Suki Liu interview summary
Although China has schools for students with learning disabilities, most parents would never send their children to those type of schools. There is a stigma attached to having a child with a learning disability, and because most Chinese people want to avoid the shame and stigma that comes with having a child with learning disabilities, they just put their children in mainstream schools even though these schools don’t cater to those students. Although Chinese public schools tend to have a lot of students with learning disabilities, teacher don’t receive any training on how to cater to students with learning disabilities. So, it becomes each teacher’s unspoken responsibility to identify those students, try to accommodate them as much as possible within reason.
They average class in a Chinese public school has fifty students in it. This makes giving special attention to any one student near impossible. The other difficulty is that Chinese teachers in public schools are generally overworked, so this makes it near impossible to dedicate time to design specialized activities or resources for the students that are struggling. The little things a teacher can do is to allow the students with visibility and hearing challenges to sit closer to the board, use bigger font in general, include as much audiovisual material as possible, and to allocate group work in a lesson, so as to free the teacher to check in on the students with learning disabilities.
There aren’t really any school policies that cover the topic of special needs. The homeroom teacher usually has meetings with the parents/ guardians of students with learning disabilities and makes recommendations. If the learning disability isn’t severe, the teacher usually recommends extra classes, or general support and encouragement at home, and maybe even getting a professional to diagnose the specific disability, it’s severity and how to work around it in general.