Caleb Gattegno: A Personal View - Claire-Marie Agnus
As a speech therapist I worked for many years with deaf children; today I divide my time between the Centre National Resource Centre Robert Laplane and the Centre pour enfants pluri-handicapés, both in Paris. At the Resource Centre, I am applied to for assistance by the staff who care for people suffering from rare disorders - deaf or not - whose multiple disabilities result in severe language impairment. I spend my time researching and developing tools to help them. At the Centre pour enfants pluri-handicapés, which deals with the same kind of children, I provide long-term speech therapy using creative technical means to deal with complex issues of oral and written language and by suggesting, where appropriate, alternative means of communication.
It was in a professional setting that I encountered Caleb Gattegno's pedagogy. Thanks to this approach, my ten-year-old adopted son, not a native French speaker and who had never attended school, learned to read French (that is to say, to produce the sounds of French on seeing the graphemes of the language) and this in just one week. Thank you Jorge Eliecer Agnus, thank you Suzanne Lachaise, thank you Caleb Gattegno!
Despite this impressive experience, believing that the principles were largely based on the aural aspects of language and therefore not applicable in the field of deafness, I did not consider applying this approach in my professional field.
Many years later my path again crossed that of UEPD. Faced with a child who had such difficulty in speaking that I was considering providing him with a speech synthesizer. (This type of machine has a keypad where each sound is represented by a letter.) There was a moment when the child - who had no other choice - was about to produce the word "photo" by pressing the F key of the "talking machine," that I was seized with a doubt. The colors of the reading charts came back to me and the rest followed, naturally leading me to UEPD. Thank you Wilfried!
Today I am happy to contribute to the spread of Gattegno's ideas by my participation on the UEPD Board of Directors, and in my workplace, through the development of adaptations of his pedagogy to people with rare disorders.
Claire-Marie Agnus
More information about Caleb Gattegno
For other personal views of Caleb Gattegno and his work written by teachers and pedagogues, you might be interested in The Gattegno Effect - 100 Voices... which can be read online as a web book.
If you wish to know about Gattegno’s academic and professional credentials and accomplishments, you will find his autobiographical notes on this site and elsewhere on the Internet.
Dr. Arthur Powell provides a more complete biography: Caleb Gattegno: A famous mathematics educator from Africa (PDF)
Dr. Roslyn Young has written a short introduction to Caleb Gattegno's Pedagogical Approach.
Caleb Gattegno : a personal point of view - Claire-Marie Agnus is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.