How do we see school integration? Should students be assimilated into the system, fit into the mold and all look alike or are they all individuals with their own particularities whose diversity enriches the group?
A tool
In order to see integration as a source of enrichment, in my master’s thesis in pedagogy ‘Intégration scolaire: l’espoir de l’Espéranto’ (School integration: the hope of Esperanto) I try to provide a tool to help a particular population of students to integrate, dyslexic students.
In this paper, I first focused on the integration of dyslexic students because they represent, if we include mild dyslexia, a significant proportion of students.
I started from the observation that these students, in addition to making more effort to do the same work as their classmates, must also engage in speech therapy sessions. An allophone student will be in a similar situation. He must make more effort to understand a language that is not his own, and must learn this language outside the classroom.
Multiple advantages
Learning Esperanto makes it possible to work in the classroom what the student with dyslexic disorders works in a speech therapy office. The goal is not to replace speech-language pathologists, but to provide additional tools so that the effects of dyslexic disorder can be reduced more quickly. More than just tools, Esperanto helps to restore the student’s confidence by allowing him or her to experience success in the field of languages in the school environment. Learning Esperanto could therefore be beneficial not only to dyslexic students, but to any students with language difficulties. The implementation of Esperanto in the classroom would therefore be in the idea of “universal design”. By providing a tool for a given population, the benefits, far from being limited to them, are shared by all the stakeholders. This secondary benefit is discussed in more detail in my other master’s thesis in pedagogy ‘La motivation dans l’apprentissage des langues : l’espoir de l’Espéranto’
To go further
The article Esperanto and Dyslexia describes in more detail the mechanisms of action of Esperanto for dyslexic students.