefly both to draw comparisons and to exemplify changes that have occurred. Specific mention is also made of research that has sought to analyse techniques utilised (consciously or otherwise) in affecting change- in order to consider the implications both for organisations promoting the interests of disabled people and for research in this area.

Within society generally the terms ‘disability’ and ‘handicap’ are often used in an interchangeable manner — the context of their usage being dependent upon the user’s particular background, interests, and experience. This ambivalence has been reflected in Australian legislation and statutory rules (for a fuller discussion see Smith, 1980). However, within specific interest groups of disabled people and those who work with them, distinctions are being clarified. The term ‘disability’ is seen to refer to the reduction or loss of physical (i.e. motor, sensory or mental) structure or function while ‘handicap’ includes the personal, environmental and social consequences of a disability. Indeed perceptions held by others may create more difficulties for the individual than the disability itself.

For the purposes of this review the term ‘attitudes’ is used in a broad sense to refer to an “individual’s predisposed thoughts, feelings and actions towards others” (Cho, 1981, p.21), without differentiating between beliefs and values. It is readily recognised that individual attitudes are formed from a wide base of variables such as economic, social and cultural factors; family attitudes; religious groups; past experiences; peer groups and specific personality traits. Similarly the complexity of interacting factors which contribute to change of attitudes is also recognised. Therefore, in order to put indications of change in perspective, an overview of critical factors affecting attitudes towards the disabled is first attempted.

Blissymbolics, a comprehensive core communication system through which non-speaking people are able to communicate, has been developed and made available throughout Canada and the world by the Blissymbolics Communication Institute in Toronto, Canada. In addition, Canadian users of the system have become leaders in helping to increase universal awareness of the intellectual, social, emotional and communication needs of communicatively impaired and disadvantaged people.

Charles K. Bliss who was born in Australia and now resides in Australia, originally developed Blissymbolics between 1942 and 1965 as an international communication system to promote better understanding among people. The system was first successfully applied during the early 1970’s by a multidisciplinary group of specialists at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Centre in Toronto to cerebral palsied, school-aged, non-speaking children. This graphic and meaning-based system provided them with a means of more grammatically complete communication than picture or word boards.

Since its first application, Blissymbolics has been expanded to many other applications and populations. Today it is used as an augmentative communiation system with cognitive and language development programs to support reading and pre-reading activities. Its users include people who are retarded, multiply-handicapped, autistic, aphasic and stroke victims.

As experimentation and the use of Blissymbolics increased during the 1970’s, the need for training programs and instructional materials, for information about ongoing programs, for more symbols and for a structure to maintain a standard form of Blissymbols also grew. In order to meet and co-ordinate these requirements the Blissymbolics Communication Foundation was established in Toronto in 1975. The Foundation, through a licensing agreement with Mr. Bliss, obtained the exclusive mandate to co-ordinate the applications of Blissymbolics with non-speaking people around the world. Its mandate was to maintain symbol standards and to provide training and material for the increasing number of people applying the system with non-speaking people. The Foundation was re-named the Blissymbolics Communication Institute in 1978 to better represent its role as a central, co-ordinating educational organization.