Problems of the formation of consciousness in deaf-blind children. Abstract: Mental development of deaf-blind children
There is an opinion that nature is very jealous of its secrets.
If this is so, then it must be admitted that deaf-blind-muteness is a big blunder in this respect; here nature showed great negligence, "missed", as they say, the impossibility of penetrating into its secret. In the creation of its "crown" - man, nature, as if mocking its own creation, left a hole in its essence. It is the business of the human mind to penetrate, taking advantage of the oversight of nature, into this hole and find out the secret, "- thought I. A. Sokolyansky, the creator of the system of education and upbringing of deaf-blind-mute children in our country.
The well-known modern physiologist X. Delgado wrote in his book "Brain and Consciousness": "If a human being could grow physically for several years at total absence sensory stimulation, it would be possible to establish precisely whether the emergence of consciousness depends on non-genetic, extracerebral factors. I can predict that such a being would be completely devoid of psychic functions. Its brain would be empty and devoid of thoughts: it would not have memory and would be unable to understand what is happening around. Physically maturing, it would remain intellectually as primitive as it was on the day it was born. Such an experiment, of course, is out of the question.” X. Delgado was mistaken in only one thing – there is such an experiment. Nature itself set it up.
Normal deaf-blind people, whose brain is in a normal state, do not have any intelligent life, - stated the founder of Soviet typhlo-deaf pedagogy I. A. Sokolyansky. “If the influence of the external environment,” he wrote, “is reduced to zero, then we also have zero reason. The way out of this tragic situation is to organize the education and upbringing of deaf-blind-mute children.”
Examples of the high spiritual development of the deaf-blind in our country serve as an example of what can be achieved with a specially organized, comprehensively controlled learning process. These examples prove the fidelity of the philosophical dialectical materialist position and the basic principles of Russian psychology: the principle of the lifetime formation of all human abilities and functions; the principle of activity as a source and driving force of mental development; the principle of development as the transition of external, expanded, material forms of activity into folded, hidden, ideal forms; principle of the study of the psyche in the process of its formation.
Along with achievements in the field of education and upbringing of the deaf-blind, there are frequent cases of stopping their development, the emergence of complex personality conflicts and severe life situations, the solution of which can be found on the basis of understanding the patterns of general mental development.
The psychology of the deaf-blind-mute is such a field of study that will constantly attract the attention of psychologists, because key problems arise in it, the solution of which determines whether a particular living person becomes a fully developed personality or not. Moreover, it is an area of research in which the main problems of normal development are being addressed. Here, behind the external specifics of mental development are the general patterns of development, the analysis of which is devoted to our work.
It has become customary to believe that outside of special education, the normal development of the psyche of a deaf-blind-mute child is impossible. Indeed, education plays a decisive, dominant role in the mental development of such a child. We know a lot about this from the works of I. A. Sokolyansky, A. I. Meshcheryakov and other researchers. At the same time, of great interest are observations of the, so to speak, free, spontaneous behavior of a deaf-blind-mute child outside the situation of direct, purposeful learning. Such observations became the subject of our analysis.
The first thing that stood out to us with particular clarity was the sharp divergence, the gap between chronological and psychological ages. So, a child of six or seven years old (Anna G.) in terms of mental development is at the level one year old baby and may not go beyond the boundaries of sensorimotor intelligence for many years. Moreover, according to some tests of mental development, in an adult 28-year-old person (Fanil S.), features of thinking characteristic of preschool age are observed. Deafblind students towards the end university education may have been acutely experiencing a crisis of adolescence.
By themselves, the facts of disproportionate development, discrepancies in chronological and psychological ages observed in deaf-blind-mute people, have a great psychological significance. They are important for understanding the general patterns of development. These facts are directly related to the question of the spontaneity of mental development, to the idea of the immanent laws of this process. These facts disprove this notion. Obviously, the development of different aspects of the psyche depends on the tasks that life sets before the subject.
Development, in the words of L. S. Vygotsky, although it takes place in time, is not a direct function of time. It has its own rules. They are easier to discern and analyze during the formation of a deaf-blind-mute child, since in this case the process of development, including the psyche, is extended in time and different aspects of this process are transparently dependent on its conditions and influences.
Like the development of the psyche of a sighted-hearing child, the psychic development of a deaf-blind-mute child begins long before special education and proceeds largely without intentional and even more so complete control.
The child is in the world of objects that are revealed to him through another person. A deaf-blind-mute child, even before mastering speech, still not being able to act purposefully, begins to "use" the hands of an adult. So, for example, a six-year-old girl (Oksana V.), not being able to assemble even a simple pyramid, takes the hand of an adult, trying to find in him an assistant in solving this difficult task.
Another child (Anya G.), age 6 years 9 months, at first glance gives the impression of extreme poverty of movements and actions. She can sway from side to side for a long time, wave her hand in front of her eyes, and almost always use an object that falls into her hands in a non-specific way: placing a pencil or spoon between her fingers, shaking them in front of her eyes or knocking them on her head. However, she is happy to join the game "search for a hidden object" and, to our surprise, finds it behind many hiding places, if before that she had the opportunity to follow how the object was hidden. According to the criteria of J. Piaget, this is the fifth, penultimate stage of development of sensorimotor intelligence, and normally it occurs at the beginning of the second year of life vision and hearing, but this is the result of the active interaction of the child with the outside world. Before a deaf-blind-mute child masters specific actions with objects, he singles out an adult person among the objects and phenomena of the surrounding world as a condition and means for satisfying his needs. So, he brings an adult or directs his hand to the desired object, not yet being able to independently perform the action.
It is interesting to observe the behavior of the already mentioned girl Anya G. (age 6 years 9 months). Once, finding herself in a room with a deaf-blind student of Moscow State University Natasha Korneeva, who temporarily replaced the teacher, Anya cried, wanting to get something from Natasha. No known methods: neither caress, nor fun, nor goodies could calm her down. Finally, Natasha guessed to put herself at the girl's full disposal, she took her hand, led her to the closet, opened it, took out her father's sweater, pressed it to her and immediately calmed down.
As this case shows, there is no direct path for the child to the object of his desire. He relates to him through an intermediary, through another person. An adult person becomes a kind of tool for the child in achieving the goal.
Such observations make it possible to say that in a deaf-blind-mute child, just as in a sighted-hearing child, the idea of action as an orienting basis for future action arises as a plan of action before the action itself.
The sequence of periods, stages of development that a deaf-blind-mute child goes through from complete helplessness to a full-fledged personality, apparently, is in principle the same as that of sighted-hearing children. In both those and others, mental development begins in the conditions of the inseparable unity of the child and the adult in their joint activity to satisfy elementary organic urges. The most important condition for this is an emotionally positive relationship between a child and an adult. A. I. Meshcheryakov described the case of the development of a deaf-blind-mute girl (Nina X.), who could not be taught anything until a positive emotional contact was established between the teacher and the child.
From the earliest stages of development, the adult acts as the organizer of the sensorimotor experience of the child, both the sighted-hearing and the deaf-blind-mute. The formation of such an experience goes through several phases.
At first, in the joint activity of an adult and a child, the orienting and executive parts of any action are organized and carried out by the adult with minimal participation of the child. Outwardly, it looks like this: the hands of the child are on the hands of an adult performing the action. Obviously, at this time, the child is already forming a scheme of the orienting basis of action.
Then, when the adult's hands are placed on the child's hands, the function of execution passes to the child, and the exact orientation and control is still carried out by the adult.
From the moment when both the orienting and the executive parts of the action are fully carried out by the child himself, objective activity begins in the proper sense of the word.
The gradual separation of the indicative part of the action from the executive part is the main trend of development. It manifests itself both in the spontaneous path of mental development, and in the specially controlled one. Only in a deaf-blind-mute child this process takes a longer time than in a sighted-hearing child. As an adult, a deaf-blind person expects approval, sanction from the teacher when performing even a simple action in a learning situation.
During the period of the formation of objective actions, called by I. A. Sokolyansky the period of "initial humanization", the most favorable conditions for the development of speech, thinking, will and other higher mental functions.
It is important to note that in the process of the formation of objective activity at the pre-verbal stage of development, the child for the first time acquires such an attitude towards himself and his actions that an adult person shows him. This is how that on the basis of which self-consciousness arises is born. And although the philosophical stage of reflection is still very far away, the child begins to look at himself from the outside - through the eyes of another person.
A vivid example of this is the observation of the development of the pupil of the experimental group of the Research Institute of Defectology Dina K. (age 7 years 5 months). This girl, having performed this or that action, which she had already mastered in the course of training, stroked herself on the head. Later, while learning the difficult process of typing on a Braille typewriter, the child in each phase of the initial learning with the "controlling hand" stroked the "performing hand", as if reinforcing the correctness of the operation.
This not only proves the importance for the child of the positive, reinforcing influence of an adult, but, and this is the main thing, indicates the formation of a child's attitude towards himself from the position of another person.
This is not about isolated facts. Various variations of such knowledge and its wide transfer to new conditions, "approval" not only of the completed action, but also of intention - all these are manifestations of a phenomenon common to both the deaf-blind and the sighted-hearing phenomenon, which is so precisely expressed in the words of a very famous self-approval: "Ai Yes, Pushkin! Oh, well done!"
Similar data on the emergence of self-consciousness are presented in a Japanese film about raising deaf-blind children. It showed how a child learned to choose a letter from the Braille alphabet. With his right hand, he examined the sample, and with his left he found the same among many others. Having completed the action, the child, as it were, approved of himself, right hand stroked left hand, hand-executor. .
This film shows further that for the same children at an older age, sugar or candy was used as a reinforcement of a successful action, but thereby the highest method of evaluation - self-esteem from the position of another person - was replaced by Japanese psychologists with a lower, only material method of reinforcement. .
Usually, the emergence of self-consciousness is associated with the process of speech formation, game and learning activities.
A study of the mental development of a deaf-blind-mute child revealed the earliest, initial stage in the formation of self-consciousness - it arises much earlier than is commonly thought. This happens at the stage of mastering objective actions, that is, before the game and even before speech.
Let us now consider how speech is formed in a deaf-blind child, or rather, how a word arises and develops. In a deaf-blind-mute, the word arises from an action - first in the form of a gesture - pointing, pictorial, conditional.
Then the gesture is replaced by dactyl words; they are introduced gradually, and the child does not notice that he begins to speak in words. At the same time, the child is taught the alphabet of the blind and sound speech.
In whatever form speech is carried out, the word in a deaf-blind-mute child is inextricably linked with action. It performs the function of a signal to action and further serves to describe the situation in which the action is carried out.
The first words that a deaf-blind-mute child uses in speech for a long time are words in the imperative mood: "Give", "Go", "Bring", "Eat", "Sleep", etc. The first true self-constructed sentences also indicate actions to be taken immediately.
We watched how Dina K., wanting to get sugar, uttered a dactyl phrase: "Lucy, give me sugar" and, without waiting for the teacher's permission, opened the cupboard and reached for sugar.
In its original function, the word only indicates the subject and the method of achieving it; it is inextricably linked with the situation and is, as it were, one of the properties of an object or action. Even in its developed form - in the form of written speech - the word remains captive to the situation, in the context of the action.
When we offered Fanil S., a deaf-blind-mute pupil of the Zagorsk boarding school (age 28), to complete the unfinished sentences, we found that he could do this correctly only if the content of the phrase corresponded to the current situation. For example:
Teacher:"Hot because..."
Fanil:"Hot because the batteries are hot." If the situation at the moment contradicts the content of the unfinished phrase, then the subject does not cope with the task, describing what he is experiencing now. For example:
P.:"Today is hot, despite the fact that.."
F.:"Today is hot, despite the fact that today the weather is cold, snowy and cold."
P.: " I ate another cookie though..."
F.:"I ate another cookie, although I want to buy myself a delicious cookie or gingerbread."
According to J. Bruner's hypothesis, speech in a sighted-hearing child also corresponds to action and is closely connected with it. However, with further development, speech is increasingly freed from action. The word, according to L.
S. Vygotsky, J. Piaget, J. Bruner and other psychologists, this is a powerful tool that frees the child from absorption environment, from the pressure of things and makes his behavior more free.
How does the transition from the signal function of the word to the significative, to the designation of the content of the subject without a specific action with it?
There is a huge literature on this subject, however, a tangle of complex problems, hypotheses and conjectures remains unraveled until now. And this is not surprising. Normally, such a transition is carried out very quickly, almost instantly, and it is almost impossible to trace it. For the deaf-blind, this process unfolds extremely slowly in time, and all the necessary conditions this transition can be fixed and made the subject of study.
In order for a word to become a means of designating a thing instead of a signal to action, certain conditions are necessary, which are not always fully provided for and ensured in the development of a deaf-blind-mute child. What are these conditions? At present, we can only make the most preliminary assumptions about this.
According to our assumption, in order to separate a word from a thing, it is necessary that one and the same thing can be expressed, represented in several different forms, for example, in a gesture, word, drawing, plasticine modeling, construction. And if a gesture and even a word (in dactyl or sound form) is closely, inextricably linked with the subject of action physically, then drawing, modeling, construction, written speech as products of activity are separated from the subject and serve as a support for tearing off dactyl or sound speech as a form of expressing a thing. from the thing itself. According to the figurative expression of L. S. Vygotsky, it is necessary "by the power of one thing to steal the name from another." When this happens and the word breaks away from the subject and ceases to function only as a signal to action, a leap occurs in the child’s mental development: the questions “Who is this?”, “What is this?” appear, the vocabulary increases sharply, references to the missing or invisible appear ( "there", "then", "where?", "why?", etc.).
Another most important consequence of the separation from the thing is the emergence of play in its proper, real sense of the word.
As with sighted-hearing children, a deaf-blind-mute child does not play without guidance from adults. This was noticed back in 1962 by I. A. Sokolyansky, who wrote that deaf-blind-mute children themselves will never learn to play with dolls, just as they cannot create a game at all. However, not only does direct learning by itself never lead to play, it does not even contribute to its emergence. At first glance, this fact may seem paradoxical. And again we find his explanation from I. A. Sokolyansky. “Moreover, teaching them to play, especially with dolls, is almost hopeless. Any game is a reflection of social experience, and even more so - playing with dolls. can not".
Outwardly, everything is happening, it would seem, correctly: the child is taught to play. However, when performing actions shown by adults with toys (a bear, a doll), a deaf-blind-mute child takes them seriously. So, a deaf-blind-mute child with remnants of sight (Vova K.) puts on glasses for a bear (outwardly this can be regarded as a game), but at the same time he quite seriously and truly looks into them from the side to make sure that the bear sees. Another observation illustrates this thesis even more clearly. The deaf-blind girl undressed and put the bear on an empty plastic wastebasket, which had previously been placed next to the bed as a pot. The girl sat down on a chair nearby and sat like that for a long time, leaning towards the bear. Then she picked it up. So for ten minutes they sat side by side, and from time to time the girl checked the "contents" of this "pot", waiting for the result. The same girl, showing the pictures to the bear, constantly brought them to her left eye, in which she had insignificant remnants of vision.
