Social Work With Blind, Deaf Children In Special Education

With the development of today’s society, the desire of receivingeducation for children who are blind and deaf has grown greatly. Toreceive equal education has become a legitimate right to people withdisabilities. Per the2ndnational sampling census generated in April2006,there were2.46million children with disabilities aged between6and15,of which130,000have visual disability and110,000have hearingdisability. How to make certain such a large youth population withdisabilities to receive quality education and to meet their personal needsduring the learning process and daily life has become the focus of wholecommunity.As an applied professional tool to serve society and a socialwelfare program, social work is designated to help and en-powervulnerable groups in our society so they can live a better life. In reality,the development of special education requires the use of professionalsocial work. On the one hand, social work and special education share acommon goal and philosophy, which is to help children with disabilitiesto enhance their skills and achieve their goals. On the other hand,professional approach of social work can make up for the shortage ofspecial education for disabled children in terms of buildingself-confidence and personality behavior. Therefore, to integrate specialeducation with social work is an revolutionary innovation to specialeducation itself.The main thesis of this paper is to understand how socialwork can apply in special education system for children with disabilities.The writer incorporated related theoretical social work research withsocial work teams’ practices as the primary research methodology andindividual interview with students with disabilities/case study as asecondary research methodology. The writer of this paper volunteered atthe Hohhot Special Education School and spent a great amount of timewith deaf and blind students in their respective classes by organizing aseries of group activities and providing social services to them. As aresult of these pre-designed group assignments, these students leantvaluable lessons via playing games, which enhanced their self-confidence and increased self-care ability. More importantly, this has improved theirteamwork ability that can further make their life better and easier inlearning and everyday life.In conclusion, this paper has shown thatintegrating special education with social work is very vital to the successof special education. Social workers should play an important role inspecial education system. People should continuously apply social workin the field of special education and discover more effective andproductive ways to integrate special education with social work inpractice to further develop the level of special education for children withdisabilities.