O papel da família e da escola no apoio às crianças com Trissomia 21

Abstract

The School and the Family in the support to the pupils with Trisomy 21 are the two institutions whose relation is our object of analysis in this study. These institutions have suffered deep transformations, mainly throughout the last decades, becoming more visible from the end of the 90s, with the integration of the pupils with Special Educational Needs in the regular classrooms and with the increase of the compulsory education (Correia, 1997). The present work approaches the problematic of the relation between the School and the Family, having as a target the analysis and the comparison of the parents and teachers’ perceptions about the involvement of parents in the school concerning their students, as well as the interest and the motivation to learn of the group of participants with T21 in this study. The sample is constituted by 30 children with trisomy 21. These children attended the second and the third cycles of the Basic Education at state-run schools from the district of Braga, aged 10 to 18 years old. This group was made up of 14 boys and 16 girls. We implemented the semi structuralized questionnaire/interview “Motivation to learn in children with Special Educational Needs (SEN)” (Miranda, 2011), as the instrument to gather data, which was filled in by the 30 pupils, and the questionnaire of Parental Involvement in the School, a version for teachers (PIS-TV) and a version for parents (PIS-PV). The results on the motivation to learn of our participants, show, in general terms, a highly centered motivation in concrete referents, depending on the characteristics of the context, on the other significant or meaningful data and on the task. As for the teachers and parents’ perception, the results suggest that the parents and the teachers’ perceptions are mostly coincident in many aspects. A reason for this fact can lie on the sample features, that is to say, it is a sample with children with T21, and in agreement to the Education Ministry alignments or even according to the child’s health conditions, the proximity among parents and teachers will always be superior to the usual proximity found in families with children without Special Educational Needs (SEN) and the teachers themselves. TV= Teachers’ version PV= Parents’ version.

Date of Award	Oct 2012
Original language	Portuguese
Awarding Institution	Universidade Católica Portuguesa
Supervisor	Lúcia do Rosário Cerqueira de Miranda (Supervisor)