Lessons from Meghalaya – Carmo Noronha – Bethany Society

Inclusion is a fundamental shift in how we see people, build communities, and define progress.
In this film we hear from Carmo Noronha, Secretary at Bethany Society, whose decades of work show us what happens when you start designing systems where everyone can thrive.
From building inclusive classrooms to leveraging ICT for opportunity, from grassroots legal awareness to leadership by people with disabilities themselves, this isn’t theory, this is rethinking education.
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It’s my 31st year working in Bethany Society.

As an organisation, we were started 41 years ago.

So we come from a mainstreaming background and also, the strategy was always inclusion.

I myself, before I joined the organisation, for 25 years, I was in mainstream education, you know, teaching in mainstream schools across the country.

Our founder was a very, uh inspirational leader.

Her focus was health.

And she started off by saying that if we give a very good foundation to the mother and the child, especially in rural areas, we are actually building the foundations of a very strong society.

So when it comes to disability, then, you know, we took on disability and- and at that time, no one was actually looking at disability.

And the- the focus was always that you need to separate them and you need to have special programs for them.

And then what actually happened was that if you wanted to have special programs, then you needed to have people who were specialised to look after them.

And they were, they were really not available.

So what- what happened then was that the people, persons with disability, children, adults, were just left behind.

They- they were, they were left to fend for themselves.

So they couldn’t get into the mainstream, neither could they get, you know, focus in the specialised system.

And this I’m talking about across the Northeast.

At- also, perhaps in other parts of the country.

And- and hence umm, you required a strategy that would reach out to the margins, to the people in rural areas.

And Meghalaya is uhh, an agrarian society, 90 percent of the people are uh, are working on the land, they are in remote villages and so obviously, 90 percent of people with disability would be in rural areas.

So that is uh, so with that background, and I think that uh- um, I mean, I was very lucky uhh, when I joined the organisation in 1994-95, that there was a lot of, there was lot of international and national uhhh, movement on how to reach out to rural areas.

And the whole concept of ‘CBR’ came then, Community Based Rehabilitation, which looked at cross-disability, which didn’t look at only blind people, only deaf people in the villages.

You couldn’t go into a village and say, “look, we are only going to look at developmental disability.”

What about the others, you know?

So a whole like, cross-sectoral and cross-disability movement started.

And I think um- um- uh it- of course it was in Africa and South America, but I think India took the lead, particularly through civil society organisations and uh through parents’ groups.

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What steps have you taken to support or enhance education for children with disabilities?

So when it came to education, as I said earlier, we actually put children into mainstream schools.

And the staff went around supporting these- these teachers and these schools and also advocating for children to be in school and not in special schools.

And what happened then was umm, after we started, education for the blind and other children with disability in the Garo Hills, which is where we had started, we came to the Khasi Hills.

I mean, our founder came to the Khasi Hills and there was no school for the blind here.

So she actually established a school for the blind here in this campus.

And very, very soon after that, we realised that this would not work, that we needed to become inclusive.

And so we started a whole process of Reverse inclusion where we opened the doors to children with other disabilities and also children who had no, seemingly no disabilities, okay.

And umm, one of the things that we, that we did after a few years was, Bertha, who is actually visually impaired, was appointed as the principal of the school, and she was um uh 14 years principal of the school, and then she took it as a challenge to move from a special school to an inclusive school.

And one of the first things that we did was to get our school affiliated with the State Board of Education, because we said that they should, they should not follow a special curriculum, they should follow the state curriculum and show people that it’s possible for all children to learn together.

And that was the focus, that- that children uh have a right to learn together, children do not, should not be segregated.

And in fact uh, one of our slogans was, uh ‘we only segregate garbage’.

And um, and we literally do that as a livelihood activity for other persons with disability, where all the organic matter, we convert into compost and we convert it into a resource.

So, and- and we said that if you segregate garbage, then the individual components become resources, and then if you put children together, then individually and as a group, they become resources.

We got affiliated with the State Board.

Then, you know, we went on to higher secondary, we set up a higher secondary school.

And then with higher secondary, we started advocating for these children to go into mainstream colleges, and we supported them.

So after they finish class 12, we have actually advocated and we went to hostels that are here in colleges, and we urged the management to admit them in hostels so that they would be seen, you know, and then they would start mixing with each other, and they would be able to then uhh, you know, look at the strengths of people rather than looking at impairments and- and- and disability.

So that was the, and specially in- in education I think, the- the- the focus was… was looking at educating all children, but not educating only the children with disability.

And so we adopted this framework of Universal design for learning, which- which is- which is new and which is now progressing, but which looks at education and it moves away from disability and looks at variability in the classroom.

So if you have 50 children, you have, all of them are different and all of them learn differently, so can we educate them?