In all the above cases, there is no imaginary situation, convention, and instead of a play action, the child essentially only reproduces a typical objective action. Therefore, the psychological mechanism of this phenomenon is prematurity learning, mismatch
requirements for real opportunities for the development of deaf-blind-mute children.
The emergence of play in a deaf-blind-mute child is due to the development of objective activity and speech. This process has the same regularities that were discovered by F. I. Fradkina when studying the development of play in normal child. The study by T. A. Basilova identified the following stages:
The stage of specific manipulation with an object, in contrast to the earlier "non-specific" manipulation, when the child performs monotonous actions with objects (waves, knocks, throws, etc.).
Independent reproduction by the child of individual elementary actions or a series of actions. Children are characterized by imitation of the actions of an adult in a similar but not identical situation, transferring the action to other objects. In the behavior of a deaf-blind-mute child, the actions of feeding the doll and putting it to bed are often repeated many times, consisting of many operations. However, this is not yet a game. So, for example, having thrown away the bear, the deaf-blind-mute girl herself, having taken off her shoes, lays down in the doll's bed (box), hides herself and cradles herself. She repeats these actions repeatedly and alternately.
Speech, which appears in the process of development of objective activity, initially performs the function of a signal to action in a deaf-blind child, but does not yet perform the function of denoting an object. The signal function of speech does not provide a "conditional" imaginary plan of activity, without which the game is impossible. The leap associated with the emergence of a real word as a means of denoting an object brings the emergence of a real game closer. This stage is characterized by the creation of a special game environment, the reproduction of the actions of another person - the teacher, the use of substitute objects. The action with the object is carried out according to the game meaning, and not the permanent meaning of the object. In these games, the child independently reproduces not individual actions, but entire plots, acting now for the teacher, then for the doll. It is at this stage that a "role in action" (F. I. Fradkina) appears - an objective imitation of the actions of specific people without the child realizing this role. The subject is used in a variety of ways, but the action is couplet, not plot. For example, Dina K. takes out a can opener, a toothbrush, a fork from the cabinet. He puts a can opener in front of the doll, a toothbrush in front of the big bear, a fork in front of the little bear. She sits down herself, "eats" from the plate with the help of a comb, then takes the toothbrush-spoon from the bear and "eats" it like a spoon. Bringing the brush-spoon to his lips, he takes it into his mouth and rubs his teeth with it. Then he "eats" again, acting like a spoon with a brush: he only brings it to his lips and lowers it into a plate. Puts a toothbrush-spoon on a plate in front of the bear. Pats himself on the head. "Drinks" - from a tall box. He gets up, approaches the big bear from behind and "feeds" him, then "feeds" another bear. He takes out a piece of paper, tears it into pieces and puts it in front of everyone at the table. He sits down in his place, "drinks" from a cup. Bites from a piece of paper for real and "drinks" from a cup. He spits out the paper, bites off again, but already pretend, drinks.
The next stage is the appearance of renaming in the game situation. First, the child calls substitute objects by a different name in accordance with the function that they perform in the game. But still there is no identification of oneself with another person, "appropriation" of his name. For example, Dina K. was brought a new andushka cup. He puts a bear on the table. In front of the bear on the table new cup and a spoon, in front of Dina - a glass and a spoon. The teacher points to the cup and asks: "What is it?" Dina: "A cup." Dina sits at the table and "eats", "feeds" the bear. He jumps up and brings the doll, puts it in its place, "feeds".
Teacher:"Who is it?"
Dina:"Doll."
Teacher:"Who is it?" (pointing to the bear)
Dina:"Bear."
Teacher:"Who is it?" (pointing to Diana)
Dina:"Dina."
Carries the rest of the dolls from the play corner, seats and? on small chairs at the table. Accordingly, he puts a plate on the table for each doll, puts plastic strips and carnations. Takes three carnations from the table and puts them on a plate in the middle of the table.
P.:"What is it?"
Dina:"Bread".
He puts another plate in each plate, but a little obliquely.
P.:"What is it?"
Dina:"A spoon".
P.:"What is it?" (points to the plastic strip next to the plate).
Dina:"A spoon".
P.:"What is it?" (points to the plate below).
Dina:"Plate".
She herself points to the bottom of the plates and says: "Soup, porridge, potatoes." “Eats” from his plate, gestures “good”, “bites off” a plastic strip - “bread”. Angrily waves his hand towards the rest of the dolls, "points to his" bread ". Jumps up, brings the parts of the plastic designer and lays them out in front of each doll at the table.
P.:"What's this?" (points to the details of the designer).
Dina:"Bread."
Last step. The child names himself and his "partner" in the game (doll) by the name of another person. Here are some situations.
1. In between classes, Dina took a counting stick from the table and brought it to her lips, imitating smoking a cigarette. She pointed to herself with her hand and said, "Daddy." Then she brought this stick to the teacher's mouth and, pointing to it, said: "Dad." She put her wand in the mouth of another deaf-blind-mute girl and called her "daddy." She brought the wand to her lips again and said, "Daddy."
2. Dina put on a teacher's white coat. She sat in a doll corner on a chair near the bed with a doll. Sits in this position for several minutes (this is how a doctor sits who comes to the group when the children are sick); He takes a "phonendoscope" made of rubber and a wooden ring from the doll's wardrobe, moves his chair closer to the doll's bed. He removes the blanket from the doll, pulls the doll out of bed, straightens the doll's bed, tries to put the ends of the "phonendoscope" into his ears, but fails. She puts the doll back. He notices the teacher who has entered, turns to her, points to himself and says:
"Doctor." He puts the teacher next to him on a chair, listens to her chest, back with a "phonendoscope". Shows with a gesture "good".
Teacher:"Who?" (pointing to Diana).
Dina:"Doctor." 3. Dina bandaged the doll's hand.
P.:"Who?" (per doll).
P.:"Who?" (pointing to Diana)
Dina:"Mother."
Such, in its main features, is the path from objective activity with a toy to plot-based, role-playing play in a deaf-blind child.
Identification of the game with a peculiar substantive activities child with toys, which is often encountered in the practice of teaching and educating deaf-blind-mute children, has serious negative consequences for the entire course of mental development. This is reflected primarily in the development of thinking, since without the game an internal plan of activity is not formed, without which schooling is impossible. The negative effects of skipping play on personality development are difficult to even assess at this time. However, today we can see the consequences of the lack of play in the field speech development deafblind. In play, according to L. S. Vygotsky, "a new relationship arises between word and action. In play, the child discovers that each word has its own meaning, which can replace a thing."
Observation of the development of a deaf-blind-mute child makes it possible to raise the question of whether play is necessary for the child's mental development. It turns out that where there is a game - role-playing, collective - a sociable child, easily in contact with others, grows up. And, conversely, where it was not organized as an external, expanded collective activity, the primitive imagination comes to the fore. As observations show, many of the difficulties that arise in the educational activities of a deaf-blind-mute child may be the result of the absence of play in their life.
Summing up, we can say that there is not a single problem in general and child psychology that does not arise with particular acuteness in the course of the education and upbringing of a deaf-blind-mute child. The specificity of the development of a deaf-blind-mute relates only to the conditions in which the formation of his psyche takes place. In the main, all mental life of a deaf-blind-mute child is subject to the same general patterns as are observed in sighted-hearing children. The education and upbringing of such children is the best test of the correctness of existing theories of development.
TOPICS FOR SEMINARS
· The problem of education and development of the child in modern psychology. Piaget-Halperin discussion.
· Driving causes and mechanisms of child development as an actual problem of modern psychology.
· New ways of studying child development.
· Advantages and limitations of the formation strategy for studying the mechanisms of child development.
What is the process of child development?
LITERATURE
· Vygotsky L, S. Selected psychological studies. M.-L., 1956.
· Davydov VV Problems of developmental education: the experience of theoretical and experimental psychological research. M., 1986.
· Zaporozhets A. V. The main problems of the ontogeny of the psyche.//Sm. Selected psychological works. T.1.
· Zinchenko V. /7., Mamardashvilch MK On the objective method in psychology. Questions of Philosophy, 1977, No 1.
Ilyenkov E. V. Dialectics of abstract and concrete in "Capital"
· Marx. M., 1960.
Ilyenkov E. V. Psyche under the "magnifying glass" of time.//Nature, 1970, No I.
· Meshcheryakov A. I. Deaf-blind-mute children. M., 1974.
· Obukhova LF Stages of development of children's thinking. M., 1972.
· Elkoshsh BD Introduction to developmental psychology. M., 1994.
CONCLUSION
Child psychology is a young science. During one century of its existence, it was created by the works of eminent scientists, and its present state is distinguished by genuine maturity. However, despite a large number of talented, creative, original scientists, nevertheless, there are no people of the scale of 3. Freud, J. Piaget or L. S. Vygotsky now. In any case, the newly emerging concepts of child development have not yet received worldwide fame and recognition. But it cannot be said that child psychology has stopped its development. Currently, many psychologists are busy studying and describing empirical facts that do not fit into the framework of classical concepts and encourage their revision. More and more researchers tend not to oppose different approaches in the study of the child's psyche, but to synthesize them.
Going beyond the laboratory, numerous attempts to apply known theories in practice are accompanied by difficulties in solving life issues, which entails a decrease in interest in theory. General trends modern science When momentary, pragmatic questions push fundamental research into the background, child psychology has not bypassed.
Classical child psychology throughout the entire period of its formation was interested in the general patterns of mental development of any child, regardless of his personality. Modern psychologists turn to the study of the individual child rather than the average subject, and take a special interest in the differences between children.
At the same time, researchers are striving to study the whole individual, analyzing the role of heredity, culture, motivation, cognitive development and behavior. They are interested in the role of social relations in the family, in the group of peers, in educational and professional groups, their influence on the mental development of the child.
The growing interest in the individual in modern society, control over the exercise of individual rights raise new problems - the study of the offended child and the provision of psychological and pedagogical assistance to children with disabilities.
None of the practical problems can be solved without a good theory. And here is a huge field of activity for new generations of psychologists.
PLAN
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...3
2. Main body
Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness ………………………………………………..6
2.2. Types of deafblindness………………………………………………………………………….7
2.3. Characteristics of the mental development of deaf-blind children…………………………..9
2.3.1. Features of the development of the cognitive sphere in deaf-blind children…………………9
2.3.2. Features of the activity of deaf-blind children………………………………………..12
2.3.3. Speech development…………………………………………………………………………… 15
2.3.4. Features of the personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children……….16
3. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...18
4. Bibliographic list……………………………………………………………...….19
1. INTRODUCTION
The modern definition of "deafblind" varies from country to country. The legal status of a deaf-blind person is determined normative documents adopted in a given state. Classifying a child or adult with a disability as deafblind in the United States or Scandinavian countries guarantees him a place in a special school for free and special social services (translation, accompaniment, transportation, etc.). In these countries, which are at the forefront in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities, the category "deaf-blind" has long been included in the state register of persons with disabilities. Deaf-blindness is defined there as a combination of visual and hearing impairments that creates special communication difficulties and requires special educational needs for these children.
To date, in our country there is no official definition of deafblindness as special kind disability (disability is determined only by blindness or only by deafness), so people with a complex disability are not guaranteed training in the system of special education and their special needs are not taken into account in the organization of social services. The only educational institution for deaf-blind children in our country, the Orphanage for the Deaf-Blind, belongs to the Ministry of Labor and social protection population of the Russian Federation.
Deafblindness is the most studied type of complex developmental disorder. Complex disorders should be defined as the presence of two or more severe primary disorders in one child. Developmental disorders that are part of a complex defect are associated with damage to various body systems.
The study of children with a complex structure of a defect is carried out by a relatively new branch of special psychology, which studies the features of the mental development of a child with two or more disorders.
The subject of this area of special psychology is the study of the originality of the mental development of a child with complex disorders and the determination of ways of psychological and pedagogical assistance to these children and their families.
The estimated number of deaf-blind people in the world is about one million people. It is now customary to include all people with visual and hearing impairments.
The world history of teaching the deafblind for more than 150 years. By the end of the second millennium, 80 countries of the world had special services and schools for the deaf and blind. The beginning of the history of teaching deaf-blind children in our country dates back to 1909, when the Society for the Care of the Deaf-Blind in Russia was created and the first school for such children was opened in St. Petersburg, which existed until 1941. The scientific achievements of this school are reflected in the works of the famous Leningrad psychologist A. V. Yarmolenko. From 1923 to 1937, a school for deaf-blind children in Kharkov, organized by I.A. Sokolyansky, worked very interestingly. The most famous pupil of this school was the famous deaf-blind writer O. I. Skorokhodova. Subsequently, this experience was continued by I. A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov in Moscow at the Institute of Defectology of the APS of the USSR (now the Institute of Correctional Pedagogy of the Russian Academy of Education), where since 1947 scientific research and practical work with deaf and blind children. Since 1963, the Orphanage for deaf-blind children in Sergiev Posad, Moscow Region, has been successfully operating, where more than 100 children are brought up. Domestic experience in teaching the deaf-blind is recognized by specialists in other countries. Since 1949, there has been an international community coordinating the development of research and services for the deaf-blind in the world, framed in public organization in 1969, in whose events since 1962 Russian specialists have also been participating.
In the past, the best-known cause of deaf-blindness, in the rare cases reported, was neuroinfection in the form of meningitis. famous in XIX in. Laura Bridgman and Ellen Keller, deaf-blind Americans, lost their sight and hearing due to a similar disease at the age of about two years.
Until the middle of the XX century. The history of education for the deaf-blind has evolved from individual cases of successful education of children who have lost their hearing and sight in different ages, but retained the possibility of intellectual and emotional development. This experience was successfully picked up by teachers in different countries of Europe and the USA. Rubella epidemic sweeping through different countries world in 1963-1965, became the reason simultaneous appearance a significant number of deaf-blind children from birth. The education of large groups of such children required the creation of a whole network of schools, and then special services. Since that time, deaf-blindness has been closely studied by specialists in various fields, the causes have been clarified, and various measures have been proposed for its prevention.
The problem of social, personal and mental development of a deaf-blind child is very acute. Visual and hearing impairments prevent the child from learning about the surrounding reality, gaining social experience, gaining skills labor activity. Importance for the social and personal development of such a child has communication with adults and other children. But visual and hearing impairments often do not bring children and adults together, but, on the contrary, repel them. Many parents, upon learning that their child is deaf-blind, refuse him. Consequently, the child ends up in an orphanage or boarding school, which adversely affects his development. Due to the small contact of the child with his parents, he has an underdevelopment of speech as a means of communication. He becomes closed, unsure of himself, his self-esteem falls, the emotional-volitional sphere is disturbed.
It is known that the most difficult thing is not deaf-blindness, but the relationship of a normally developing child to a deaf-blind one. Children with developmental disabilities are very sensitive to negative attitudes towards them from their peers, especially if the loss of vision and hearing occurred at a later age.
