iHETP - Inclusive Higher Education Training Program

The main objective of the project is to provide higher education professors with competence building training, so they acquire the pedagogic skills they didn’t attain on their academic education along with their technical expertise.

Providing the professors with pedagogic skills in a training program rather than the typical formal education in educating sciences will have more immediate results and is likely to draw more acceptance from the target group than requiring them to take another higher education program to make up for the gap the higher education systems have in preparing the students to later become professors, even if the equivalent is done to prepare them to become researchers when they begin master programs.

By providing the professors with the same pedagogic skills that are usually provided to trainers it will make each specialist indifferent scientific areas also a trained educator for every student in the higher education system, but also providing them with teaching practices specifically adapted to diverse types of disabilities will result in building a more inclusive higher education system as less professors will feel unprepared to teach students with disabilities, especially, as previously identified, those with sensory or mental disabilities which scares the most those professors with less experience in teaching students with disabilities or those that had negative experiences due to the lack of these skills. Indirectly any student will benefit from taking classes with the most brilliant engineers, doctors (MD), economists, lawyers, etc. that now also acquired pedagogic skills, but the students with disabilities that can be tutored by professors that now have the skills to adapt their teaching practices to these students with disabilities and become able to produce adapted pedagogic materials will not only augment their success rate but can result in more students with disabilities enrolling in higher education as they become more confident on their success chances.

Building a more inclusive higher education system will make people with disabilities employable in roles and positions from which they have been believed and made believe to be incapable of assuming, including becoming higher education professors themselves. This project assumes this last scenario making all the efforts to present the training sessions and materials as accessible to anyone as we advocate the higher education professors must start to be able to deliver themselves.

EIA – ENSINO E INVESTIGACAO E ADMINISTRACAO SA – PORTUGAL