Institutional Distinctiveness

The Xavier’s Resource Centre for the Visually Challenged (XRCVC) – resource centre for students with disabilities on campus, has always strived to bring in the best inclusive education practices on campus and to be a leader at the national level in the field of inclusion and access for persons with disabilities.

The Centre reached out to a total of 4971 beneficiaries in 2019-20

Students with disabilities at St. Xavier’s College: 81

Training and Guidance for Persons with Disabilities (Non-Xavierite): 729

Awareness Programs: 3538

Reading without Seeing Workshops (Assistive Technology Awareness):110

Stakeholder Trainings – Content Creation Inclusive Education (teachers, special educators, etc): 479

Some key areas of strides during this academic year:

Expanding the Horizon:

The first student with blindness enrolled for BSc- Chemistry, Botany and Zoology course. XRCVC provided trainings to teaching and non-teaching staff as also purchased the necessary equipment to make our labs accessible.

The college management permitted a student whose disability condition would not permit him to participate in full time undergraduate program, to have a college experience to build life skills and have a holistic learning exposure, as a Guest student who could attend classes of choice and will be provided an attendance certification without undergoing evaluations. The student had a positive and enriching experience.

IUA MoU: The Inclusive University Alliance work formalised as an MoU between leading academic institutes in the country working on Inclusive education. The IUA has started holding monthly meetings to begin and plan its work as a collective.

Raised Line Foundation (RLF) MoU: XRCVC – RLF MoU is aimed for producing tactile diagram study sets for students with blindness. The first set of volumes being worked upon is Geometry Diagrams for 1st-10th Grades.

Social Alpha MoU for Building Assistive Technologies: To meet the Made in India assistive technologies demand, Social Alpha, a venture capital initiative supporting the Assistive technologies development has collaborated with XRCVC. The Centre will provide its domain and technical expertise to Social Alpha to ensure that relevant and user need based technologies come to the market.

CSMVS MoU for building accessibility in the museum: XRCVC has provided training and expertise to the museum at Mumbai for building accessibility to the museum experience for visitors with disabilities.

Research and Knowledge Building: The XRCVC released its research report “Degrees of Accessibility” that looks at design and teaching pedagogy ideas of an accessible geometry kit for students with blindness. Further XRCVC has set up an Inclusive Education Resource Page on its website with data related to its various endeavours for others to use and replicate. (https://sites.google.com/xaviers.edu.in/xrcvc-inclusive-education/xrcvc)

Responding to the COVID Challenge: Online learning poses new challenges for Inclusion. XRCVC has taken a proactive step to address this. It has built a resource kit for educators to make online learning accessible which will also be used for training of teachers and educators.

(https://sites.google.com/xaviers.edu.in/xrcvc-inclusive-education/xrcvc/inclusion-services-at-higher-education/new-challenges-of-inclusion-in-online-learning)