Indeed, whatever differences there may be between the medical and educational systems of each country, the work with children is very similar everywhere. There is the same difficulty with classes : pupil turnover, differing levels of learning, etc…. ; and especially, sick children share common experiences of separation from their families, medical care, anxiety…
The schooling of sick children cannot be reduced to simple passing on of knowledge, as if " the child were in his own school. For this reason hospital teachers, from the very beginning, carried out exchanges between departments (burns units in France and England, surgical wards in France and Spain, etc…).
The impact of these exchanges has shown that it was not only the involvement of the teacher which mattered, but that of a much larger team including doctors, psychologists, and parents..
The sick child is at the center of a network of discussion and exchange.
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• The wealth of this network is due to the presence in each atelier of teachers from different countries. What is contributed by each culture, by the diversity of professional circumstances, enables the group to focus on the essential without increasing the burden of work (mainly tried and tested teaching practices are shared).
Our first discussion led us to organize exchanges around the theme “Learning in hospital”.
• The HOPE network is currently made up about 15 atelier. Each one organises its work and its exchanges by means of case studies (files ?), cassettes, faxes and the Internet.
• The network is based on what the child learns at the hospital, the knowledge which he has received through school, the formal knowledge (ateliers 1 to 3) and experience the child gains during his stay at the hospital.
The school should enable this life experience to become experiential knowledge (atelier 4 to 10)
At the junction of these two forms of knowledge (formal-experiential) three ateliers undertook to determine specific institutional and social links (atelier 11,12,13)
Atelier 14 is focused on the role and qualification of the hospital teacher
Atelier 15 studies the rights and the pedagogical needs of the sick child. |