Innovative Campus summer school makes physical education inclusive

InPhysEd is all set to run in July

The EIT Health InPhysEd Summer School will be organised by Trinity College Dublin, running between 7-12 July 2019 in Dublin and 14-19 July in Munich. The school will encourage participants to develop and pitch solutions to the challenge of including students with intellectual disability (ID) within the physical education (PE) class. The EIT Health InPhysEd Summer School will be organised by Trinity College Dublin, running between 7-12 July 2019 in Dublin and 14-19 July in Munich.

The school will encourage participants to develop and pitch solutions to the challenge of including students with intellectual disability (ID) within the physical education (PE) class.

Trinity College Dublin will run the InPhysEd Summer School between 7th to 12th July in Dublin and in Munich between 14th to 19th July.

It will encourage students to develop and pitch solutions to the problem of including students with intellectual disability (ID) within the physical education (PE) class. To promote healthier living, trainee teachers, health science students and people with ID will co-learn and co-design methods to foster social inclusion, create inclusive learning spaces and develop early educational interventions.

As experts on their own well-being and on the experience of exclusion/inclusion, people with ID will take the lead at the summer school and will be central to the design, delivery and problem solving involved. People with ID as Physical Activity Leaders (P-PALs – trained by EIT health Campus) will be invited to run training sessions on physical activity.

Students with ID from the TCD School of Education Certificate in Arts, Science and Inclusive Applied Practice (ASIAP), who develop individual business plans as part of their coursework, will be invited to lead supported entrepreneurial skill and business plan clinics drawing on their knowledge and experience of the process. This will be in tandem with students from the TCD Lunchbox entrepreneurial hub.

The attendees will develop skills in critically and creatively assessing problems that exist within the delivery of physical education at all school levels, in addition developing skills in designing and pitching solutions with an entrepreneurial mindset.

Trinity College Dublin (TCD) are working in collaboration with the Technical University of Munich (TUM) in designing, delivering and promoting the summer school with the second week based on the TUM campus.

TUM is one of Europe’s top universities and is one of Germany’s first Universities of Excellence. It achieves impressive scores in all international rankings and its mission is to add value to society.

As at TCD, researchers at TUM believe that an interdisciplinary approach is the key to solving the major challenges of the future and the idea for the summer school builds on previous research carried out by both universities.

Trinity’s P-PALs project was about empowering people with intellectual disabilities to make their communities healthier by becoming Physical Activity Leaders, which culminated in a celebratory sports day, described in the video above.

Participants developed the skills and confidence needed to lead weekly sports and activity sessions. This saw participants take charge of activity sessions for their friends, their peers and staff in order to get everyone more active.

The day involved a range of games between teams of people training by the PPALs. The leaders were presented with their Certificates of Completion by the Minister for Health Promotion, Catherine Byrne, TD and Ireland Rugby fullback Rob Kearney.

Speaking at the Games, Minister Catherine Byrne said: “I’m delighted to celebrate here with the PPALs and support their achievement. The National Physical Activity Plan is about getting everyone more active. People with disabilities and older people are explicitly named as target groups in the plan. We must encourage partnerships like this one between Trinity and Age & Opportunity, if we want to try to reach people who we can’t reach in other ways. Everyone deserves the chance to be active and that’s what we’re seeing today.”

Prof Mary McCarron, Director of the Trinity Centre for Ageing and Intellectual Disability, who was also at the event described it as a “truly fantastic” day.

“I think the P-Pals programme has been just an outstanding, fantastic programme, really focusing on building physical activity leaders amongst people an intellectual disability, equipping people to go back out into their own communities and to lead physical activities.”