International meetingGRUNDTVIG Project ‘F.E.P.I.D’

Further Education for People with Intellectual Disabilities

Katalin KostyalAnd

Szilveszter HallerSummary about the first workshop

on behalf of The Foundation for Rogers Person-centred Education

Date: 12-14 October 2008.

Place: Leibnitz, Austria

Participants: Katalin Kostyal and Szilveszter Haller

The topics were:

Polonca Koshi introduced herself as representative of Der Schloss Retzhof in Austria. She is the coordinator of our project, who is and will be the centre of information. We can ask her help in all aspects and she will be the motor of the project. She prepared the schedule of the whole two-year project. We agreed on the best version together.

1. We made clear that we use the meaning of ’disable’ in our project definitely in connection with people with intellectual disability.

2. We made it clear that the main production of our project will be the compilation and publish of a handbook.In this handbook we want to combine all our experiences, collect present experiences, the best practice examples, interviews with experts, documentations, sentences from the target group, results of the project, photos of artwork.In this handbook we want to define how to make art workshops for people with intellectual disabilities.

The advertising of the handbook will help people and institutions to get information about that topic.

3. Each participant introduced its institute. There were people from Austria, Germany, France, Cyprus, Hungary, Slovenia (Hrastovec), Slovenia (Ptuj) and Portugal. There were no institutes from Greece, Italy and Romania. Romania cancelled its participation in the project.

Six participant institutions deal with multiple disabled adult in segregated form: in boarding-house or in occupational centre for people with special needs

France and Hungary are exceptions.

The delegates of France are the organizers of the local institutes where there are people living or working in connection with the topic.

We, Hungarians are from a foundation that helps running a small alternative secondary school dealing with some students 18+. Among them there are some with slight intellectual disabilities. Our school is different from the others in the sense, that our mission is the integration and inclusion of disabled young people.

The main goal of the participating of our foundation is building a bridge with some useful “best practice” or ideas between dealing multiple disabled adults in segregated form and dealing with people with slight intellectual disabilities in integrated form. We find it important to look for connections in methodologies of these two different orientations.

In the handbook which is one of the main goals of this project we can include case-histories, good ideas, practise for the assistants. In this way the handbook would represent the problems of these people as well.

4. We agreed in using the internet, e-mails to keep connection. In this way we can send interesting articles, question, exercises, homework to each other, and we can co-ordinate and solve different problems, as well, like the organization of the following workshop.

5. We voted accomplishment to a website for the project. Polonca Koshi choose a firm to make it. We can put in there the material to the topic, reports and photos, best practice examples, with a discussion forum, a chat room and a newsletter. Other people and institutions can look at the website, ask questions, read about our project and learn about the topic.

Each participant has to pay some money for this job. It costs about 100 Euros per participant.

6. We analysed the form and the connotations of the logo of our project.Some participants brought their plans. We voted at the most accepted logo and chose one that we liked the best. The Portuguese group made it.

7. We had a lot of good experiences with the participating. The entertainer prepared some very pleasant events to have conversations with each other including meal together, and making a ‘buschenshank’-trip We could make each other acquaintance.There were very nice people who help each other in the difficulties of using English.