They share experiences around inclusive communication, its practice and some successful examples

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Esperanza Silva, president of the Chilean Actors Corporation; Juan Pablo Gómez, National Inclusion Coordinator of Santo Tomás; and Arlyn Orellana, academic from the University of La Serena, were invited to the third day of the Raúl Bitrán Chair.

Three speakers were part of the panel of the third day of the “Construction of Inclusive Universities” cycle of the Raúl Bitrán Nachary Chair of the University of La Serena. Esperanza Silva, Juan Pablo Gómez and Arlyn Orellana made an analysis of current communication and what society needs to be inclusive, using different technological means and successful experiences.

chair2The person in charge of starting was the actress Esperanza Silva, president of the Chilean Actors Corporation, who referred to the awareness that culture and art are part of our basic rights, and how the group created its first project carried out together with SENADIS: the Accessible Digital Book “The Creation”, which contains poems by Chilean authors such as Pablo Neruda or Vicente Huidobro and original stories presented with illustrations, sign language, narrations, description of the illustrations, text reading, music and effects sonorous

In addition, Silva provided details of the projects “Inclusive Chilean Cinema” and “Cinema in the Ear” and highlighted that “after years working to universalize access to our culture, I have realized that finally, seeing, hearing or reading is nothing more than understanding and feeling. And there is nothing more universal than emotions. If I feel, I am able to understand and enjoy what surrounds me. So it doesn't matter if what I perceive comes through my ear, my eye, or my finger, because all the information is stored in the same place: the heart, and that's the only thing that matters."

Juan Pablo Gómez, National Inclusion Coordinator of the Santo Tomás university, meanwhile, referred to technologies and how advances in devices such as cell phones have contributed to achieving more inclusive communication, but they are still underused, for which he proposes that “developing projects that incorporate the use of information and communication technologies can facilitate a qualitative improvement in the teaching and learning processes, develop capacities and competencies, attend to the uniqueness and individual needs of each student. ”.

chair3In this panel, the academic from the University of La Serena, Arlyn Orellana, spoke, highlighting that the world is a world of words, expressed: “how we configure individual and collective thinking depends on our way of speaking, how we find our place. in society and how we define it, we name it.”

In the same context, the academic invited “you to face the darkness of your own thoughts, the darkness of your own convictions. You may believe that you are not discriminators, that you do not have prejudices, but until each of us in society accepts that the culture that has brought us here has transmitted all this to us, we cannot ask the other to change (…) Here my message is so simple, but at the same time so difficult, recognize your own prejudices so that from that we can really change this society.”

Finally, Arlyn Orellana reflected: “the moment I realized that I was capable of feeling and thinking in such a negative way towards someone as adored as a son, I said this is where we start. Enough of this, but let's recognize that we do it because that will give us humility to be able to change, language, speech, acting, and ultimately how we constitute our world and order it in a better way."

The Raúl Bitrán Nachary Chair is organized jointly by the Directorate of Links with the Environment and the 1799 Project on disability and inclusion and addresses this year the theme “Construction of Inclusive Universities”, of which there are still 3 conferences to be developed, continuing on the 21st August at 11:30 hrs. with the activity titled “Dialogue of Knowledge: Sciences and local and traditional knowledge.

Written by Jenifer Araya, DIVEULS