The relevance of the mental development of these children is determined by their difficulty, due to impaired vision and hearing, interaction with the outside world, the problem of social adaptation, the development of the child as a person, awareness of his place in society. It is very difficult for such people to adapt to life, so society (social services, families themselves) needs to help them, educate and create all the necessary conditions for their development. The problem of deaf-blind children is one of the leading in the field of psychology of persons with developmental disorders, and its solution has great importance.
When writing this work, the book of Meshcheryakov A.I. was used. “Deaf-blind children. Development of the Mind in the Process of Behavior Formation”, which proposes the first attempt at a systematic presentation of a pedagogical experiment conducted in an experimental group of deaf-blind students at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1955 to 1970 and in the Zagorsk Orphanage for the Deaf-Blind-Mute from 1963 to 1970. Contents books - a study of the problems of the initial mental development of the child in the process of teaching him practical behavior. The peculiarity of deaf-blindness as a research problem is determined by the fact that the lack of vision and hearing and the dumbness associated with the lack of hearing deprive the child of the opportunity (without special training) to communicate with other people. As a result of loneliness, a deaf-blind-mute child does not develop mentally. When teaching such a child, a unique task arises of the purposeful formation of the entire human psyche. And it is known that where the task of purposeful formation of a phenomenon arises, favorable conditions are created for establishing its laws. The intention of this book is precisely to try to show some regularities in the emergence and development of human behavior and the psyche in general, using specific experimental and theoretical material for the formation of the behavior and psyche of deaf-blind children.
AT teaching aids"Special Psychology" V.I. Lubovsky and Fundamentals of Special Psychology, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova presented general information on the problem of deaf-blind children and their education and upbringing. Some articles were also used.
2. Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness
For the early diagnosis of a complex disorder, knowledge of the causes that can lead to damage to several body functions at once is very important. When a child has one primary developmental defect, the likelihood of either hereditary or exogenous origin is considered. A complex developmental disorder can be caused by one or more causes, different or the same in origin.
Currently, more than 80 hereditary syndromes are known to cause deafblindness. These are combinations of congenital deafness and progressive atrophy. optic nerves; hearing loss and retinitis pigmentosa; deafness, cataracts and kidney disease; congenital hearing loss and progressive myopia, etc. The most well-known and common cause of deaf-blindness in adolescence and adulthood is Usher's syndrome. It occurs in 3-6% of people with hearing loss since childhood. This syndrome is characterized by congenital hearing loss varying degrees and progressive retinitis pigmentosa, leading to gradual narrowing of visual fields and blindness.
Another group of causes leading to deaf-blindness includes various diseases transmitted in utero, prenatally and perinatally. The best known of these intrauterine diseases is rubella. The rubella virus passes from a sick mother through the placenta into the fetus and can cause multiple malformations of the child. In this disease, the greatest risk of multiple fetal damage exists on early dates pregnancy, when the development of the cardiac system, organs of vision and hearing is laid. Since the early 1970s In the developed countries of the world, prophylactic vaccinations against rubella are carried out. In Russia, such vaccinations were not carried out until 1998.
Other known intrauterine viral disease, which can lead to congenital deaf-blindness, is a cytomegalovirus infection. The causes of congenital visual and hearing impairments can be maternal disease with toxoplasmosis, syphilis, etc. Severe diabetes and a number of others can lead to complex visual and hearing impairment with age. somatic diseases
Hereditary causes of multiple, including dual sensory, impairments include the CHARGE syndrome, which is increasingly common in children with dual sensory and multiple impairments. This name was formed from a combination of the first Latin letters of six words denoting various disorders (coloboma of the organs of vision; disorders of cardiac activity; difficulty in swallowing and breathing due to narrowing of the nasal openings-choan; growth retardation; underdevelopment of the genital organs; impaired hearing organs). Children with this syndrome are also characterized by underdevelopment of facial expressions and imbalance.
The causes of deaf-blindness can also be a variety of diseases that lead only to deafness or only to blindness and are combined in one particular person. For example, the cause of congenital blindness may be genetic, and hearing loss may come from scarlet fever or as a result of meningitis; Hearing impairment caused by these reasons can be complicated by severe eye injury with age, etc.
Knowledge of the causes and characteristics of diseases that can lead to a complex developmental disorder in a child can significantly help in diagnosing these disorders, identifying newborns at risk and carefully monitoring their development.
2.2. Types of deafblindness
In the early 1960s In the 20th century, A.V. Yarmolenko analyzed all domestic and foreign information about deaf-blind people available by that time and classified them according to the state of the sense organs, according to the ratio of the time of hearing loss and vision loss, according to the age of the onset of violations, and according to the types of training. She herself referred to real deaf-blindness only people deprived of hearing and sight from birth or who lost them at an early age - before mastering and consolidating verbal speech as a means of communication and thinking. She considered deaf-blind only children with minimal residual vision (with loss of it to light perception) and with severe hearing loss or deafness. The rest she attributed to childhood (hearing and vision lost at the age of 4 to 10 years), adolescent, adult or senile deaf-blindness.
I.A. Sokolyansky referred to true deaf-blindness only children with congenital or acquired complete or partial dysfunction of the peripheral part of the visual and auditory analyzers, without gross violations of the central parts of the brain. Mentally retarded children with severe visual and hearing impairments, he referred to as "cerebral deficiency".
The first classification of the deafblind was made in the 1940s. A.V. Yarmolenko based on the analysis of 220 life histories of deaf-blind children, both in our country and abroad. The classification was based on the time of onset of the defect and the presence of a combination of sensory impairments with intellectual ones:
Deaf-blind from birth or who lost their sight and hearing in early childhood, before mastering and consolidating verbal speech (congenital deaf-blindness);
Deaf-blind, in whom the loss of sight and hearing occurred at preschool age and later, when the child had already formed speech (acquired deaf-blindness);
Deaf-blind mentally retarded children: all previous options complicated by mental retardation.
Currently, it is customary in the world to distinguish the following groups of deaf-blind people.
1. Congenital and early deaf-blindness resulting from congenital rubella or other intrauterine infections, severe prematurity or birth trauma, genetic disorders. The severity of visual and hearing impairments largely depends on the quality of timely medical care these children. Many have visual impairments for which early surgical and therapeutic treatment(congenital cataracts, glaucoma, strabismus, etc.). Early and high-quality eye surgery can significantly improve residual vision, and continuous treatment can maintain its condition for a long time. However, there are observational data showing a large number of complications after removal of congenital cataracts in children with congenital rubella and a poor prognosis for the development of residual vision in these children. According to foreign data, up to 25% of children who have had rubella in utero and operated on for bilateral cataracts lose their sight after 18 years as a result of complete bilateral retinal detachment.
According to the severity of sensory impairments, children with congenital visual and hearing impairments are usually divided into totally deaf-blind, practically deaf-blind, visually impaired deaf, blind, hearing-impaired and visually impaired children. These children need special educational conditions. These can be special schools for the deaf and blind and special classes in schools for the blind or for the deaf, as well as individual education at special schools of various types.
The first means of communication for these children may be household items or natural gestures depicting actions with these items. In the future, they can learn to communicate using fingerprinting, oral and written speech (writing in large "sighted" letters or Braille). There are isolated cases of teaching children with congenital deaf-blindness by a purely oral method - they could speak orally and read the oral speech of others by vibration, with their hand from the throat of the speaker.
2. Congenital hearing impairment and blindness acquired with age. These people make up to 50% of deaf-blind adults. The causes of the disorders are Usher's syndrome and other hereditary syndromes, trauma, etc. As a rule, these people graduate from educational institutions for people with hearing impairments, their vision deteriorates significantly in high school or later. special attention require deaf children who lose their sight in adolescence. Acute, state of shock and psychoses that occur in individual cases in such adolescents and their parents can be largely prevented if these children are identified in time and provided with timely psychotherapeutic and psychological-pedagogical assistance. The leading means of communication for the deaf-blind in this category are most often signed speech and fingerprinting, which, in cases of a sharp drop in vision, can be helped by touch: they can perceive the interlocutor’s sign speech if they touch his hands or perceive finger speech “in hand”.
3. Congenital blindness and acquired deafness. These are people who have profound visual impairments and study in schools for the blind. As a result different reasons they lose their hearing partially or completely with age. As a rule, these are children, adolescents or adults who use mainly oral speech in communication, sometimes not intelligibly enough. Many of them need speech therapy and audiological assistance. Most are shown wearing hearing aids and individual lessons for the development of residual hearing and pronunciation correction. Observations show that in some cases these people in adulthood can lose their hearing completely, and then they switch to communication only with the help of touch (writing in the palm of your hand, fingerprinting "in the hand" or Lorm - a special alphabet for the deaf-blind, invented by the Czech deaf-blind G. Lorm and quite popular in Germany, the Czech Republic and some other countries).
4. Deaf-blindness acquired with age. These are people who were born with normal hearing and vision, who lost their hearing and vision as a result of illness or injury during adolescence or adulthood. In this case, the biggest problem is to cope with the stress of loss of vision and hearing and try to rebuild the already established and automated orientation in space to use other types of sensory. A special task is to make available other means of communication (perception of oral speech by hand, writing in the palm of your hand, fingerprinting and writing in Braille).
5. Senile deaf-blindness. It is known that in some people after 65 years of age and in many over 85, hearing and vision deteriorate sharply. Some of them become deaf-blind in old age. In the developed countries of the world, these people receive special support aimed at establishing relationships in their families, organizing special conditions for assistance in institutions for the elderly, and helping them communicate and find their bearings.
2.3. Characteristics of the mental development of deaf-blind children
2.3.1. Features of the development of the cognitive sphere in deaf-blind children
The development of a child with a combination of visual and hearing defects proceeds in a completely different way than that of the blind or deaf. This feature mainly lies in the fact that the possibility of a deaf-blind-mute child to communicate with the people around him falls catastrophically.
The mental development of the deaf-blind is based on intact analyzers (smell, kinesthetic, tactile and vibration sensitivity) and intellectual functions. Education plays an important role in the development of deaf-blind children.
A deaf-blind-mute child, before the start of his special education and upbringing, is characterized as completely helpless and deprived of the ability of human behavior and thinking. Early detection visual and hearing impairments in children allows at the right time to provide psychological help family, timely start raising a child and significantly improve the prospects for his development.
The famous French deaf-blind from birth, Marie Ertin, at the age of nine, behaved "like a wild animal", she was taken out of the school for the deaf-mute, and from the school for the blind, like an "idiot", and placed in solitary confinement psychiatric hospital. With a special intervention, it was revealed that her brain was normal, and she herself was quite trainable.
Children in whom deaf-blindness is not congenital, but acquired in early childhood, fall into a similar situation. A child, losing hearing and vision, usually loses all behavioral skills acquired by him before.
Gofgardt, in his report at the IV congress devoted to education, spoke about the girl Ragnhild Kaata, who lost hearing, sight, taste and smell in the third year of her life. Until the age of 14, she lived at home, and only by the age of 15 she was accepted into a school for the deaf and dumb. She was a little like a man: she could sit all day in one place, not showing the slightest interest in what was happening around her, only occasionally making sounds like a heavy moan. If anyone approached her, she began to stamp her feet, roar and scratch like a wild animal. With training, her development went faster than that of the average deaf-mute child.
Indicative in this respect is also the case of the deaf-mute Spaniard Ionosencio Reyes. Having lost his sight at the age of 6, he completely degraded mentally, forgot how to walk, fell into a stupor, which lasted until the beginning of his studies - until the age of ten.
The observations of I. A. Sokolyansky (1927, 1962) show that the deaf-blind, deprived of training, can spend many years in bed, in a fenced off corner of the room, without communicating with people and objects, without developing mentally at all, without learning to walk or walk. - human eating and drinking.
Meshcheryakov describes the following situation: “When selecting a school for the deaf-blind-mute, we examined a group of pedagogically neglected children who came to us from a family. Some of them were absolutely incapable of independent existence. Since they were all the time in their mother's arms, they did not even develop independent thermoregulation of the body. In this sense, it was difficult to consider them as independent organisms; rather, they were appendages to the mother's body. They could not sleep separately from their mother at night, they could not be without her for a minute even during the day. It was extremely difficult to tear them away from their mother, to teach them to sleep separately, to be not in their arms, to eat on their own.
One of the boys, who came to us at the age of 6, was distinguished by the fact that he could suddenly, as it were, freeze and remain motionless for a long time. It turned out that in his family there was no one to leave him at home with and he was left alone. And over the past three years of forced loneliness, he has “got used to” waiting for hours for someone to come up to him. He had no interest in anything but food. He did not know how to serve himself at all, he could not use the pot either. With systematic studies with him, he very quickly mastered the skills of self-service and orientation.
Similar to this boy were children who came to us from children's homes for invalids. Some of them could not walk, others walked only in a narrow circle of familiar space. They did not know how to eat on their own, even hold a spoon, use a potty, dress, undress. Their usual pastime is sitting in bed or on a rug and monotonous pendulum-shaped swaying of the torso. These children do not pick up or feel anything. They do not know toys and do not understand what they are. There is no need for communication. They react negatively to all attempts to touch: the hands of an adult are removed or repelled.
The whole psyche of such children is reduced to the feeling of the simplest organic needs and to the experience of simple pleasure from their satisfaction and displeasure.
They don't really have any behavior. It has been replaced by stereotyped motor activity that allows them to expend energy.
Thus, deaf-blindness under adverse external conditions, excluding all the usual forms of human communication between a child and other people, dooms him to loneliness and a semi-animal existence. The development of the human psyche in these cases does not occur at all, despite the fact that the brain of a child with medical point vision can be quite normal and physiologically suitable for the performance of all higher mental functions. »
Thus, the development of the psyche of such children is impossible without the intervention of specialists.
The mistake of most typhlo-surdo-pedagogues of the past was that they began teaching their pupils with attempts to form speech. They proceeded from the premise that the main difference between humans and animals is the "gift of speech", and tried to form this speech in oral, written or dactyl (finger) form. However, this "speech", not relying on a system of direct (figurative) reflection of the surrounding world, hung in the air and could not serve as the basis for the mental development of the child.
The practice of teaching the deaf-blind-mute shows that the task of forming a child's speech is not solved and cannot be solved as the first task of the development of the human psyche.
The child's psyche is formed and develops as a result of his interaction with the world of things and the world of people. The things that the child interacts with are the products of human labor. The essence of interaction with things and people lies in the fact that in both cases it is interaction with the human factor. Expressed with a certain degree of paradoxicality, we can say that the relationship of the individual to other people is carried out through the thing, and the relationship to the thing - through the relationship to another person. The child, in the process of learning to behave in the world of things, mastering actions with things, assimilates their social significance; the social meanings of things turn out to be their objective properties, expressing in their totality their essence.
