Mainstreaming and the Science Teacher

The task of teaching a severely handicapped child mainstreamed into an ordinary secondary school is far from easy. Very little help can be found in the research literature. The bulk of this is geared to primary age children's needs, and those authors who do write of mainstreaming in secondary schools seem to limit themselves to observing that practical science is one of the most difficult subjects to teach! When a pupil who had been blind from birth arrived in my class of sighted pupils, I realised that blindness presents special problems because of the very high visual input in science teaching; some authorities estimate it at more than 80 percent.