Vasanta Ganesan has been a special education teacher in Malaysia for 14 years, but for the next five weeks, she will be helping out at Bendigo Special Developmental School.
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Ms Ganesan is one of eight teachers on exchange at Victorian special education schools as part of a program to provide insight into international best practices.
Ms Ganesan said the number of staff is one of the biggest takeaways from her experience so far.
"There [in Malaysia], for 12 students, there is only one teacher and one assistant teacher," she said.
"Here, I can see some having two students and one assistant staff, and some having one student and one assistant staff. It's a big difference."
Ms Ganesan said she hopes to share her experiences with Malaysia's minister for education.
"It's quite good when they have a lot of assistant teachers so they can guide the students well. If there's less assistant teachers, it's quite hard for us to teach them."
The program was organised and funded by Rotary clubs in Australia and Malaysia.
Australia was chosen because of its reputation as a leader in specialist education, said Rotary Director International of Bendigo South, Lindsay Jollie.
Bendigo SDS 'jumped' on the opportunity
Kirshy McAinch, the principal of Bendigo SDS, said the school jumped at the chance to teach and learn about special education across the world.
"Any time we can share our practice and learn from other practices is only going to benefit ourselves as practitioners and as special educators," Ms McAinch said.
"It's a great privilege to be selected and thought of as a place where people want to come and visit and see the success that we have in engaging students in their learning," said Ms McAinch.
Ms McAinch said students would also benefit from exposure to different cultures through the exchange.
"The teachers that are visiting us, they're obviously from a different country, but they also have different cultural practices, different religious beliefs," she said.
The visiting teachers will be teaching in the classrooms with the students, as well as meeting with curriculum leaders to learn about the Victorian curriculum.
They have also met with a career practitioner to see the post-school options offered to students at Bendigo SDS.
Georgina Sebar
Journalist at the Bendigo Advertiser. Email me at georgina.sebar@austcommunitymedia.com.au
Journalist at the Bendigo Advertiser. Email me at georgina.sebar@austcommunitymedia.com.au