The world for a deaf-blind-mute child before the beginning of his education is empty and pointless. For him there are no objects with which our life is filled, that is, they can be for him in the sense that he can stumble upon them, but they do not exist for him in their functions and purposes.
It is clear that such a person has only one way to cognize the world - through a tactile-motor analyzer. It would seem that the situation is simple: objects must be placed in the hands of the child, he will feel them, and in this way an unlimited number of images of surrounding objects will be created in him.
However, the practice of raising deaf-blind-mute children shows that this is not feasible. After all, deaf-blind-mute children, before the start of their special education and training, are completely devoid of any traits of the human psyche - they only have the possibility of its formation and development (to the highest level), but at the initial stages of this process they do not have any need for knowledge the world, nor the skills of orienting and research activities.
If such a child is given objects for "examination", he immediately drops them, without even trying to get acquainted with them. This is understandable, since the objects given to the child are insignificant for him. And no matter how new the tactile stimuli may be when trying to put various objects into the child's hands, they do not evoke an orienting reaction in him.
The first acquaintance with the objects of the surrounding world takes place in the process of satisfying the simplest natural needs.
Thus, for a deaf-blind-mute child in the first stages of development, the appropriation of social experience that humanizes him must be associated with specific practical activities to satisfy his actual (first organic, and then other, developing in activity) needs.
When satisfying natural needs, for example, while eating, a person uses a number of "tools" - a spoon, a fork, a plate, etc. This is used for the initial acquaintance of a deaf-blind child with objects. An adult, while feeding a child, holding his hands in his hands, teaches him to use a spoon, plate, napkin.
Observations of small children with congenital deaf-blindness have shown great possibilities of touch and smell in the development of cognitive activity. "If you do not interfere with the development of the safe activity of such a child and facilitate his timely grasping, sitting, walking upright and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve completely free orientation in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions" .
Sensation and perception in deaf-blind children has a number of features.
Since deaf-blind children cannot navigate in space with the help of sight and hearing, then "Skin sensitivity and motor memory become in deaf-blind children a special way of knowing the world around." I.A. Sokolyansky described how easily deaf-blind children find windows and doors even in an unfamiliar room due to the perception of air wave movements and temperature emitted by the window by the skin of the face.
Therefore, the development of the movements of a deaf-blind child with early childhood must be given great importance. If you do not interfere with the development of the safe activity of such a child and facilitate his timely grasping, sitting, walking upright and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve completely free orientation in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions. Such a child is able already in early childhood to move freely around a familiar room, to recognize people close to him by smell, characteristic movements and by feeling his feet and shoes, to get objects and toys he likes and act with him in accordance with their purpose. Deaf-blind people have a tactile perception of the properties of the floor, soil, etc. with their feet. Memory for uneven ground under their feet often helps them remember the way in a particular direction.
Tactile sensitivity allows you to perceive objects only by touch and action with them in direct contact. However, a person deprived of sight and hearing can receive information from the environment even at a distance, remotely. Deaf-blind people have an unusual subtlety of smell. The sense of smell allows almost all deaf-blind people to find at a distance a familiar or stranger, find out the weather on the street by smells from an open window, determine the features of the premises and look for the necessary items in them.
Thanks to tactile-vibrational sensitivity to sounds produced by the movement of objects and people, the child can feel what is happening around him also at a certain distance. With age, the deaf-blind are able to determine at a distance approaching people by their gait, to recognize that someone has entered the room, to listen to the sounds of music with their hands, to determine with their feet the direction of loud sounds produced in the house and on the street, etc. Vibrational sensations can become the basis for the perception and formation of oral speech in a deaf-blind child. “For example, in the St. Petersburg school, deaf-blind children were taught to perceive oral speech with the palm of their hand from the throat of the speaker and control their own speech in this way.”
Along with the preserved possibilities of olfactory, gustatory, tactile, tactile-vibratory sensitivity, deaf-blind children must use residual vision and hearing. Audiometric examination and selection of hearing aids (for both ears), up to cochlear implantation, can significantly expand and develop hearing capabilities in a number of deaf-blind children. Classes for the development of visual perception in deaf-blind children with residual vision (up to light perception) can give them the skills to use minimal residual vision to orient themselves in the world around them.
2.3.2. Features of the activity of deaf-blind children
Proper upbringing of a child early age with profound visual and hearing impairments in the family is possible only with a sensitive attitude of adults to the most imperceptible manifestations of his activity, with the ability to support this activity in every possible way and develop it in order to stimulate any contacts with an adult and with objects of the surrounding world. The constancy of the location of the objects surrounding the child and the observance of the time schedule of the day contribute to its correct orientation in time and space. Independent movement around the house and mastering actions with objects create the prerequisites for successful cognitive and speech development. Even the most limited sensory sphere of a deaf-blind child creates conditions for his mental development. With preserved cognitive abilities and the correct attitude of parents towards a deaf-blind child, he is capable of a certain spontaneous development. An indicator of such successful development is the emergence of communication between the child and his loved ones with the help of natural gestures. However, the assimilation of verbal speech is possible only with special training.
In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the formation of the first means of communication - gestures - takes the leading place. Thanks to an adult, the child gradually learns the sequence of everyday everyday situations (morning toilet, breakfast, games, lunch, daytime sleep, afternoon tea, walk, dinner, evening dress and getting ready for bed, etc.). An object or a gesture depicting an action with an object can become a signal of each such everyday situation that is significant for the child. The independent mastering by a deaf-blind child, first of individual actions, and then of a whole cycle of actions within each household or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares the replacement of a natural gesture with a conventional sign, makes it possible in the future to replace the gesture with a dactyl word, and then with a written phrase (written in capital letters or Braille).
Sculpting, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment for a deaf-blind child. It is these types of activities that make it possible to control the adequacy of the child's ideas about the environment, with their help, the meaning of the first words of children is generalized, when one name can designate a real object and its image, a real object and an object that replaces it in the game.
However, a deaf-blind child with additional disabilities is often limited or even deprived of the opportunity to independently observe and imitate the actions of an adult. His learning goes through the organization of joint actions with an adult (an adult acts with the hands of a child or the hands of a child “follow” the actions of an adult), which gradually turn first into shared actions with an adult (an adult starts the action, and the child finishes it) and, finally, into completely independent actions. But, having taught the child to act independently, it is necessary to try to organize his independent observations of the activities of the people around him. For this, a deaf-blind child is taught to calmly observe with his hands how his loved ones eat, drink, dress, etc. Thanks to these observations, the child receives the first ideas about the actions of other people, the conditions for imitation are formed, which is very important for a full-fledged social development person. The meaning of gestures and words is expanded and generalized, denoting not only a specific cup for drinking the child himself, but also other cups from which mom and dad drink, guests, etc. By organizing a child's observation of the daily activities of others, we expand his own experience and ideas about the activities of other people. For example, before you start teaching a deaf-blind child to read and write, he needs to form a “setting for reading” - he is taught, without interfering with the actions of other people, to observe them; Before teaching a child to act with plot toys - dolls, it is necessary to teach him to "see" the real actions of other people.
Observations of the development of play in children with complex sensory impairments show that story toys at first appear to them as real objects. A deaf-blind or blind child tries to lie down in a doll's bed or drink from a small cup by himself, after actions with these toys have been demonstrated to adults with the help of a doll. The real plot-role-playing game develops in such children much later, at school age.
Any child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to navigate independently in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering the skills of self-care. In the education of children with complex disorders, this period can take both the preschool and school age of the child.
Of great importance for the development of the psyche of the deaf-blind-mute is socially significant work, aimed not only at self-service of the pupil himself, but also needed by his comrades. In this work, the first understanding of the community of labor with the division of operations is developed: I serve not only myself, but also others, and others serve me as well. This work is often carried out collectively, and in it the ability to combine one's activity with a common task is developed. And individual labor is evaluated from the point of view of its significance for the common labor. Here the rudiments of self-awareness as a member of some kind of collective already arise. Deaf-blind pupils are also attracted to participate in various kinds of collective work. They clean the yard, clean the snow in winter, break off the ice on the site, dig a garden in the spring, water the beds, take care of the animals that are in a special house in the yard. The types of work that students do are different: some are easy, others are more difficult. Pupils do some work willingly, others less willingly, and doing something is not at all pleasant for them.
Upon reaching the age of sixteen, deaf-blind pupils, subject to their physical and mental readiness, begin to learn professional work. In the conditions of an orphanage, professional labor, like the previous types of labor (in self-service, in group self-service, manual labor, educational work in workshops), serves educational tasks. Usually, when analyzing work in a special school, they note its importance for improving speech, developing movements, perception, memory, imagination, and thinking. All this is correct, but not enough. It can even be said that such a characterization of the meaning of labor misses its main function in the development of the student. Labor training and practical participation in labor are the only correct way to form a full-fledged personality. It is in labor that an awareness of one's position in the system of interpersonal relations is formed; through labor, an assessment of oneself through the attitude of others is assimilated. In labor, the formation of the most important essential human traits takes place. If in the historical aspect, a person, creating forms of labor, created himself, made himself a man, then in a certain sense it can be said that in the process of ontogenetic development, mastering the forms of labor activity, a person each time, as it were, creates himself anew. It is also important that through work, through personal participation in it, a correct reflection is formed. public relations and already through the prism of these relations, the world of things humanized by labor is more deeply and adequately known.
When teaching a deaf-blind-mute to more and more "adult" types of labor, a contradiction appears and grows between the nature of the activity and its relation to needs. If at first the labor activity accessible to the child during the period of the formation of his self-service skills is directly and immediately connected with the satisfaction of his simplest needs, then already during the transition to collective self-service this connection is not so obvious. And as the forms of divided labor are mastered, the direct connection between concrete activity and the needs of the organism is lost. This connection becomes more and more mediated and, in the end, is carried out through such a measure of labor as money. Understanding money as a measure of labor and awareness of the connection of one's labor with the ability to satisfy one's needs using money is a necessary condition for practical knowledge of existing social relations.
2.3.3. Speech development
It is extremely important in teaching a deaf-blind-mute child to master the means of communication. The first special means of communication for him are gestures. With gestures, the child designates objects, their functions, actions, elements of behavior. Mastering gestures is a necessary stage in the speech development of a child.
The stage following the assimilation of means of communication after gestures is the formation of verbal speech in the child. Verbal speech in dactyl form is a superstructure over gestural speech, arises inside it as its variant, and later develops into an independent and dominant form of speech.
It happens in this way. Gestures denoting well-known and frequently encountered objects are replaced by finger words. For a child, these designations are also gestures, but only gestures of a different configuration. With a gesture, he is shown that the given object can be designated in a different way. In the future, he designates the object shown to him with a new gesture for him, not even suspecting that he already owns a word made up of letters, just as a sighted-hearing child who has learned to speak in the second year of life does not know that he speaks in letter words.
Teaching verbal language begins not with letters, but with words, and not just words, but with words in a system of coherent semantic text. The semantic context of the first words are gestures. The first dactyl words are included in the story, carried out by means of facial expressions. Here words act as gestures. Only after mastering several dozen words denoting specific objects, the child is given a dactyl alphabet, which he already practically owns. After the dactyl alphabet, the child can be given any word, correlating it with the corresponding gesture and object. Learning the letters of the dactyl alphabet is also of great importance because the child, in the process of memorizing, learns to perceive dactyl letters from the teacher's hand.
After a solid memorization of the dactyl alphabet, the child is given a point designation of letters. Finger articulation and dot representation of letters in a child must be impeccable and perfect. To improve this, a special dictionary of two to three dozen words is selected, denoting objects well known to the child. The same dictionary is used in the future to master the grammatical structure.
Learning verbal speech for the deaf-blind is possible through the development of writing and reading. Mastery of writing and reading often occupies the entire school period of development of such a child. When a child has mastered the usual letter in capital letters or the relief-dotted script of the blind, he is taught to consistently describe his own actions. From such descriptions, consisting of simple, uncommon sentences, the first texts for reading by a deaf-blind child are formed. With the enrichment of the child's vocabulary, the grammatical structure of the first texts becomes more complicated. These texts, describing the child's own experience and the actions of people he knows, are compiled with the help of a teacher and are called educational. In addition, texts reflecting personal experience child, are compiled by the child himself (spontaneous texts). The constant interpenetration of these two types of texts, which I.A. Sokolyansky called parallel, creates conditions for the full assimilation of verbal speech by a deaf-blind child. The desire of the child to talk about important and bright events own life, as it were, is built into the already existing grammatical forms of a story about similar events.
Together with the assimilation of the elements of narrative speech, work is underway to develop colloquial speech (in dactyl form), first in the form of simple incentive sentences, and later on more complex ones.
A low level of initial verbal proficiency should not artificially limit the child's communication, as this will inevitably lead to a delay in his overall development. It is necessary, especially in the first period of training, to use a gesture form of communication.
Oral speech for the deaf-blind-mute is not a means of learning, it is one of the subjects of study. Oral speech classes are held in the form of individual lessons.
2.3.4. Features of personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children.
In the early stages of the development of a deaf-blind child, personal development is merged with all other lines of development. A deaf-blind child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to navigate independently in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering the skills of self-care. No less important is the mastery of writing and reading. Cognitive development at this stage seems to be the main one, which largely determines the development of the personality. But care about the development of the child should not be directed only to solving cognitive problems.
Until recently, in teaching deaf-blind children, their speech and intellectual development was considered the main and often the only task. This was justified during the formation of the very tradition of teaching the deaf-blind in Russia. In the early 1980s the content and methods of primary education for the deaf-blind were basically determined, and the tasks of the personal development of the deaf-blind students came to the fore. By this time, it was possible to appreciate the low opportunities for independent life of adult deaf-blind graduates of the school, to see their extreme personal immaturity and unpreparedness to understand the rights and obligations of an adult member of society.
In cases of complex sensory impairment, the probability of a defective, dependent, egoistic development of the child's personality is especially high. Observations show that many deaf-blind young people have primitive moral assessments and criteria, insufficient awareness of themselves, their “I”, unformed identification of themselves as a family member, as a representative of a certain age group, as a member of a certain community of disabled people, as a resident of a certain area, as citizen, etc. One can also talk about the poverty of the ideas of the deaf-blind about their past and future, about the biography of their loved ones, about the life path of a person in general.
The possibility of such personality development is explained by a number of reasons (Sokolyansky I.A., Basilova T.A., Blagosklonova N.K.). The first is the reasons due to the complex disorder itself, which leads to a different degree of isolation of the child from the outside world. Such isolation inevitably leads to secondary developmental disorders - weakness and distortion of emotional and social ties with the wide world of people, to egocentrism.
The second group of reasons is related to the attitude of the people around him. As a rule, close people around a deaf-blind child, realizing his severe violations may show excessive anxiety and pity. The requirements for the child may drop sharply, and the assessment of the success of his actions may become unnecessarily high or even inadequate. A situation of overprotection may arise when the child becomes the center of the existence of the family and the interests of all its other members are relegated to the background, considered insignificant.
