Together with the increasing number of special needs children enrolled in educational programmes with adapted implementation and additional professional assistance also, the need for professional workers offering them support during their inclusion into these programmes heightens. This support, referred to as additional professional assistance, is provided by an expert, specialised in the field of special needs that children require. In the domain of education of the deaf and hard of hearing, the professional workers offering such assistance are teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing. The majority of them are mobile teachers, which suggests they are simultaneously working at more than one institution. Their work obligations include a wide range of tasks – planning and implementing assistance to a child and cooperation with their parents, kindergarten and school teachers and other professionals in contact with the child. Together they endeavour to organise and evaluate types of assistance and, if required, teachers also provide information about child's characteristics and their functioning and introduce appropriate teaching strategies. In Slovenia, the work of a mobile teacher of the deaf and hard of hearing has been, to a lesser extent, already researched, however, no in-depth study focused solely on this profession has yet been conducted. Every group of special needs children requires suitable assistance approaches, methods and techniques, which applies to the deaf and hard of hearing as well. Since the deaf and hard od hearing are a very heterogeneous group of special needs children, assisting them necessitates adapted working practices, different conditions, teaching aids and organisation of work.
The empirical part examined various aspects of providing additional professional assistance by mobile teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing. Six interviews with mobile teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing employed at Zavod za gluhe in naglušne Ljubljana, Center za sluh in govor Maribor and Center za komunikacijo, sluh in govor Portorož were conducted. The research has indicated that working conditions and work organisation of mobile teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing have ameliorated over the years, yet there is still room for improvement in certain domains where further changes are required. The interviewees' most common tasks proved to be direct assistance for the child and cooperation with other professional workers and parents; the latter was evaluated as satisfactory by all the participants. Since additional professional assistance is predominantly carried out individually, mobile teachers of the deaf and hard of hearing are able to include elements of different methods and approaches. The study also revealed that half of the participants consider their work space and institutions' material conditions as adequate, whereas the other three disagree. In the sphere of organisation, the most commonly mentioned difficulty was setting timetables. The interviewees emphasised freedom at work as the main advantage of this job, whereas in terms of its challenges, there was a greater variety of answers: spanning from working conditions, cooperation and professional support to systemic deficiencies.
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