And so once the students finished college, you know, they have their networks, specially the visually impaired, the hearing impaired, some are in Delhi, some are in Mumbai, some are in…they uhh, they realise that computers is very important, and then we took on ICT as a very important part of- of learning, of a means to learn.

And these guys now are, some are working in Infosys, some are working in- in Accenture, WebEx.

They are doing extremely well in the ICT sector.

Uhh and the advantage that we had was, many of the companies said, “look, give us 15 years of education with a good background in English and we’ll do the rest”.

So the advantage of people from the Northeast was that they- they- they speak English very well.

And Bertha herself, who was uhh, you know, who was an English teacher and uh was very umm, uh kind of insistent that we teach them good spoken English skills.

So that was, you know, that’s how the education uh went.

And then we are now promoting this across, you know, across the uh, the state, across districts, especially when we had this five years uh project on ‘Raise Northeast’, which is Regional Action for Inclusive Education.

Fifteen of us NGOs came together, worked with SSA and tried to build the competence of the system to promote inclusion.

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In your view, what are the essential elements that constitute quality education?

When it comes to education, you know, traditionally or going back etc, parents came, they put their- left their children in school and that was the end.

You know, parents were not encouraged uhh, to- to be a partner in the education system.

But I think today’s world has changed, and uh, to be true to uh the- the development, parents must form an integral part of education.

Because children are with us, say, 5-6 hours a day, the remaining time they are with their families, they are with their siblings, they are with their parents, they have their own culture.

So, uh you know, this whole focus on culturally responsible uhh- uh teaching and learning is so important.

And so it’s- it’s very important that parents become partners in the education system.

To a certain extent, we cannot do this because many of our children are from remote villages, they are staying in a hostel.

But what- what we do is we do visit the families, we encourage parents, no matter how poor they are, to come in to the school and then, of course, the parents of- of- of day scholars, they participate in everything.

Our gate is always open.

Parents come in and- and sit in the classrooms, parents come in and support the teachers, teachers go and visit the home, and- and that is how you can actually design for inclusion.

Inclusion is not only designing uh, content, it’s also designing the environment.

Environment means the environment in the school, the environment in the home, the environment in the neighborhood.

The… so- so- so the way we look at it is that, you know, ‘whom we teach” is at the centre, “where we teach” is the environment, “what we teach” is the curriculum, “how we teach” is the instruction, “how we assess” is the assessment and how we train teachers…if all these five, you know sectors, are not at the service of the child at the centre, then we are not doing justice to education.

So the parents and the environment and the community and the culture is vital to quality education.

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What further steps do you believe can be taken to advance progress in disability-inclusion?

Once a year, we have a festival of inclusion where uh the parents come in, other schools come in, other teachers come in.

We have- we have a festival of music.

You know, we have- we’ve had festivals of cooking where, you know, other schools come in, parents come in, and uh so, parents become partners.

And now, you know, it’s very important, even in a place like Shillong, parents are educated, you know, they have- they have their perceptions, they have their ideas and we have to listen to them.

Particularly, tod- today in the age of social media, ICT, umm social media uh, ICT, digital- digital learning becomes a very strong means of creating equity.

A very, very important part of uh community-based rehabilitation is empowerment of people with disability, and so, one of our, initially, about 17 years ago, we started what is called a Legal Awareness Cell.

You know, to- to- to- to learn ourselves about the law, to keep updated about various conventions and laws that were coming, to- to- to- to organise programs where people with disability and even parents groups would come together and learn about their rights and how to advocate for them.

And, say, for example, in Bethany, one of the, I think, one of our- our- our most uh decision that I think will go a long way was for the management to appoint a person with blindness as the headmistress of the school, you know.

And after that, she’s now the executive director of- of- of the whole uh, you know uh, programs of the society.

And so, in the legal awareness cell and in which we then changed to the mainstreaming unit, the whole focus was what is available in the mainstream, and then how do we train individuals, disabled-persons -organisations to advocate, for their right to be included in all government programs in education, health, in livelihoods, in social, in uh- and you know, and the right to vote, the right to- to- to, uhh for transport, etc.

And these are uh groups that are in the villages who can go to their BDO, who can go to their district level and say, “look, we are not getting this.

We are speaking for ourselves.”

So, rather we speak for them, they spoke for themselves.

And- and we had a lot of trainings for them through the CBR network of 15-16 organisations, where they would come together, be trained, and then at the end of the training, call in government officials and then, you know, speak to them.

What I, what I want to also appeal to people is that don’t look at impairment as a disadvantage.

We- we- we need to look at leveraging the strengths of people, including persons with disability, and not to look at them as challenges to be overcome so that, you know, so- so- and- and, and you need to bring in uh flexibility and choice in the system without diluting the goals.

The goal should be the same, but the way to reach the goal may take a little longer time, but that flexibility and choice must be there.