ACC @ school for social inclusion (TBC)

Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) can play a very important role in supporting the process of inclusion of people with communication issues, being them for instance with hearing and speech difficulties and / or migrants who live in different linguistic and cultural contexts from their original. With this project we would like to strengthen and promote the use of ACC in schools as a tool that could substitute or enhance the verbal and clinic practice by offsetting the temporary or permanent disability of individuals with complex communication needs. In recent years much has been done for the removal of architectural barriers and to make places accessible to all types of physical disabilities, but this is not enough. We believe that in order to provide a school with true and complete accessibility, encompassing all aspects of the individual and all the various types of disabilities (not only physical) it would be necessary to create wider friendly environment applying the AAC methodology. Starting from the schools, but not only: it would be important to let fully accessible also all the contexts in which life and education is happening for people with complex communication needs: such as libraries, sport facilities, cultural institutions such as museums, other educational agencies... With such kind of environments the children and/or migrants will not be isolated and excluded because of their communication difficulties. Through AAC, an universal and multimodal language, s/he can be able to express needs, intentions, requests and better understand the surrounding environments. We foresee for the project a series of training, sharing activities and pilot actions to identify best practices and new approaches allowing schools to be more inclusive also in partnership with other stakeholders applying the AAC methodology. In the course of the project we envisage the production of the following outputs: a Toolkit for schools to support the implementation of AAC practies and an ACC training module for teachers.