Hitting right note for special needs

Hanan Elattar's, a music supervisor with the Sharjah Education Zone, has developed a pioneering music programme that helps pupils master new skills while promoting inclusion within mainstream schools.

Hanan Al Attar Hanan, supervisor of music for the Sharjah Education Zone. Jaime Puebla / The National

SHARJAH // Hanan Elattar’s eyes light up as she flips through a thick red binder stuffed with newspaper clippings about her pioneering work with special-needs pupils.

She points to photos of the pupils and fondly mentions them by name to explain how the music programme she developed has helped the youngsters to master new skills, while promoting inclusion within mainstream schools.

“Let me show you Abdulla here. Abdulla could not hold anything. He has loose hands, so he couldn’t play music,” Hanan says, pointing to a picture of a young Emirati boy.

“Then I started to say, ‘OK, we have the Smart Learning going on in the schools and every child has his own iPad, so why not? Let’s put the music for them on the iPad’.”

The simple idea led to the creation of the country’s first iPad orchestra for children with special needs, giving them a chance to play a musical instrument, simulated by an iPad application, in a band for the first time in their lives.

“It’s building their confidence. It’s changing their character,” says Hanan.

The iPad orchestra is one of three award-winning music initiatives she has launched as music supervisor for the Sharjah Education Zone.

Each is aimed at educating special-needs children through music while promoting tolerance in the mainstream schools where they study.

The initiative, For a Child’s Smile, was started as a pilot programme in 2006 as Hanan sought solutions to challenges of integration, which became mandatory after a federal law granted children with special needs equal access to education.

“As I know how music can help and how important is music therapy, I said, ‘OK, let’s do something,” says Hanan, who started her as a music teacher with the zone more than 20 years ago.

For A Child’s Smile soon grew to include a choir of 150 singers and a traditional orchestra made up of 70 musicians in Sharjah’s government schools. The iPad orchestra now features about 65 pupils.

Their integration into these programmes has helped to foster understanding and empathy of children with special needs by mainstream pupils, Hanan says.

The programme also helped to boost the school community’s pride in their pupils’ public performances.

“In the beginning we had difficulties with the parents, we had difficulties with the schools, but now we have got all over those difficulties,” she says.

“The parents, now they just come to me and they say, ‘Do whatever you want. We can’t even imagine that our children are doing this.’

“This is so touching you know? They say, ‘Really, we saw the change. It’s 180 degrees, there is a change happening’.”

One mother whose eight-year-old son was born with Collins syndrome, says the music programme has been life-changing for her son.

“It has changed his personality a lot,” the mother says. “It’s giving him a lot of happiness. He is always looking forward to any events that go with the project.

“After the event and he talks a lot a lot about it. He’s very proud. It makes the children feel like they are stars.”

For A Child’s Smile, which has won the Khalifa Award for Education and the Ministry of Education’s Emirates Award for Excellent, is a source of great pride for the emirate, says Mona Shouhil, deputy director of the Sharjah Education Zone.

“I am proud that Sharjah Education Zone is the first education zone that supports this kind of a project, because it’s coming from the vision of the country and the Ministry of Education to give the support for the disabled to have a normal life like others,” she says.

“They’re normal pupils and they have all the rights to have a normal life. So we can say that we are the first people to do that. This is a kind of pride for us.”

Hanan says the next step is to expand the programme across the country.

“I think the next step, inshallah, is that we have to first train teachers all over the UAE so we get them ready for that,” she says.

“We’re not talking about only confidence and things that you cannot feel. No, there are results that you can see, you can compare before and after how things are going.

“When I see those results in my children, I want to go to every child in the UAE and this is my dream. And why not? Why not?”

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