By the end of this decade we may well look back on the beginning of the 1980’s as a watershed period in the provision of services for children with special needs in Australia. This period from 1979 to 1983 has been an era in which several state and national reports on needs in special education, teacher education and related areas have been published and placed before Federal and State governments for action. Yet, as fate would have it, this has been a period of great economic difficulty dominated by contractionary budgets at the Federal level with inevitable restraint at State levels. It has also been a period of record unemployment with the average person much more concerned about unemployment, family budgets and survival than social issues such as provision of appropriate and rightful resources to educate handicapped children and adults. Indeed, the visibility and relevance of education generally as a social and political issue has been subjugated by more pressing survival issues.

The need for capable, dedicated, and well trained teachers in special educational facilities for visually handicapped children is, and has always been crucial for the effective operation of those facilities. At the same time, the need for the above mentioned qualities in teachers of visually handicapped children has become more apparent in recent years, in the light of various changes which have occurred in the context of special educational services generally. These changes have also strongly affected the direction and scope of special educational research (Wedell & Roberts 1982).

Several recent reviews of research on teaching and in particular research on teacher effectiveness have identified three variables: pupil engaged time, direct instruction and efficient classroom management as the most significant instructional factors related to pupil achievement (Barnes, 1981; Brophy, 1979, 1980; Good, 1979, 1982; and Rosenshine, 1976, 1979). While these findings, within the context of basic skill instruction, are unequivocal and now largely accepted within the educational community, their overemphasis to the virtual exclusion of other important classroom variables has led a number of researchers and teacher educators to express some concern (Griffin, Webb and Confrey, 1981; Roehler and Duffy, 1981).

Ten Year 3 children from a Sydney primary school, identified by testing as the poorest readers out of the five classes in the grade, received remedial tutoring using a set of highly structured remedial materials. The tutoring involved twenty one volunteer mothers, and each mother worked with a child for two sessions a week to allow the child to receive four sessions of tutoring each week. The tutoring sessions involved (1) drill of single sounds and digraphs (2) tutoring and practice of word attack skills, and (3) reading practice using an appropriate reader, with verbal comprehension questions relevant to the reader. The volunteers kept records of each child’s performance during each session. After an average of one term of tutoring, the children demonstrated considerable improvement on test gains in comparison with gains made by a control group from the same classes.

Film and video play an important part in shaping our attitudes and increasing our understanding of children with special needs. Media of quality are now widely available in Australia, and the article discusses how this may be obtained by teachers. In this first of a series of occasional articles, media which introduces the field of special education are briefly reviewed in an annotated bibliography.

Art is for all human beings, including the handicapped. Visual Arts Education is able to provide an expressive form for communication, socialisation, creativity, self-expression, self-exploration and manipulation of the environment.