The third group of reasons includes problems associated with the practice of teaching and upbringing, in which the child himself remains his object throughout the entire preschool and school education. He is taught and educated, and not he himself learns and educates. In the special conditions of a special preschool and school institution, where the child is constantly among children like himself, he does not need to realize his impairments and the possibilities of compensating him, to think about the impact of visual and hearing impairment on his future independent life among children. other seeing and hearing people. On the one hand, the help of people directly surrounding the child opens up opportunities for personal development, on the other hand, it limits and even distorts this development.
Thus, taking into account the causes of complex disorders and the types of upbringing of deaf-blind children, it is necessary to single out such personality traits and emotional-volitional spheres as the weakness of social ties, egocentrism, lack of independence, low self-esteem, poor development of self-education, unconsciousness of one’s violation.
“The experience of teaching deaf-blind children and children with multiple disabilities convinces us that there are no unteachable children, but children with different learning opportunities. Even a small advance in development contributes to gaining greater independence and, consequently, self-confidence. The success of a child is largely due to the courage of his loved ones, their optimism and self-confidence.
3. CONCLUSION
Such a deviation as impaired vision and hearing significantly complicates the mental development of children, they face numerous difficulties in their social rehabilitation. The causes of deaf-blindness are different: from congenital to acquired.
A child born deaf-blind is a special child. These features are the result of certain factors that make deafblindness a specific type of disability. Since sight and hearing are the most important means of development, as well as the most important channels for communication, a deaf-blind child has huge problems in understanding the world, both in relation to himself and to other people.
The development of a child with a combination of visual and hearing defects proceeds in a completely different way than that of the blind or deaf. This feature basically consists in the fact that the possibility of communication of a deaf-blind-mute child with the people around him falls catastrophically. Therefore, a deaf-blind child needs special psychological and pedagogical support. On the other hand, the parents of a deaf-blind child also need psychological counseling.
A deaf-blind child is deprived of the most important means of contact with the environment - sight and hearing, and, most importantly, is deprived of verbal speech. A child with such a disorder is "cut off" from the whole world, deaf-blindness isolates the child from society, making it difficult for his physical, mental and socio-personal development. The circle of people communicating with him is very narrow, while there is Big world unfamiliar and inaccessible to knowledge. On his own, only by his own efforts, the child cannot come into contact with the social environment around him and cannot acquire concrete ideas about it.
The mental development of deaf-blind children is based on intact intellectual and sensory abilities and their improvement. Proper upbringing of a young child with profound visual and hearing impairments in the family is possible only with a sensitive attitude of adults to the most inconspicuous manifestations of the child's activity, the ability to support this activity in every possible way and develop it. The constant location of the objects surrounding the child and the observance of the time schedule contribute to its orientation in time and space. Independent movement around the house and mastering actions with objects creates the prerequisites for successful cognitive and speech development. In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the formation of the first means of communication - gestures - takes the leading place. Thanks to the adult, the child gradually learns the sequence of everyday everyday situations. An object or gesture can become a signal of each such significant everyday situation for a child.
The independent mastering by a deaf-blind child, first of individual actions, and then of a whole cycle of actions within each everyday or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares the replacement of the natural gesture with the word. Sculpting, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment. Teaching verbal speech is possible through the development of writing and reading. Having mastered the usual writing in capital letters or in relief-dotted font for the blind (L. Braille), the child is taught to consistently describe his own actions.
“A child with complex sensory impairments has all the necessary self-care and household skills to feel independent in everyday life. He can master specific household skills, certain labor skills for work in specialized disabled enterprises or at home. Under certain circumstances (constant help and attention from the family, teachers, organization of support), a deaf-blind person can continue his education after graduating from school at a college or university and find his place in life among professionally well-prepared people.
4. Bibliographic list
1. Bertyn G.P. Etiological classification of deaf-blindness / GP Bertyn // Defectology. - 1985. - No. 5. - S. 14 - 20.
2. Children with complex developmental disorders: pedagogical assistance: textbook. allowance for students. higher textbook institutions / M.V. Zhigoreva. - 2nd ed., corrected. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2008. - 240 p.
3. Meshcheryakov A.I. Deaf-blind children. Development of the psyche in the process of formation of behavior / AI Meshcheryakov. - M .: "Pedagogy", 1974. - 327 p.
4. Fundamentals of special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. avg. ped. textbook institutions / L.V. Kuznetsova, L.I. Peresleni, L.I. Solntseva [i dr.]; ed. L.V. Kuznetsova. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2002. - 480 p.
5. Pelymskaya T.V. If the baby does not hear / T.V. Pelymskaya, N.D. Shmatko - 2nd ed., revised. - M.: Enlightenment, 2003
6. Sokolyansky I.A. Teaching deaf-blind-mute children / I.A. Sokolyansky // Defectology. - 1989. - No. 2.
7. Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook institutions / V. I. Lubovsky, T. V. Rozanova, L. I. Solntseva and others; ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - 2nd ed., Rev. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - 464 p.
Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - С394.
Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 391.
Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - P.392.
Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 394.
Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 402.
Fundamentals of special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. avg. ped. textbook establishments, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2002. - P.390.
Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 405.
Fundamentals of special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. avg. ped. textbook establishments, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova. - M .: Publishing Center "Academy", 2002. - S. 392.
The development of a child with a combination of visual and hearing defects proceeds in a completely different way than that of the blind or deaf. This feature basically consists in the fact that the possibility of communication of a deaf-blind-mute child with the people around him falls catastrophically.
A deaf-blind-mute child, before the start of his special education and upbringing, is characterized as completely helpless and deprived of the ability of human behavior and thinking. Early detection of visual and hearing impairments in children makes it possible to provide psychological assistance to the family at the right time, start raising a child in a timely manner and significantly improve the prospects for his development.
The well-known French deaf-blind-mute from birth, Marie Ertin, behaved “like a wild animal” at the age of nine, she was taken out of the school for the deaf-mute, and from the school for the blind, like an “idiot”, and placed in solitary confinement in a psychiatric hospital. With a special intervention, it was revealed that her brain was normal, and she herself was quite trainable.
Children in whom deaf-blindness is not congenital, but acquired in early childhood, fall into a similar situation. A child, losing hearing and vision, usually loses all behavioral skills acquired by him before.
Observations show that the deaf-blind, devoid of education, can spend many years in bed, in a fenced-off corner of the room, without communicating with people and objects, without developing mentally at all, without learning to walk or eat and drink like a human being. Thus, deaf-blindness under adverse external conditions, excluding all the usual forms of human communication between a child and other people, dooms him to loneliness and a semi-animal existence. The development of the human psyche in these cases does not occur at all, despite the fact that the brain of a child from a medical point of view may be quite normal and physiologically suitable for the performance of all higher mental functions.
The mental development of deaf-blind children is based on intact intellectual and sensory (sense of smell, vibrational and kinesthetic sensitivity) capabilities and their improvement. Observations of the development of young children with congenital deaf-blindness and intact cognitive development show great compensatory possibilities of touch and smell. If you do not interfere with the development of the safe activity of such a child and contribute to the timely formation of grasping, sitting, walking upright and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve a free orientation of the child in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions in him. Such a child is already in early childhood able to move freely around a familiar room, recognize people close to him by smell, characteristic movements and by feeling his feet and shoes, get objects and toys he likes and act with them in accordance with their purpose.
Skin sensitivity and motor memory become a special way for the deaf-blind to cognize the environment. I. A. So-Kolyansky described how easily deaf-blind children find windows and doors even in an unfamiliar room due to the perception of the movements of the air wave and the temperature emitted by the window by the skin of the face.
Touch, active feeling of objects with hands or tongue allows you to get acquainted with objects and recognize them in the future. There are cases when a deaf-blind person learned to thread a needle, actively helping himself with his tongue and lips. Special studies have shown that deaf-blind people could distinguish the thickness of threads of close numbers with the tip of their tongue and find a needle hole about 0.3 mm in size. The tasting of objects with the tongue by young deaf-blind children in order to examine the surface of the object also plays another, no less important role - a deaf-blind child is able to taste objects of different material. By tasting an object with their tongue and determining its hardness with their teeth, deaf-blind adults can distinguish copper from iron nails and silver from copper money. Observations show that with age, deaf-blind children studying at school learn to use, first of all, a tactile hand for object recognition, and "mouth probing" fades into the background.
Deaf-blind people have a tactile perception of the properties of the floor, soil, etc. with their feet. Memory for uneven ground under their feet often helps them remember the way in a particular direction.
In most cases, deaf-blind children actively used their sense of touch to get to know the world around them and to communicate even before the start of special education. Special education brought touch to a new level of use: with its help, children learned to compare and group objects according to a certain attribute, they developed subtle differentiated finger movements that made it possible to read and write texts written in Braille, etc.
The sense of smell allows almost all deaf-blind people to look for a familiar or unfamiliar person at a distance, to recognize the weather on the street by smells from an open window, to determine the features of rooms and to find the necessary objects in them.
With age, deaf-blind people are able to determine at a distance approaching people by the characteristics of their gait, learn about the appearance of a new face in the room, listen to the sounds of music with their hands, determine the direction of loud sounds at home and on the street with their feet, etc. Vibrational sensations can become the basis for perception and formation of oral speech in a deaf-blind child. For example, in the St. Petersburg school, deaf-blind children were taught to perceive oral speech with the palm of their hand from the throat of the speaker and control their own speech in this way.
In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the leading place is played by the formation of the first means of communication - gestures. Thanks to an adult, the child gradually learns the sequence of everyday everyday situations (morning toilet, breakfast, games, lunch, afternoon nap, afternoon tea, walk, dinner, evening toilet and getting ready for bed, etc.). An object or a gesture depicting an action with an object can become a signal of each such everyday situation that is significant for the child. The independent mastering by a deaf-blind child, first of individual actions, and then of a whole cycle of actions within each everyday or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares the replacement of a natural gesture with a conventional sign (a deaf language gesture, a dactyl or spoken word), makes it possible in the future to replace the gesture with a dactyl word, and then with a written phrase (written in capital letters or Braille). Sculpting, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment for a deaf-blind child. It is these types of activities that make it possible to control the adequacy of the child's ideas about the environment, with their help the first concepts are generalized, when one name can designate a real object and its image, a real object and an object that replaces it in the game.
In the early stages of the development of a deaf-blind child, personal development is merged with all other lines of development. A deaf-blind child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to navigate independently in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering the skills of self-care. No less important is the mastery of writing and reading. Cognitive development at this stage seems to be the main one, which largely determines the development of the personality.
These children also develop means of communication in different ways. They may remain at the level of an indefinite demand on an adult, which we defined as "immediate display", when a deaf-blind child pulls an adult's hand in the direction of an object or room that interests him. Others can communicate with the help of the actual objects associated with the creation of the desired situation: thus showing the adult what they would like. A number of children can use only natural gestures and individual dactyl letters and words in communication. Many of them need constant supervision and support from adults until the end of their lives.
The concept of norm and anomaly.
PLAN
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...3
2. Main body
Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness ………………………………………………..6
2.2. Types of deafblindness………………………………………………………………………….7
2.3. Characteristics of the mental development of deaf-blind children…………………………..9
2.3.1. Features of the development of the cognitive sphere in deaf-blind children…………………9
2.3.2. Features of the activity of deaf-blind children………………………………………..12
2.3.3. Speech development…………………………………………………………………………… 15
2.3.4. Features of the personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children……….16
3. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...18
4. Bibliographic list……………………………………………………………...….19
1. INTRODUCTION
The modern definition of "deafblind" varies from country to country. The legal status of a deaf-blind person is determined by the normative documents adopted in a particular state. Classifying a child or adult with a disability as deafblind in the United States or Scandinavian countries guarantees him a place in a special school for free and special social services (translation, accompaniment, transportation, etc.). In these countries, which are at the forefront in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities, the category "deaf-blind" has long been included in the state register of persons with disabilities. Deaf-blindness is defined there as a combination of visual and hearing impairments that creates special communication difficulties and requires special educational needs for these children.
Until now, in our country there is no official definition of deaf-blindness as a special type of disability (disability is determined only by blindness or only by deafness), therefore, people with a complex impairment are not guaranteed training in the special education system and their special needs are not taken into account when organizing social service. The only educational institution for deaf-blind children in our country, the Orphanage for the Deaf-Blind, belongs to the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population of the Russian Federation 1 .
Deafblindness is the most studied type of complex developmental disorder. Complex disorders should be defined as the presence of two or more severe primary disorders in one child. Developmental disorders that are part of a complex defect are associated with damage to various body systems.
The study of children with a complex structure of a defect is carried out by a relatively new branch of special psychology, which studies the features of the mental development of a child with two or more disorders.
The subject of this area of special psychology is the study of the originality of the mental development of a child with complex disorders and the determination of ways of psychological and pedagogical assistance to these children and their families.
The estimated number of deaf-blind people in the world is about one million people. It is now customary to include all people with visual and hearing impairments.
The world history of teaching the deafblind for more than 150 years. By the end of the second millennium, 80 countries of the world had special services and schools for the deaf and blind. The beginning of the history of teaching deaf-blind children in our country dates back to 1909, when the Society for the Care of the Deaf-Blind was created in Russia and the first school for such children was opened in St. Petersburg, which existed until 1941. The scientific achievements of this school are reflected in the works of the famous Leningrad psychologist A. V. Yarmolenko. From 1923 to 1937, a school for deaf-blind children in Kharkov, organized by I.A. Sokolyansky, worked very interestingly. The most famous pupil of this school was the famous deaf-blind writer O. I. Skorokhodova. Subsequently, this experience was continued by I. A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov in Moscow at the Institute of Defectology of the APS of the USSR (now the Institute of Correctional Pedagogy of the Russian Academy of Education), where, since 1947, scientific research and practical work with deaf-blind children. Since 1963, the Orphanage for deaf-blind children in Sergiev Posad, Moscow Region, has been successfully operating, where more than 100 children are brought up. Domestic experience in teaching deaf-blind people is recognized by specialists in other countries. Since 1949, there has been an international community coordinating the development of research and services for the deaf-blind in the world, formalized as a public organization in 1969, in whose activities since 1962 Russian specialists have also participated 2 .
In the past, the best-known cause of deaf-blindness, in the rare cases reported, was neuroinfection in the form of meningitis. famous in XIX in. American deafblinds Laura Bridgman and Ellen Keller lost their sight and hearing due to a similar disease at the age of about two years.
Until the middle of the XX century. The history of education for the deaf-blind has evolved from individual cases of successful education of children who lost their hearing and sight at different ages, but retained the possibilities of intellectual and emotional development. This experience was successfully picked up by teachers in different countries of Europe and the USA. The rubella epidemic that swept through different countries of the world in 1963-1965 caused the simultaneous appearance of a significant number of deaf-blind children from birth. The education of large groups of such children required the creation of a whole network of schools, and then special services. Since that time, deaf-blindness has been closely studied by specialists in various fields, the causes were clarified, and various measures were proposed for its prevention.
