Practicing sport is of great importance for the individual and his or her productive life. Basically, every human being can exercise. Older, younger, sick and healthy people, people without any obstacles in life, as well as people with obstacles. With that said, people with special needs, in our case intellectual disabilities, are perfectly fit to practice sport. Exercising has been shown to have a positive effect on our lives, regardless of our abilities. Most research up to date has been conducted on individuals who do not have any special needs. Very few, too few are based on people with specific needs or disabilities. For this reason, our goal was to do a research on the sport of swimming. More specifically, we wanted to identify the swimming program needs for people with intellectual disabilities and their organization, determining the eligibility conditions for these programs, learning about the methods used to teach swimming and identifying potential participation in special Olympics In a survey we conducted, 79 (seventy-nine) members of Special Olympics were included, 60 (sixty) of these members responded. The survey was sent via email to organizations where people with intellectual disabilities are members. Our main interest was to find out what the conditions for conducting the swimming programs are, what type of swimming exercises are being practiced, their participation in Special Olympics and which methods are known and being used. We came to the conclusion that most organizations do conduct swimming programs and also participate in the swimming sport in Special Olympics. Furthermore, we also found that the conditions for teaching swimming are problematic. We came to the conclusion that the majority of survey respondents believe that the curriculum also requires changes regarding the special education programs. It was also very clear that the Halliwick Concept is well known by the organizations which participated in the survey. The conclusions being made in this master thesis can in the future be helpful for changing certain aspects in this area.
|