Beliefs and experiences of pedagogical workers about the use of creative movement when working with children with intellectual disabilities

The Master's thesis contains a theoretical and an empirical section. In the theoretical section, we began by defining students with special needs, wherein we focused most on children with intellectual disabilities and the education programmes in which they take part. We presented the importance of movement in a child’s holistic development. We also explained the scope of holistic learning, and we presented models of holistic teaching and the acquisition of knowledge. Furthermore, we also defined creative movement as an approach to teaching and as an educational method of working with children. We explained the role of the teacher in the incorporation of movement into the learning process. At the end of the theoretical section, we also presented the use of creative movement in working with people with special needs. We reviewed previous research done on the topic of learning and teaching through movement for people with special needs. This is followed by the empirical section, wherein we used a questionnaire to explore teachers’ attitudes towards creative movement at the Janez Levec Center Ljubljana (CJL). We wished to ascertain whether the teachers were familiar with the method of creative movement, where they had learned about creative movement, and how often they used it when working with children. We prepared workshops for teachers, where they were presented with concrete examples of the use of creative movement in acquiring, fortifying, and testing knowledge in various subject areas and with students of varying ages. All of the examples and activities were adapted to working with children with special needs. Of all the teachers who participated in the workshops, a group of three teachers used creative movement methodically in working with children. Their personal experiences in the classroom were verified through implementing a semi-structured interview. Our findings were that, despite their poor to mid-level knowledge of the use of creative movement in the learning process of children with intellectual disabilities, as well as their lack of or only occasional use of creative movement, the employees at CJL on average find creative movement to be positive. Furthermore, we improved their already positive attitudes by conducting our workshops