ICEVI International Excellence awardee K. Piyasena:

Hero to the visually impaired

by Indeewara Thilakarathne

Kamala, a retired teacher who had served at St. Sebastian Vidyalaya in Katuneriya for many years, speaks fluent English describing her career that is almost similar to any other graduate teacher's except for the fact that she had not seen her students. She is totally blind.

"The biggest problem I faced was that I could not see the children as an ordinary teacher. However, I sense them and used to walk through every row so that, students could not play the fool with me. I got help from my friend to read out answer scripts. When I was studying at the university I used to take down notes in Braille," said Kamala.

Kamala is one of the beneficiaries of the "Integrated Education Program for the Visually Handicapped" which was launched by the Ministry of Education aimed at tapping the vast pool of talents dormant among the visually handicapped who had been excluded from the conventional system of education for decades.

However, very little is known about the man behind this successful program which has been in operation for over 20 years in diverse parts of the country.

It was K. Piyasena, present Consultant for the Special Education for the Disabled at the Ministry of Education, who introduced a special program for the visually handicapped which is now known as "inclusive education".

One of the successful programs that Piyasena launched as an educationist was the "Three-phase Program of Special Education". The program was aimed at developing and integrating the Visually handicapped, the deaf, mentally retarded and physically handicapped into mainstream system of education.

He introduced an island-wide survey in order to identify and detect disabled children in communities and in schools outside the system of education. Remedial Education for slow learners with the assistance of SIDA was another program launched by Piyasena on experimental basis in schools.

K. Piyasena has been selected for this year's ICEVI (International Conference on Education of People with Visual Impairment) International Excellence Award. He is the first Sri Lankan educationist to win this prestigious award. The last recipient of this award was Dr. Herman Gresnight of Netherlands.

Piyasena's expertise in the field of Special Education was internationally recognised and in 1985 UNESCO appointed him as a consultant on Special Education in the Republic of Vietnam. His services were highly sought by the Government of Papua New Guinea and Bhutan to develop special education in their schools.

K. Piyasena is an old boy of Taxila Central College and joined the tutorial staff of the school following his graduation from the University of London. He started his career in Special Education on completion of his B.ED Degree on Special Education at the University of Sri Jayawardenapura under Dr. Randall Harly of the University of Tennessee, USA.

As a university student, Piyasena was involved in a survey to identify blind children in 'slum' areas in Colombo. Seventeen children were located as a result of the survey and were, for the first time in the history of education in Sri Lanka, admitted to 5 schools near their homes.

He started teaching them as itinerant teacher. This program known as the Integrated Education Program for Disabled Children, revolutionised Sri Lankan systems of education which had been hitherto exclusively catered to able-students.

Subsequently he was appointed as the Officer-in-Charge of the 'Integrated Education Program' at the Ministry of Education, and as the Head of "Special Education Unit" and the Director of Special Education. He started Integrated Education Programs for mentally retarded children, physically handicapped and slow learners. The programs were in operation over 2000 schools throughout the country including Jaffna and Batticaloa.

He was instrumental in establishing three permanent Teacher Training Programs for Special Education at the Maharagama Teacher's Training College. In 1973, he won the Commonwealth Fellowship to study further on Special Education in Edinburgh and another from Commonwealth Fund for Technical Education to learn Special Education for the gifted and the mal-adjusted at Brighton and Bristol Universities.

During his studies at the universities, he stayed at the Royal Blind School in Edinburgh where he got an insight into the education of disabled as he volunteered to serve the School and the Hostel as a House Father on part-time basis.

In 1977, K. Piyasena attended the ICEVI Conference held in Paris and was selected as an ICEVI Committee member. In 1994 he was appointed as the Chairperson at the 4th APEID (Asia-Pacific Conference on Special Education) held in Kanagawa Japan. Piyasena who studied Low Vision Education in Exhall Grange school, Coventry in UK and Ebenzer school in Hong Kong, established a Low Vision Clinic at Bandaragama Government Hospital.

He also worked out a program in consultation with SHIA and SRF in Sweden resulting in Swedish Government donating the present National Braille Printing Press in Maharagama Teachers' Training College.

Setting up of two Special Education Units in the Ward 55 of the Colombo National Hospital and at Ragama Rehabilitation Hospital for orthopaedically handicapped children are some of the projects that Piyasena initiated.

In order to develop Sign Language system for deaf in Sri Lanka, Piyasena set up a Committee. Under the SIDA assistance, two Sign Language experts Hakan Collins (a deaf educationist) and Hariet Bjorneheim from Sweden assisted the Committee that developed a Sign Language system for Sri Lanka.

On retirement after 22 years service, K. Piyasena joined the Ministry of Health and Social Services as UNICEF consultant on CBR (Community Based Rehabilitation of the disabled) and developed CBR programs for 26 AGA Divisions.

He is also an author of a large number of books including "Towards Inclusive Education- A three phase Program for Special Education", "Education for all through Special Education", "Heroism of the Disabled in the village".

The awards ceremony will be held on June 21, 2006 in Kuala lumpur on the final day of the 12th ICEVI World Conference. K. Piyasena will present a paper on "Strategies for Future Development of Special Education" at the ICEVI World Conference.