The problem of social, personal and mental development of a deaf-blind child is very acute. Visual and hearing impairments prevent the child from learning about the surrounding reality, gaining social experience, and gaining work skills. Communication with adults and other children is important for the social and personal development of such a child. But visual and hearing impairments often do not bring children and adults together, but, on the contrary, repel them. Many parents, upon learning that their child is deaf-blind, refuse him. Consequently, the child ends up in an orphanage or boarding school, which adversely affects his development. Due to the small contact of the child with his parents, he has an underdevelopment of speech as a means of communication. He becomes closed, unsure of himself, his self-esteem falls, the emotional-volitional sphere is disturbed.
It is known that the most difficult thing is not deaf-blindness, but the relationship of a normally developing child to a deaf-blind one. Children with developmental disabilities are very sensitive to negative attitudes towards them from their peers, especially if the loss of vision and hearing occurred at a later age.
The relevance of the mental development of these children is determined by their difficulty, due to impaired vision and hearing, interaction with the outside world, the problem of social adaptation, the development of the child as a person, awareness of his place in society. It is very difficult for such people to adapt to life, so society (social services, families themselves) needs to help them, educate and create all the necessary conditions for their development. The problem of deaf-blind children is one of the leading in the field of psychology of persons with developmental disorders, and its solution is of great importance.
When writing this work, the book of Meshcheryakov A.I. was used. “Deaf-blind children. Development of the Mind in the Process of Behavior Formation”, which proposes the first attempt at a systematic presentation of a pedagogical experiment conducted in an experimental group of deaf-blind students at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1955 to 1970 and in the Zagorsk Orphanage for the Deaf-Blind-Mute from 1963 to 1970. Contents books - a study of the problems of the initial mental development of the child in the process of teaching him practical behavior. The peculiarity of deaf-blindness as a research problem is determined by the fact that the lack of vision and hearing and the dumbness associated with the lack of hearing deprive the child of the opportunity (without special training) to communicate with other people. As a result of loneliness, a deaf-blind-mute child does not develop mentally. When teaching such a child, a unique task arises of the purposeful formation of the entire human psyche. And it is known that where the task of purposeful formation of a phenomenon arises, favorable conditions are created for establishing its laws. The intention of this book is precisely to try to show some regularities in the emergence and development of human behavior and the psyche in general, using specific experimental and theoretical material for the formation of the behavior and psyche of deaf-blind children.
In the textbooks "Special Psychology" V.I. Lubovsky and Fundamentals of Special Psychology, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova presents general information on the problem of deaf-blind children and their education and upbringing. Some articles were also used.
2. Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness
For the early diagnosis of a complex disorder, knowledge of the causes that can lead to damage to several body functions at once is very important. When a child has one primary developmental defect, the likelihood of either hereditary or exogenous origin is considered. A complex developmental disorder can be caused by one or more causes, different or the same in origin.
Currently, more than 80 hereditary syndromes are known to cause deafblindness. These are combinations of congenital deafness and progressive atrophy of the optic nerves; hearing loss and retinitis pigmentosa; deafness, cataracts and kidney disease; congenital hearing loss and progressive myopia, etc. The most well-known and common cause of deaf-blindness in adolescence and adulthood is Usher's syndrome. It occurs in 3-6% of people with hearing loss since childhood. This syndrome is characterized by congenital hearing impairment of varying degrees and progressive retinitis pigmentosa, leading to a gradual narrowing of the visual fields and blindness.
Another group of causes leading to deaf-blindness includes various diseases transmitted in utero, prenatally and perinatally. The best known of these intrauterine diseases is rubella. The rubella virus penetrates from a sick mother through the placenta into the fetus and can cause multiple malformations of the child. In this disease, the greatest risk of multiple fetal damage exists in the early stages of pregnancy, when the development of the cardiac system, organs of vision and hearing is laid. From the beginning of the 1970s. in the developed countries of the world, prophylactic vaccinations against rubella are carried out. In Russia, such vaccinations were not carried out until 1998.
Another known intrauterine viral disease that can lead to congenital deafblindness is cytomegalovirus infection. The causes of congenital visual and hearing impairments can be maternal disease with toxoplasmosis, syphilis, etc. Severe diabetes and a number of other somatic diseases can lead to complex vision and hearing impairment with age 3
Hereditary causes of multiple, including dual sensory, impairments include the CHARGE syndrome, which is increasingly common in children with dual sensory and multiple impairments. This name was formed from a combination of the first Latin letters of six words denoting various disorders (coloboma of the organs of vision; violations of cardiac activity; difficulty in swallowing and breathing due to narrowing of the nasal openings-choan; growth retardation; underdevelopment of the genital organs; hearing loss). Children with this syndrome are also characterized by underdevelopment of facial expressions and imbalance.
The causes of deaf-blindness can also be a variety of diseases that lead only to deafness or only to blindness and are combined in one particular person. For example, the cause of congenital blindness may be genetic, and hearing loss may occur from scarlet fever or as a result of meningitis; Hearing impairment that has arisen for these reasons can be complicated by severe eye injury with age, etc.
Knowledge of the causes and characteristics of diseases that can lead to a complex developmental disorder in a child can significantly help in diagnosing these disorders, identifying newborns at risk and carefully monitoring their development.
2.2. Types of deafblindness
In the early 1960s In the 20th century, A.V. Yarmolenko analyzed all the domestic and foreign information about the deaf-blind that was available by that time and made their classification according to the state of the sense organs, according to the ratio of the time of hearing loss and vision loss, according to the age of the onset of violations, according to the types of training. She herself referred to real deaf-blindness only people who were deprived of hearing and sight from birth or who lost them at an early age - before mastering and consolidating verbal speech as a means of communication and thinking. She considered deaf-blind only children with minimal residual vision (with loss of it to light perception) and with severe hearing loss or deafness. The rest she attributed to childhood (hearing and vision lost at the age of 4 to 10 years), adolescent, adult or senile deaf-blindness.
I.A. Sokolyansky referred to true deaf-blindness only children with congenital or acquired complete or partial dysfunction of the peripheral part of the visual and auditory analyzers, without gross violations of the central parts of the brain. Mentally retarded children with severe visual and hearing impairments, he referred to as "cerebral deficiency". four
The first classification of the deafblind was made in the 1940s. A.V. Yarmolenko based on the analysis of 220 life histories of deaf-blind children, both in our country and abroad. The classification was based on the time of onset of the defect and the presence of a combination of sensory impairments with intellectual ones:
Deaf-blind from birth or who lost their sight and hearing in early childhood, before mastering and consolidating verbal speech (congenital deaf-blindness);
Deaf-blind, in whom the loss of sight and hearing occurred at preschool age and later, when the child had already formed speech (acquired deaf-blindness);
Deaf-blind mentally retarded children: all previous options complicated by mental retardation.
At present, it is customary in the world to distinguish the following groups of deaf-blind people.
1. Congenital and early deaf-blindness resulting from congenital rubella or other intrauterine infections, deep prematurity or birth trauma, genetic disorders. The severity of visual and hearing impairments largely depends on the quality of timely medical care for these children. Many have visual impairments, in which early surgical and therapeutic treatment is indicated (congenital cataracts, glaucoma, strabismus, etc.). Early and high-quality eye surgery can significantly improve residual vision, and constant treatment can maintain its condition for a long time. However, there are observational data showing a large number of complications after removal of congenital cataracts in children with congenital rubella and a poor prognosis for the development of residual vision in these children. According to foreign data, up to 25% of children who had rubella in utero and were operated on for bilateral cataracts lose their sight after 18 years as a result of complete bilateral retinal detachment.
According to the severity of sensory impairments, children with congenital visual and hearing impairments are usually divided into totally deaf-blind, practically deaf-blind, visually impaired deaf, blind, hearing-impaired and visually impaired children. These children need special educational conditions. These can be special schools for the deaf and blind and special classes in schools for the blind or for the deaf, as well as individual education at special schools of various types.
The first means of communication for these children may be household items or natural gestures depicting actions with these items. In the future, they can learn to communicate using fingerprinting, oral and written speech (writing in large "sighted" letters or Braille). There are separate cases of teaching children with congenital deaf-blindness by a purely oral method - they could speak orally and read the oral speech of others by vibration, with their hand from the throat of the speaker.
2. Congenital hearing impairment and blindness acquired with age. These people make up to 50% of deaf-blind adults. The causes of the disorders are Usher's syndrome and other hereditary syndromes, trauma, etc. As a rule, these people graduate from educational institutions for people with hearing impairments, their vision deteriorates significantly in high school or later. Deaf children who lose their sight in adolescence require special attention. An acute state of shock and psychoses that occur in some cases in such adolescents and their parents can be largely prevented if these children are identified in time and provided with timely psychotherapeutic and psychological and pedagogical assistance. The leading means of communication for the deaf-blind in this category are most often signed speech and fingerprinting, which, in cases of a sharp drop in vision, can be helped by touch: they can perceive the interlocutor’s sign speech if they touch his hands or perceive finger speech “in hand”.
3. Congenital blindness and acquired deafness. These are people who have profound visual impairments and study in schools for the blind. As a result of various reasons, they lose their hearing partially or completely with age. As a rule, these are children, adolescents or adults who use mainly oral speech in communication, sometimes not intelligibly enough. Many of them need speech therapy and audiological assistance. Most are shown wearing hearing aids and individual lessons on the development of residual hearing and pronunciation correction. Observations show that in some cases these people in adulthood can lose their hearing completely, and then they switch to communication only with the help of touch (letter on the palm of your hand, fingerprinting "in the hand" or Lorm - a special alphabet of the deaf-blind, invented by the Czech deaf-blind G. Lorm and quite popular in Germany, the Czech Republic and some other countries).
4. Deaf-blindness acquired with age. These are people who were born with normal hearing and vision, who lost their hearing and sight as a result of illness or injury in adolescence or adulthood. In this case, the biggest problem is to cope with the stress of loss of vision and hearing and try to rebuild the already established and automated orientation in space to use other types of sensory. A special task is to make available other means of communication (perception of oral speech by hand, writing in the palm of your hand, fingerprinting and writing in Braille).
5. Senile deaf-blindness. It is known that in some people after 65 years of age and in many over 85, hearing and vision deteriorate sharply. Some of them become deaf-blind in old age. In the developed countries of the world, these people receive special support aimed at establishing relationships in their families, organizing special conditions for assistance in institutions for the elderly, and helping them communicate and find their bearings. 5
2.3. Characteristics of the mental development of deaf-blind children
2.3.1. Features of the development of the cognitive sphere in deaf-blind children
The development of a child with a combination of visual and hearing defects proceeds in a completely different way than that of the blind or deaf. This feature basically consists in the fact that the possibility of communication between a deaf-blind-mute child and the people around him falls catastrophically.
The mental development of the deaf-blind is based on intact analyzers (smell, kinesthetic, tactile and vibration sensitivity) and intellectual functions. Education plays an important role in the development of deaf-blind children.
A deaf-blind-mute child, before the start of his special education and upbringing, is characterized as completely helpless and deprived of the ability of human behavior and thinking. Early detection of visual and hearing impairments in children makes it possible to provide psychological assistance to the family at the right time, start raising a child in a timely manner and significantly improve the prospects for his development.
The well-known French deaf-blind-mute from birth, Marie Ertin, behaved “like a wild animal” at the age of nine, she was taken out of the school for the deaf-mute, and from the school for the blind, like an “idiot”, and placed in solitary confinement in a psychiatric hospital. With a special intervention, it was revealed that her brain was normal, and she herself was quite trainable.
Children in whom deaf-blindness is not congenital, but acquired in early childhood, fall into a similar situation. A child, losing hearing and vision, usually loses all behavioral skills acquired by him before.
Gofgardt, in his report at the IV congress devoted to education, spoke about the girl Ragnhild Kaata, who lost hearing, sight, taste and smell in the third year of her life. Until the age of 14, she lived at home, and only by the age of 15 she was accepted into a school for the deaf and dumb. She was a little like a man: she could sit all day in one place, not showing the slightest interest in what was happening around her, only occasionally making sounds like a heavy moan. If anyone approached her, she began to stamp her feet, roar and scratch like a wild animal. With training, her development went faster than that of the average deaf-mute child.
Indicative in this respect is also the case of the deaf-mute Spaniard Ionosencio Reyes. Having lost his sight at the age of 6, he completely degraded mentally, forgot how to walk, fell into a stupor, which lasted until the beginning of his studies - until the age of ten 7 .
The observations of I. A. Sokolyansky (1927, 1962) show that the deaf-blind, deprived of training, can spend many years in bed, in a fenced off corner of the room, without communicating with people and objects, without developing mentally at all, without learning to walk or walk. -humanly eat and drink 8 .
Meshcheryakov describes the following situation: “When selecting a school for the deaf-blind-mute, we examined a group of pedagogically neglected children who came to us from a family. Some of them were absolutely incapable of independent existence. Since they were all the time in their mother's arms, they did not even develop independent thermoregulation of the body. In this sense, it was difficult to consider them as independent organisms; rather, they were appendages to the mother's body. They could not sleep separately from their mother at night, they could not be without her for a minute even during the day. It was extremely difficult to tear them away from their mother, to teach them to sleep separately, to be not in their arms, to eat on their own.
One of the boys, who came to us at the age of 6, was distinguished by the fact that he could suddenly, as it were, freeze and remain motionless for a long time. It turned out that in his family there was no one to leave him at home with and he was left alone. And over the past three years of forced loneliness, he has “got used to” waiting for hours for someone to come up to him. He had no interest in anything but food. He did not know how to serve himself at all, he could not use the pot either. With systematic studies with him, he very quickly mastered the skills of self-service and orientation.
Similar to this boy were children who came to us from children's homes for invalids. Some of them could not walk, others walked only in a narrow circle of familiar space. They did not know how to eat on their own, even hold a spoon, use a potty, dress, undress. Their usual pastime is sitting in bed or on a rug and monotonous pendulum-shaped swaying of the torso. These children do not pick up or feel anything. They do not know toys and do not understand what they are. There is no need for communication. They react negatively to all attempts to touch: the hands of an adult are removed or repelled.
The whole psyche of such children is reduced to the feeling of the simplest organic needs and to the experience of simple pleasure from their satisfaction and displeasure.
They don't really have any behavior. It has been replaced by stereotyped motor activity that allows them to expend energy.
Thus, deaf-blindness under adverse external conditions, excluding all the usual forms of human communication between a child and other people, dooms him to loneliness and a semi-animal existence. The development of the human psyche in these cases does not occur at all, despite the fact that the brain of a child from a medical point of view may be quite normal and physiologically suitable for the performance of all higher mental functions. 9 "
Thus, the development of the psyche of such children is impossible without the intervention of specialists.
