Development of Social Interaction Programs for Students with Special Needs in the Inclusive Education Environment

Abstract

The diversity that is acceptable to all schools is one of the key indicators in the success of inclusive education. Expanding meaningful social interaction opportunities for students with special needs in schools is important to develop. The school where this research conducted does not have systematic and optimal social interaction programs yet, it makes research becomes important to do. This study aims to obtain a description of the objective condition of the social interaction of students with special needs with other school members, and the description of the problem occurs in the social interaction of students with special needs in schools, and also obtaining an objective condition of social interaction program that has been implemented by the school to find out what is the need to be developed. The type of the research is research and development or R and D with ADDIE approach. "A Day Together" or "One Day Together" is a social interaction program for students with special education and education. This program contains activities of the member's school, especially regular students with special needs students for one day starting from the activities in the classroom during the learning process, at the rest time, until the end of the school time in a day.

The reflections of the inclusive student's active participation in out-of-class school activities on social development

“…These outputs are in parallel with the idea that social interaction and active participation open a social learning space (Bandura, 1999) advocated by social learning theory. The most important output of this research is that in addition to the studies revealing that out-of-class school activities have positive reflections on the social development of students (Muniroh, Soendari & Tarsidi, 2018;Sakellariou, 2020;Saygın & Karakaş, 2021), inclusive students also show positive signs on their social development. Sucuoğlu and Özokçu (2005) stated the necessity of teaching social skills outside the classroom to ensure the social skills development of inclusive students.…”

“…In his research on the role of social skills in inclusive education practices, Sakellariou (2020) found the opportunity to acquire social skills and accept differences with enriched inclusive practices. According to Muniroh, Soendari and Tarsidi (2018) proposes to develop social interaction opportunities by observing all the time spent by the student during the entrance and exit process of the school in the inclusive education environment. Similarly, Juvonen (2019) suggested proactive practices that connect different students to each other based on differences such as ethnicity, sexual orientation, and body weight in order to draw attention to the obstacles to social inclusion in schools.…”