The project includes activities and intellectual outputs to ensure the adaptation of individuals with disabilities to the higher education process and subsequent life processes, to increase their accessibility to fundamental rights, to raise awareness of disabled and non-disabled individuals on disability and disability rights. The main objective of the project is to prepare a curriculum which includes subjects such as disability and disability rights based on human rights, disability legislation, employment opportunity, employment and social security legislation, tax legislation, legal regulations within the scope of criminal law, principally basic communication, training of sign language, communication techniques with subtitle, empathy, body language, comparative disability legislation and practices and to provide the placement of this curriculum among the curriculums of higher education institutions. The basic modules of the curriculum prepared within the scope of the project will be extended to the distance education module as well as formal education, and accessibility to the information within the scope of the curriculum will be increased. Survey will be conducted to the target group determined in the first phase of the project. Participants, who are the representatives of the universe to be conducted survey, will be the disabled and non-disabled students of the coordinator Gaziantep University (Turkey), Uludağ University (Turkey), (Poland) AHE, (Greece) University of Thessaly, which are the other strategic partners of the project. The number we envisaged for the participants has been planned to be approximately 500 people from the coordinator university and the universities which are the strategic partners of the project. Participants of these activities will be determined by demanding in writing from public and private institutions and organizations and non-governmental organizations carrying out activities related to disability and disability rights. The profile of the participants who will participate in dissemination and promotion activities are the students, staff and academicians who are the target audience of the project in the coordinator and partner countries. Activities and outputs of the project; awareness raising and evaluation meetings for the in-house target group and dissemination meetings to be held apart from the external multiplier events, turning the analysis results of the surveys conducted within the scope of the project into booklet and report, ensuring that scientific publications to be prepared as a result of survey studies are also reference sources for those working in this field, creation of a formal and virtual information sharing platform in electronic environment for the opinions and suggestions of academicians working in this field, in cooperation with coordinator and partner universities, creation of a formal and virtual information platform to have opinions of academicians in universities of partner countries and in coordinator university for the curriculum study to be prepared within the scope of the project, making a part of the curriculum an open educational resource for students through distance education, sharing the curriculum and analysis study with the community through the associated partners, as a result of the project, a proposal text has been prepared by Gaziantep University and it has been planned to share it with local and national decision makers to support policy reform. After the end of the project, Gaziantep University will be the coordinator of the use, dissemination and sustainability of the intellectual outputs. Gaziantep University will provide guidance on the placement of the curriculum to be prepared within the scope of the project in the course catalogs of other universities and on the development of its content. Regulations on current developments will be presented to the Higher Education Council as a policy proposal. In order to make the project sustainable, after the project has been completed, new projects will be prepared related to the project subject. In the later period, curriculum presentations will be held in training units of Turkey Bar Association, the Turkish Medical Association, Bar Association and the Medical Chamber and other relevant professional chambers and contribution will be made in the reorganization of vocational training programs within itself. The outputs to be obtained from the curriculum through the disabled units of universities, which are our transnational strategic partners, will be published on the web sites of universities in the international platform.
Our responsibility in the project is to remove idea-based barriers to the participation of the disabled into social life and direct all available resources and scientific accumulation of this content towards this issue in order to discover the potential that the disabled have. The intellectual outputs emerged from the implementation of our project focused on raising awareness of “disability and disability rights” among persons with disabilities and other individuals of society by higher education students as mentors. In the creation and implementation of the content of the “Disability Rights and Problems” course, one of the intellectual outputs, cooperation was built among universities, nongovernmental organizations for the disabled, public administrations and society, which is included in the European Union’s priorities. The course was designed to spread the cognitive transformation about the disabled and disability rights from university students to society. Project outputs contributed to the improvement of disabled individuals’ access to information about their rights in all areas, public services for them, participation in business life and their rights afterwards, participation in administrative and decision-making processes.
Our purpose in applying to the project is to include a course in the curriculum, which will improve higher education students’ knowledge, skills, attitudes and awareness of the disabled and disability rights on the basis of human rights and in cooperation with Law and Medicine as two human-based fields of science. In addition, the absence of a course on “The Rights and Problems of the Disabled” that deals directly with disability rights particularly in the curriculum of Faculties of Law in the Turkish Higher Education System was seen as a critical need. This need came up in the communications held with Non-governmental Organizations for the Disabled as well. In the project application period, it was seen that studies in the related literature mostly looked into the deficiencies in the physical infrastructure arrangements for the disabled. However, the starting point of our project is to achieve “Cognitive transition from higher education into society” in individuals concerning the rights and problems of persons with disabilities. The formation of all the intellectual outputs and the activities conducted within the scope of the project serve this main purpose.