Blind students at the forefront of inclusion in Indonesian schools

From The Jakarta Globe in Indonesia:

JAKARTA -- Muhammad Arif Budiman is one of three million Indonesians who were born blind, and who, as a result, struggled to get into school.

“I got rejected when I applied to a regular senior high school in Jakarta,” he says.

“For a while, I felt like it was useless to even think of continuing my education.”

But his mother urged him to keep trying, and finally he was accepted at a public school.

Even with his disability and the school’s lack of accessible facilities, he managed to graduate, closing the first chapter on his big dream and embarking on the next: university.

And not just any university, but the University of Indonesia: the country’s oldest, biggest and by most measures, best.

“I wanted to show that people like me could study at a top university and take the regular admissions test,” Arif says.

In 2008 Arif was accepted into UI’s School of Social and Political Studies, where he is majoring in social welfare.

But here again he came up against failures by the university management to accommodate visually challenged students.

“In my first week there, I tripped and fell into the drainage ditch in front of the school building,” Arif says.

His problem, though rare, is not unique. Bayu Iwan Yulianto, secretary general of the Indonesian Association for the Visually Impaired (Pertuni), says around 250 blind students are enrolled at universities across Indonesia.

The figure is tiny, he points out, because most schools do not provide supporting facilities for such students.

“Blind students are still students,” he says. “They have the right to participate in all campus activities with the same level of comfort as anyone else.”

Rianty is a visually challenged student at the State University of Jakarta (UNJ), and like Arif, she has trouble getting by on campus.

For her, the primary difficulty lies in blending in with the other students.

“The fact is, socializing is always going to be different for me,” she says. “Not everyone is comfortable speaking with a blind person, and I can tell that.”

Bayu says Pertuni has long called for universities to establish centers for disabled people on their campuses, in line with the government’s pledge of education for all.

“The support centers would also address the issues faced by other disabled students, not just the blind,” he says.

Pertuni is currently working on the issue with four universities in Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya and Makassar.

Starting at one college in each region, the progress toward thoroughly applying the program has been gradual.

Bayu acknowledges these are just the first steps, while educators have said that adapting facilities and curricula to accommodate the disabled is not easy.

Asep Sunjaya, a deputy rector at UNJ, says his university is implementing a parallel curriculum for blind and deaf students.

There are currently six blind and four deaf students at UNJ, and the university expects to take in five more this month.

“I admit we’re still not yet providing the best possible level of accessibility,” Asep says, adding that the hardest part is not retrofitting physical facilities such as grab bars and ramps, but trying to get disabled students accepted among their peers, as well as “making everyone on campus realize that there are these [disabled] people among us, and that we need to treat them right.”

Arif says he has experienced this problem of lack of awareness at UI, when in several different classes, lecturers explain a concept without fully describing what it is.

“They say ‘this is’ or ‘that is’ without describing exactly what ‘it’ is,” he says.

Bambang Shergy Laksmono, dean of UI’s School of Social and Political Studies, says the problem for many universities is in is how to “fulfill the sociocultural rights of the disabled.”

The university is “still trying to provide basic needs” for blind students, he says. Last month, the university launched new computer software to help blind students study and take tests through audio, in cooperation with the Friends of the Blind Foundation.

The foundation’s director, Bambang Basuki, says the government needs to set universal minimum standards for accessibility at all universities.

“Start from the basics — every university must have tactile paving for blind students,” he says, adding that small improvements like audio guides in elevators or braille signs on lecture-room doors are already helping.

Nonetheless, a wealth of facilities can only do so much without a peer group to support disabled students, says Haris Iskandar, secretary of the Ministry of National Education’s Directorate General of Higher Education.

“In an era of fragmented socioeconomic classifications, it’s difficult to provide an inclusive education,” he says.

However, the government is trying to eliminate on-campus discrimination by requiring universities to provide a support center, stipulated in the 2003 National Education Law.

In Arif’s case, his GPA of 3.24 out of 4 has proved, to himself at least, that even though he is blind he can achieve just as much as his sighted peers.