Scientific Articles

• Campo Mon, M. Á., Castro Pañeda, P., Álvarez Martino, E., Álvarez Hernández, M., & Torres Manzanera, E. (2010). Funcionamiento de la integración en la enseñanza según la percepción de los maestros especialistas en Pedagogía Terapéutica. Psicothema. https://www.psicothema.com/pdf/3804.pdf
• García-Prieto, F. J., Delgado-García, M., Gómez-Hurtado, I., & Maya, A. M. (2021). Prácticas de aula de los profesionales de pedagogía terapéutica para atender a la diversidad: hacia un enfoque inclusivo. Educar, 57(2), 289-304. https://educar.uab.cat/article/view/v57-n2-garcia-etal/1299-prieto-etal

Explanation of the Post

The PT teacher uses his or her knowledge and tools to attend to and prevent the educational needs of students, both those with and without diversity or disability.
However, the work of this professional is currently carried out both inside and outside the classroom. This leads us to a question: if we take into account the principle of inclusion by which PT teachers move, would it be appropriate to take a student out of the regular classroom to supposedly improve their learning? This, as usual, gives rise to endless questions and debates, but what I want to focus on is: what is better: for PTs to exercise their professional work inside or outside the classroom?

On the one hand, we have arguments that determine that learning is not only equally effective inside the classroom (in terms of the curriculum), but that the socialization factor and true inclusion factor must also be taken into account (Barroso and Arenas, 2016). For example, this can be done by adapting the classroom, from the arrangement of the tables to the teaching methodology, including new technologies. And in all this, the figure of PT has a fundamental role, since he/she is in charge of knowing in detail all these individual needs of the students and the possible solutions and adaptations; taking into account that here we are not only talking about people with diversity, but also about the students without special educational needs, who are already young and have a casuistry to deal with. Following these arguments, other studies comment that the work to improve the work of the PT goes beyond the classroom. Factors such as family involvement, the use of other types of complementary programs and more resources are mentioned (Campo Mon et al., 2010).

On the other hand, there are a large number of professionals, both PT professionals and teachers and professors (who, let us remember, are a fundamental part of the whole process), who defend that support should be given outside or, failing that, inside-outside (García-Prieto et al., 2021). In general, this type of arguments are given from the prism of curricular learning, which defend that students should be taken out of the classroom to reinforce the subjects taught in the regular classroom, thus improving the scores and results of students who would otherwise obtain lower scores.

Therefore, I think it is interesting to debate whether the PT should work inside or outside the classroom, since, according to established precedents, if we are based on inclusive education and we take into account the socializing agent factor that the school has, PTs should work collaboratively inside the classroom (with the respective changes in the current model of education, of course); but, taking into account that attending to students with special educational needs outside the classroom will result in obtaining higher scores than those they would obtain if they did not have this type of support, all this gives rise to a very interesting question to be addressed.

Other sources

• Barroso, G., & Arenas, M. (2016). Pedagogía terapéutica dentro del aula. Lo que funciona fuera puede mejorar dentro del aula. Padres y Maestros/Journal of Parents and Teachers, (365), 49-54. https://revistas.comillas.edu/index.php/padresymaestros/article/view/6687/6486