The mistake of most typhlo-surdo-pedagogues of the past was that they began teaching their pupils with attempts to form speech. They proceeded from the premise that the main difference between humans and animals is the "gift of speech", and tried to form this speech in oral, written or dactyl (finger) form. However, this "speech", not relying on a system of direct (figurative) reflection of the surrounding world, hung in the air and could not serve as the basis for the mental development of the child.
The practice of teaching deaf-blind-mutes shows that the task of forming a child's speech is not solved and cannot be solved as the first task of the development of the human psyche.
The child's psyche is formed and develops as a result of his interaction with the world of things and the world of people. The things that the child interacts with are the products of human labor. The essence of interaction with things and people lies in the fact that in both cases it is interaction with the human factor. Expressed with a certain degree of paradoxicality, we can say that the relationship of the individual to other people is carried out through the thing, and the relationship to the thing - through the relationship to another person. The child, in the process of learning to behave in the world of things, mastering actions with things, assimilates their social significance; the social meanings of things turn out to be their objective properties, expressing their essence in their totality.
The world for a deaf-blind-mute child before the beginning of his education is empty and pointless. For him there are no objects with which our life is filled, that is, they can be for him in the sense that he can stumble upon them, but they do not exist for him in their functions and purposes.
It is clear that such a person has only one way to cognize the world - through a tactile-motor analyzer. It would seem that the situation is simple: objects must be placed in the hands of the child, he will feel them, and in this way an unlimited number of images of surrounding objects will be created in him.
However, the practice of raising deaf-blind-mute children shows that this is not feasible. After all, deaf-blind-mute children, before the start of their special education and training, are completely devoid of any traits of the human psyche - they only have the possibility of its formation and development (to the highest level), but at the initial stages of this process they do not have any need for knowledge the world, nor the skills of orienting and research activities.
If such a child is given objects for "examination", he immediately drops them, without even trying to get acquainted with them. This is understandable, since the objects given to the child are insignificant for him. And no matter how new the tactile stimuli may be when trying to put various objects into the child's hands, they do not evoke an orienting reaction in him.
The first acquaintance with the objects of the surrounding world takes place in the process of satisfying the simplest natural needs.
Thus, for a deaf-blind-mute child in the first stages of development, the appropriation of social experience that humanizes him must be associated with specific practical activities to satisfy his actual (first organic, and then other, developing in activity) needs.
When satisfying natural needs, for example, while eating, a person uses a number of “tools” - a spoon, a fork, a plate, etc. This is used for the initial acquaintance of a deaf-blind child with objects. An adult, while feeding a child, holding his hands in his hands, teaches him to use a spoon, plate, napkin 11.
Observations of small children with congenital deaf-blindness have shown great possibilities of touch and smell in the development of cognitive activity. "If you do not interfere with the development of the safe activity of such a child and facilitate his timely grasping, sitting, walking upright and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve completely free orientation in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions" 12.
Sensation and perception in deaf-blind children has a number of features.
Since deaf-blind children cannot navigate in space with the help of sight and hearing, then "Skin sensitivity and motor memory become in deaf-blind children a special way of knowing the world around" 13. I. A. Sokolyansky described how easily deaf-blind children find windows and doors even in an unfamiliar room due to the perception of the skin of the face by the movements of the air wave and the temperature emitted by the window 14 .
Therefore, the development of the movements of a deaf-blind child from early childhood should be given great importance. If you do not interfere with the development of the safe activity of such a child and facilitate his timely grasping, sitting, walking upright and independence in everyday activities, you can achieve completely free orientation in the room and the development of full-fledged objective actions. Such a child is able already in early childhood to move freely around a familiar room, to recognize people close to him by smell, characteristic movements and by feeling his feet and shoes, to get objects and toys he likes and act with him in accordance with their purpose. Deaf-blind people have a tactile perception of the properties of the floor, soil, etc. with their feet. Memory for uneven ground under their feet often helps them remember the way in a particular direction.
Tactile sensitivity allows you to perceive objects only by touch and action with them in direct contact. However, a person deprived of sight and hearing can receive information from the environment even at a distance, remotely. Deaf-blind people have an unusual subtlety of smell. The sense of smell allows almost all deaf-blind people to look for a familiar or unfamiliar person at a distance, to recognize the weather on the street by smells from an open window, to determine the features of rooms and to find the necessary objects in them.
Thanks to tactile-vibrational sensitivity to sounds produced by the movement of objects and people, the child can feel what is happening around him also at a certain distance. With age, the deaf-blind are able to determine at a distance approaching people by their gait, to recognize that someone has entered the room, to listen to the sounds of music with their hands, to determine with their feet the direction of loud sounds produced in the house and on the street, etc. Vibrational sensations can become the basis for the perception and formation of oral speech in a deaf-blind child. "For example, in the St. Petersburg school, deaf-blind children were taught to perceive oral speech with the palm of their hand from the speaker's throat and control their own speech in this way" 15 .
Along with the preserved possibilities of olfactory, gustatory, tactile, tactile-vibratory sensitivity, deaf-blind children must use residual vision and hearing. Audiometric examination and selection of hearing aids (for both ears), up to cochlear implantation, can significantly expand and develop hearing capabilities in a number of deaf-blind children. Classes for the development of visual perception in deaf-blind children with residual vision (up to light perception) can give them the skills to use minimal residual vision to orient themselves in the world around them.
2.3.2. Features of the activity of deaf-blind children
Proper upbringing of a young child with profound visual and hearing impairments in the family is possible only with a sensitive attitude of adults to the most imperceptible manifestations of his activity, with the ability to support this activity in every possible way and develop it in order to stimulate any contacts with an adult and with objects of the surrounding world. The constancy of the location of the objects surrounding the child and the observance of the time schedule of the day contribute to its correct orientation in time and space. Independent movement around the house and mastering actions with objects create the prerequisites for successful cognitive and speech development. Even the most limited sensory sphere of a deaf-blind child creates conditions for his mental development. With preserved cognitive abilities and the correct attitude of parents towards a deaf-blind child, he is capable of a certain spontaneous development. An indicator of such successful development is the emergence of communication between the child and his loved ones with the help of natural gestures. However, the assimilation of verbal speech is possible only with special training.
In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the formation of the first means of communication - gestures - takes the leading place. Thanks to an adult, the child gradually learns the sequence of everyday everyday situations (morning toilet, breakfast, games, lunch, afternoon nap, afternoon tea, walk, dinner, evening toilet and getting ready for bed, etc.). An object or a gesture depicting an action with an object can become a signal of each such everyday situation that is significant for the child. The independent mastering by a deaf-blind child, first of individual actions, and then of a whole cycle of actions within each household or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares the replacement of a natural gesture with a conventional sign, makes it possible in the future to replace the gesture with a dactyl word, and then with a written phrase (written in capital letters or Braille) 16 .
Sculpting, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment for a deaf-blind child. It is these types of activities that make it possible to control the adequacy of the child's ideas about the environment, with their help, the meaning of the first words of children is generalized, when one name can designate a real object and its image, a real object and an object that replaces it in the game.
However, a deaf-blind child with additional disabilities is often limited or even deprived of the opportunity to independently observe and imitate the actions of an adult. His learning goes through the organization of joint actions with an adult (an adult acts with the hands of a child or the hands of a child “follow” the actions of an adult), which gradually turn first into shared actions with an adult (an adult starts the action, and the child finishes it) and, finally, into completely independent actions. But, having taught the child to act independently, it is necessary to try to organize his independent observations of the activities of the people around him. For this, a deaf-blind child is taught to calmly observe with his hands how his loved ones eat, drink, dress, etc. Thanks to these observations, the child receives the first ideas about the actions of other people, conditions for imitation are formed, which is very important for the full social development of a person. The meaning of gestures and words is expanded and generalized, denoting not only a specific cup for drinking the child himself, but also other cups from which mom and dad drink, guests, etc. By organizing a child's observation of the daily activities of others, we expand his own experience and ideas about the activities of other people. For example, before you start teaching a deaf-blind child to read and write, he needs to form a “setting for reading” - he is taught, without interfering with the actions of other people, to observe them; Before teaching a child to act with plot toys - dolls, it is necessary to teach him to "see" the real actions of other people.
Observations of the development of play in children with complex sensory impairments show that story toys at first appear to them as real objects. A deaf-blind or blind child tries to lie down in a doll's bed or drink from a small cup by himself, after actions with these toys have been demonstrated to adults with the help of a doll. The real plot-role-playing game develops in such children much later, at school age.
Any child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to navigate independently in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering the skills of self-care. In the education of children with complex disorders, this period can take both the preschool and school age of the child.
Of great importance for the development of the psyche of deaf-blind-mutes is socially significant work, aimed not only at self-service of the pupil himself, but also needed by his comrades. In this work, the first understanding of the community of labor with the division of operations is developed: I serve not only myself, but also others, and others serve me as well. This work is often carried out collectively, and it develops the ability to combine one's activity with a common task. And individual labor is evaluated from the point of view of its significance for the common labor. Here the beginnings of self-awareness as a member of some kind of collective already arise. Deaf-blind pupils are also involved in various kinds of collective work. They clean the yard, clean the snow in winter, break off the ice on the site, dig a garden in the spring, water the beds, take care of the animals that are in a special house in the yard. The types of work that students do are different: some are easy, others are more difficult. Pupils do some work willingly, others less willingly, and doing something is not at all pleasant for them.
Upon reaching the age of sixteen, deaf-blind pupils, subject to their physical and mental readiness, begin to learn professional work. In the conditions of an orphanage, professional labor, like the previous types of labor (in self-service, in group self-service, manual labor, educational work in workshops), serves educational tasks. Usually, when analyzing work in a special school, they note its importance for improving speech, developing movements, perception, memory, imagination, and thinking. All this is correct, but not enough. It can even be said that such a characterization of the meaning of labor misses its main function in the development of the student. Labor training and practical participation in labor are the only correct way to form a full-fledged personality. It is in labor that an awareness of one's position in the system of interpersonal relations is formed; through labor, an assessment of oneself through the attitude of others is assimilated. In labor, the formation of the most important essential human traits takes place. If in the historical aspect, a person, creating forms of labor, created himself, made himself a man, then in a certain sense it can be said that in the process of ontogenetic development, mastering the forms of labor activity, a person each time, as it were, creates himself anew. It is also important that through labor, through personal participation in it, a correct reflection of social relations is formed, and already through the prism of these relations, the world of things humanized by labor is more deeply and adequately known.
When teaching a deaf-blind-mute to more and more "adult" types of labor, a contradiction appears and grows between the nature of the activity and its relation to needs. If at first the labor activity available to the child during the period of the formation of his self-service skills is directly and directly related to the satisfaction of his simplest needs, then already during the transition to collective self-service this connection is not so obvious. And as the forms of divided labor are mastered, the direct connection between concrete activity and the needs of the organism is lost. This connection becomes more and more mediated and, in the end, is carried out through such a measure of labor as money. Understanding money as a measure of labor and awareness of the connection of one's labor with the ability to satisfy one's needs using money is a necessary condition for practical knowledge of existing social relations.
2.3.3. Speech development
It is extremely important in teaching a deaf-blind-mute child to master the means of communication. The first special means of communication for him are gestures. With gestures, the child designates objects, their functions, actions, elements of behavior. Mastering gestures is a necessary stage in the speech development of a child.
The stage following the assimilation of means of communication after gestures is the formation of verbal speech in the child. Verbal speech in dactyl form is a superstructure over gestural speech, arises inside it as its variant, and later develops into an independent and dominant form of speech.
It happens in this way. Gestures denoting well-known and frequently encountered objects are replaced by finger words. For a child, these designations are also gestures, but only gestures of a different configuration. With a gesture, he is shown that the given object can be designated in a different way. In the future, he designates the object shown to him with a new gesture for him, not even suspecting that he already owns a word made up of letters, just as a sighted-hearing child who has learned to speak in the second year of life does not know that he speaks in letter words.
Teaching verbal language begins not with letters, but with words, and not just words, but with words in a system of coherent semantic text. The semantic context of the first words are gestures. The first dactyl words are included in the story, carried out by means of facial expressions. Here words act as gestures. Only after mastering several dozen words denoting specific objects, the child is given a dactyl alphabet, which he already practically owns. After the dactyl alphabet, the child can be given any word, correlating it with the corresponding gesture and object. Learning the letters of the dactyl alphabet is also of great importance because the child, in the process of memorizing, learns to perceive dactyl letters from the teacher's hand.
After a solid memorization of the dactyl alphabet, the child is given a point designation of letters. Finger articulation and dot representation of letters in a child must be impeccable and perfect. To improve this, a special dictionary of two to three dozen words is selected, denoting objects well known to the child. The same dictionary is used in the future to master the grammatical structure.
Teaching deaf-blind people verbal speech is possible through the development of writing and reading 18 . Mastery of writing and reading often occupies the entire school period of development of such a child. When a child has mastered ordinary writing in capital letters or relief-dotted writing in the font of the blind, he is taught to consistently describe his own actions. From such descriptions, consisting of simple, uncommon sentences, the first texts for reading by a deaf-blind child are formed. With the enrichment of the child's vocabulary, the grammatical structure of the first texts becomes more complicated. These texts, describing the child's own experience and the actions of people he knows, are compiled with the help of a teacher and are called educational. In addition, texts reflecting the child's personal experience are compiled by the child himself (spontaneous texts). The constant interpenetration of these two types of texts, which I.A. Sokolyansky called parallel, creates conditions for the full assimilation of verbal speech by a deaf-blind child. The child's desire to tell about important and vivid events of his own life, as it were, is built into the already existing grammatical forms of a story about similar events.
Together with the assimilation of the elements of narrative speech, work is underway to develop colloquial speech (in dactyl form), first in the form of simple incentive sentences, and later on more complex ones.
A low level of initial verbal proficiency should not artificially limit the child's communication, as this will inevitably lead to a delay in his overall development. It is necessary, especially in the first period of training, to use a gesture form of communication.
Oral speech for the deaf-blind-mute is not a means of learning, it is one of the subjects of study. Oral speech classes are held in the form of individual lessons.
2.3.4. Features of personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children.
In the early stages of the development of a deaf-blind child, personal development is merged with all other lines of development. A deaf-blind child cannot develop as a person without mastering the objective world, without learning to independently orient himself in time and in the surrounding space, without mastering the skills of self-service. No less important is the mastery of writing and reading. Cognitive development at this stage seems to be the main one, which largely determines the development of the individual. But care about the development of the child should not be directed only to solving cognitive problems.
Until recently, in teaching deaf-blind children, their speech and intellectual development was considered the main and often the only task. This was justified during the formation of the very tradition of teaching the deaf-blind in Russia. In the early 1980s the content and methods of primary education for the deaf-blind were basically determined, and the tasks of the personal development of the deaf-blind students came to the fore. By that time, it was possible to appreciate the low possibilities of independent life of adult deaf-blind graduates of the school, to see their extreme personal immaturity and unpreparedness to understand the rights and obligations of an adult member of society 19 .
