It’s a kindergarten class, which looks like so many others, with small benches, drawings on the wall, boxes of educational materials… and children playing around, under the kind gaze of their teacher. However, this Class of Ladybugs, the title of the documentary by director Benjamin Laurent, is not entirely ordinary. This is an autism kindergarten teaching unit (UEMA). Recommended by the third autism plan (2013-2017), these specialized systems make it possible to accommodate, in small numbers, young children with an autism spectrum disorder, within a traditional nursery school.
For three months, Benjamin Laurent immersed himself in the daily life of one of these units, in Grigny (Grand Lyon). We discover Liam, Zayim, Médine, their specialist teacher, Odile, and a whole team of educators and professionals (psychologist, psychomotor therapist, speech therapist, etc.). Here, the therapists move around to intervene in the class, and not the children who go to their offices for their treatment.
This on-site presence is a difference from other specialized systems for students with disabilities, such as ULIS (localized units for educational inclusion), and a “real strength,” underlines the teacher, “because we can constantly discuss support children.”
A positive development
Another particularity is that these young students do not yet have the prerequisites for schooling when they arrive in UEMA. Those who had a first experience in a regular class found themselves in difficulty. So, the previous year, Médine had gone to school for a maximum of three hours a week, and it was “very trying” both for his mother and for him, says his referent. “We did not give him the opportunity to show who he was,” she continues, emphasizing that, in the unit, with the work of professionals, “he was able to gradually regain confidence in the adults who accompanied him “.
For the team, the first objective is to first teach these children with autism spectrum disorders to look at others, to interact… It is only later that academic skills are worked on. A cocoon for these students with very special needs, UEMA is not closed in on itself. Children from ordinary classes are invited to come and do activities with their little friends. Throughout this sensitive documentary, we see Liam, Médine and Zayim open up and progress. A positive development also witnessed by their parents and professionals.
Will these early care measures, which are still little known, make it possible to change the trajectory of these young people with autism? At a time when the place of children with disabilities in schools is increasingly called into question, notably by certain teachers, Benjamin Laurent’s film is in any case a plea for living together, and the acceptance of differences.
