More and more often we meet children with special needs in kindergartens and schools. Long-term sick children also belong to this group. One of the long-term diseases is diabetes, which requires constant care for regulated sugar. Younger children cannot or have problems to manage diabetes on their own, so the Act on Guidance of Children with Special Needs allows them to have an assistant.
In the thesis, we focused on the role of the assistant for a child with diabetes. We were interested what his tasks are, how he cooperates with all the participants in the educational process, and what is their opinion about the assistant's provision of educational assistance to this child and his classmates. We were also interested in how the presence of the assistant affects on social inclusion.
We made the research with the help of a half-structured interview, in which we included the teacher, parents, classmates, the child's former assistant and the child with diabetes.
On first, it seems that the assistant of a child with type 1 diabetes cares only for his disease, but this job is much more complex. With the start of the job, the assistant also takes the role of teacher's assistant, because he helps to this child and also helps to other classmates in performing of learning tasks. With his presence and work, he also influence on the social integration of all present in the department.
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