In cases of complex sensory impairment, the probability of a defective, dependent, egoistic development of the child's personality is especially high. Observations show that many deaf-blind young people have primitive moral assessments and criteria, insufficient awareness of themselves, their “I”, unformed identification of themselves as a family member, as a representative of a certain age group, as a member of a certain community of disabled people, as a resident a certain locality, as a citizen, etc. One can also talk about the poverty of the ideas of the deaf-blind about their past and future, about the biography of their loved ones, about the life path of a person in general.
The possibility of such personality development is explained by a number of reasons (Sokolyansky I.A., Basilova T.A., Blagosklonova N.K.). The first is the reasons due to the complex disorder itself, which leads to a different degree of isolation of the child from the outside world. Such isolation inevitably leads to secondary developmental disorders - weakness and distortion of emotional and social ties with the wide world of people, to egocentrism.
The second group of reasons is related to the attitude of the people around him. As a rule, close people around a deaf-blind child, realizing his severe violations, may show excessive anxiety and pity. The requirements for the child may drop sharply, and the assessment of the success of his actions may become unnecessarily high or even inadequate. A situation of overprotection may arise when the child becomes the center of the existence of the family and the interests of all its other members are relegated to the background, considered insignificant.
The third group of reasons includes problems associated with the practice of teaching and upbringing, in which the child himself remains his object throughout the entire preschool and school education. He is taught and educated, and not he himself learns and educates. In the special conditions of a special preschool and school institution, where the child is constantly among the same children as himself, he does not need to realize his impairments and the possibilities of his compensation, to think about the impact of visual and hearing impairment on his future independent life among people who see and hear differently. On the one hand, the help of people directly surrounding the child opens up opportunities for personal development, on the other hand, it limits and even distorts this development.
Thus, taking into account the causes of complex disorders and the types of upbringing of deaf-blind children, it is necessary to single out such features of the personality and the emotional-volitional sphere as the weakness of social ties, egocentrism, lack of independence, low self-esteem, poor development of self-education, unconsciousness of one's violation 20 .
“The experience of teaching deaf-blind children and children with multiple disabilities convinces us that there are no unteachable children, but children with different learning opportunities. Even a small advance in development contributes to gaining greater independence and, consequently, self-confidence. The success of a child is largely due to the courage of his loved ones, their optimism and self-confidence 21.
3. CONCLUSION
Such a deviation as impaired vision and hearing significantly complicates the mental development of children, they face numerous difficulties in their social rehabilitation. The causes of deaf-blindness are different: from congenital to acquired.
A child born deaf-blind is a special child. These features are the result of certain factors that make deafblindness a specific type of disability. Since sight and hearing are the most important means of development, as well as the most important channels for communication, a deaf-blind child has huge problems in understanding the world, both in relation to himself and to other people.
The development of a child with a combination of visual and hearing defects proceeds in a completely different way than that of the blind or deaf. This feature basically consists in the fact that the possibility of communication of a deaf-blind-mute child with the people around him falls catastrophically. Therefore, a deaf-blind child needs special psychological and pedagogical support. On the other hand, the parents of a deaf-blind child also need psychological counseling.
A deaf-blind child is deprived of the most important means of contact with the environment - sight and hearing, and, most importantly, is deprived of verbal speech. A child with such a disorder is "cut off" from the whole world, deaf-blindness isolates the child from society, making it difficult for his physical, mental and socio-personal development. The circle of people communicating with him is very narrow, while there is a large world nearby, unfamiliar and inaccessible for knowledge. On his own, only by his own efforts, the child cannot come into contact with the social environment around him and cannot acquire concrete ideas about it.
The mental development of deaf-blind children is based on intact intellectual and sensory abilities and their improvement. Proper upbringing of a young child with profound visual and hearing impairments in the family is possible only with a sensitive attitude of adults to the most inconspicuous manifestations of the child's activity, the ability to support this activity in every possible way and develop it. The constant location of the objects surrounding the child and the observance of the time schedule contribute to its orientation in time and space. Independent movement around the house and mastering actions with objects creates the prerequisites for successful cognitive and speech development. In the development of a deaf-blind child of preschool age, the formation of the first means of communication - gestures - takes the leading place. Thanks to the adult, the child gradually learns the sequence of everyday everyday situations. An object or gesture can become a signal of each such significant everyday situation for a child.
The independent mastering by a deaf-blind child, first of individual actions, and then of a whole cycle of actions within each everyday or play situation, makes it possible to make a natural gesture a sign of a certain individual object and action with it. All this prepares the replacement of the natural gesture with the word. Sculpting, modeling, drawing and playing are of great importance for the formation of correct ideas about the environment. Teaching verbal speech is possible through the development of writing and reading. Having mastered the usual writing in capital letters or in relief-dotted font for the blind (L. Braille), the child is taught to consistently describe his own actions.
“A child with complex sensory impairments has all the necessary self-care and household skills to feel independent in everyday life. He can master specific household skills, certain labor skills for work in specialized disabled enterprises or at home. Under certain circumstances (constant help and attention from the family, teachers, organization of support), a deaf-blind person can continue his education after graduating from school at a college or university and find his place in life among professionally well-prepared people” 22.
4. Bibliographic list
1. Bertyn G.P. Etiological classification of deaf-blindness / GP Bertyn // Defectology. - 1985. - No. 5. - S. 14 - 20.
2. Children with complex developmental disorders: pedagogical assistance: textbook. allowance for students. higher textbook institutions / M.V. Zhigoreva. - 2nd ed., corrected. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2008. - 240 p.
3. Meshcheryakov A.I. Deaf-blind children. Development of the psyche in the process of formation of behavior / AI Meshcheryakov. - M .: "Pedagogy", 1974. - 327 p.
4. Fundamentals of special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. avg. ped. textbook institutions / L.V. Kuznetsova, L.I. Peresleni, L.I. Solntseva [i dr.]; ed. L.V. Kuznetsova. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2002. - 480 p.
5. Pelymskaya T.V. If the baby does not hear / T.V. Pelymskaya, N.D. Shmatko - 2nd ed., revised. - M.: Enlightenment, 2003
6. Sokolyansky I.A. Teaching deaf-blind-mute children / I.A. Sokolyansky // Defectology. - 1989. - No. 2.
7. Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook institutions / V. I. Lubovsky, T. V. Rozanova, L. I. Solntseva and others; ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - 2nd ed., Rev. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - 464 p.
1 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - С394.
2 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 391.
3 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - P.392.
4 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 394.
5 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S.395-396.
15 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M .: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - P. 400.
16 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M .: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - P. 401.
17 Meshcheryakov A.I. Deaf-blind children. The development of the psyche in the process of behavior formation. - M .: "Pedagogy", 1974. - S. 167.
18 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 401.
19 Special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. higher ped. textbook establishments, ed. V.I. Lubovsky. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2005. - S. 402.
20 Fundamentals of special psychology: Proc. allowance for students. avg. ped. textbook establishments, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova. - M.: Publishing Center "Academy", 2002. - P.390.
Delayed children mental development, psychology deaf-blind and even more...
Development psychological science in the USSR
Abstract >> Psychology...). Much attention is paid to the development of the theory mental development children in its relationship with education and training (S. L. ... children(L. V. Zankov, I. M. Solovyov, Zh. I. Shif, M. I. Zemtsova). Of great scientific interest are the works deaf-blind- ...
PLAN
1. Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………...3
2. Main body
Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness ………………………………………………..6
2.2. Types of deafblindness………………………………………………………………………….7
2.3. Characteristics of the mental development of deaf-blind children…………………………..9
2.3.1. Features of the development of the cognitive sphere in deaf-blind children…………………9
2.3.2. Features of the activity of deaf-blind children………………………………………..12
2.3.3. Speech development…………………………………………………………………………… 15
2.3.4. Features of the personality and emotional-volitional sphere of deaf-blind children……….16
3. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………………...18
4. Bibliographic list……………………………………………………………...….19
1. INTRODUCTION
The modern definition of "deafblind" varies from country to country. The legal status of a deaf-blind person is determined by the normative documents adopted in a particular state. Classifying a child or adult with a disability as deafblind in the United States or Scandinavian countries guarantees him a place in a special school for free and special social services (translation, accompaniment, transportation, etc.). In these countries, which are at the forefront in protecting the rights of persons with disabilities, the category "deaf-blind" has long been included in the state register of persons with disabilities. Deaf-blindness is defined there as a combination of visual and hearing impairments that creates special communication difficulties and requires special educational needs for these children.
Until now, in our country there is no official definition of deaf-blindness as a special type of disability (disability is determined only by blindness or only by deafness), therefore, people with a complex impairment are not guaranteed training in the special education system and their special needs are not taken into account when organizing social service. The only educational institution for deaf-blind children in our country - the Orphanage for the deaf-blind - belongs to the Ministry of Labor and Social Protection of the Population of the Russian Federation.
Deafblindness is the most studied type of complex developmental disorder. Complex disorders should be defined as the presence of two or more severe primary disorders in one child. Developmental disorders that are part of a complex defect are associated with damage to various body systems.
The study of children with a complex structure of a defect is carried out by a relatively new branch of special psychology, which studies the features of the mental development of a child with two or more disorders.
The subject of this area of special psychology is the study of the originality of the mental development of a child with complex disorders and the determination of ways of psychological and pedagogical assistance to these children and their families.
The estimated number of deaf-blind people in the world is about one million people. It is now customary to include all people with visual and hearing impairments.
The world history of teaching the deafblind for more than 150 years. By the end of the second millennium, 80 countries of the world had special services and schools for the deaf and blind. The beginning of the history of teaching deaf-blind children in our country dates back to 1909, when the Society for the Care of the Deaf-Blind in Russia was created and the first school for such children was opened in St. Petersburg, which existed until 1941. The scientific achievements of this school are reflected in the works of the famous Leningrad psychologist A. V. Yarmolenko. From 1923 to 1937, a school for deaf-blind children in Kharkov, organized by I.A. Sokolyansky, worked very interestingly. The most famous pupil of this school was the famous deaf-blind writer O. I. Skorokhodova. Subsequently, this experience was continued by I. A. Sokolyansky and A. I. Meshcheryakov in Moscow at the Institute of Defectology of the APS of the USSR (now the Institute of Correctional Pedagogy of the Russian Academy of Education), where, since 1947, scientific research and practical work with deaf-blind children were continued. Since 1963, the Orphanage for deaf-blind children in Sergiev Posad, Moscow Region, has been successfully operating, where more than 100 children are brought up. Domestic experience in teaching the deaf-blind is recognized by specialists in other countries. Since 1949, there has been an international community coordinating the development of research and services for the deaf and blind in the world, formalized as a public organization in 1969, in whose activities since 1962 Russian specialists have also been participating.
In the past, the best-known cause of deaf-blindness, in the rare cases reported, was neuroinfection in the form of meningitis. famous in XIX in. Laura Bridgman and Ellen Keller, deaf-blind Americans, lost their sight and hearing due to a similar disease at the age of about two years.
Until the middle of the XX century. The history of education for the deaf-blind has evolved from individual cases of successful education of children who lost their hearing and sight at different ages, but retained the possibilities of intellectual and emotional development. This experience was successfully picked up by teachers in different countries of Europe and the USA. The rubella epidemic, which swept through different countries of the world in 1963-1965, caused the simultaneous appearance of a significant number of deaf-blind children from birth. The education of large groups of such children required the creation of a whole network of schools, and then special services. Since that time, deaf-blindness has been closely studied by specialists in various fields, the causes have been clarified, and various measures have been proposed for its prevention.
The problem of social, personal and mental development of a deaf-blind child is very acute. Visual and hearing impairments prevent the child from learning about the surrounding reality, gaining social experience, and gaining work skills. Communication with adults and other children is important for the social and personal development of such a child. But visual and hearing impairments often do not bring children and adults together, but, on the contrary, repel them. Many parents, upon learning that their child is deaf-blind, refuse him. Consequently, the child ends up in an orphanage or boarding school, which adversely affects his development. Due to the small contact of the child with his parents, he has an underdevelopment of speech as a means of communication. He becomes closed, unsure of himself, his self-esteem falls, the emotional-volitional sphere is disturbed.
It is known that the most difficult thing is not deaf-blindness, but the relationship of a normally developing child to a deaf-blind one. Children with developmental disabilities are very sensitive to negative attitudes towards them from their peers, especially if the loss of vision and hearing occurred at a later age.
The relevance of the mental development of these children is determined by their difficulty, due to impaired vision and hearing, interaction with the outside world, the problem of social adaptation, the development of the child as a person, awareness of his place in society. It is very difficult for such people to adapt to life, so society (social services, families themselves) needs to help them, educate and create all the necessary conditions for their development. The problem of deaf-blind children is one of the leading in the field of psychology of persons with developmental disorders, and its solution is of great importance.
When writing this work, the book of Meshcheryakov A.I. was used. “Deaf-blind children. Development of the Mind in the Process of Behavior Formation”, which proposes the first attempt at a systematic presentation of a pedagogical experiment conducted in an experimental group of deaf-blind students at the Institute of Defectology of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR from 1955 to 1970 and in the Zagorsk Orphanage for the Deaf-Blind-Mute from 1963 to 1970. Contents books - a study of the problems of the initial mental development of the child in the process of teaching him practical behavior. The peculiarity of deaf-blindness as a research problem is determined by the fact that the lack of vision and hearing and the dumbness associated with the lack of hearing deprive the child of the opportunity (without special training) to communicate with other people. As a result of loneliness, a deaf-blind-mute child does not develop mentally. When teaching such a child, a unique task arises of the purposeful formation of the entire human psyche. And it is known that where the task of purposeful formation of a phenomenon arises, favorable conditions are created for establishing its laws. The intention of this book is precisely to try to show some regularities in the emergence and development of human behavior and the psyche in general, using specific experimental and theoretical material for the formation of the behavior and psyche of deaf-blind children.
In the textbooks "Special Psychology" V.I. Lubovsky and Fundamentals of Special Psychology, ed. L.V. Kuznetsova presents general information on the problem of deaf-blind children and their education and upbringing. Some articles were also used.
2. Mental development of deaf-blind children
2.1. Causes of deafblindness
For the early diagnosis of a complex disorder, knowledge of the causes that can lead to damage to several body functions at once is very important. When a child has one primary developmental defect, the likelihood of either hereditary or exogenous origin is considered. A complex developmental disorder can be caused by one or more causes, different or the same in origin.
Currently, more than 80 hereditary syndromes are known to cause deafblindness. These are combinations of congenital deafness and progressive atrophy of the optic nerves; hearing loss and retinitis pigmentosa; deafness, cataracts and kidney disease; congenital hearing loss and progressive myopia, etc. The most well-known and common cause of deaf-blindness in adolescence and adulthood is Usher's syndrome. It occurs in 3-6% of people with hearing loss since childhood. This syndrome is characterized by congenital hearing impairment of varying degrees and progressive retinitis pigmentosa, leading to a gradual narrowing of the visual fields and blindness.
