We Are Together kindergarten hires first overseas employee
José Alonso Aguilar Valera, Associate Professor of the National University of San Marcos (NUSM), Peru, was hired as staff psychologist in September 2021.
“I am half-Mexican and half-Italian,” the new employee says about his life story. “I know these two languages. But I didn’t learn any Russian until recently, so I spoke only English. However, I also wanted to speak with various people, such as market salespersons or bus conductors. I hope I’ve mastered Russian quite well in the three years I spent in KFU’s PhD course in developmental psychology.”
After graduating from NUSM, the interviewee stayed there as an employee and presented his thesis on logopedic testing for speech impairment diagnostics.
“Recently, psychologists have been very interested in autism spectrum disorders. I am also interested in this topic, as I am researching speech impairments in normotypical children and children with ASD,” says Valera. “In Peru, there are methods for diagnosing ASD in kids as young as one year of age. I’ve been working at the kindergarten for two months now, and I am quite vexed that Russia doesn’t use psychometric tests from various countries.”
He shared that Western approaches to testing are based on Alexander Luria’s qualitative approaches to disorders of higher mental functions, “This approach has significantly influenced global neuropsychology. As of now, there is ongoing work to create tests which combine the advantages of qualitative and quantitative approaches. However, it’s fair to say that quantitative evaluations of cognitive functions, currently popular in Europe and the Americas, also have many advantages. The overwhelming majority of tests using quantitative assessment have been validated using studies of patients with local pathology and the use of modern neuroimaging techniques when performing tests on healthy volunteers. A huge variety of tests aimed at studying one group of functions and varying in the degree of complexity and duration of the test allows specialists to diagnose the child as accurately as possible.”
He sees his own mission as uniting three worlds – a child’s internal world, their family, and the kindergarten – and foster conditions to effectively battle autism.
In the two months he has spent at the kindergarten, Associate Professor Aguilar Valera tested 28 kids, and 27 of them were admitted to the institution.
“Today, one of the most effective methods of correcting autism is behavioral therapy, or the method of applied behavior analysis. With this approach, all complex skills, including speech, creative play, the ability to look in the eyes, and others, are broken down into small blocks – actions. Each action is learned separately with a child, then the actions are combined into a chain, forming a complex action. During training in the ABA system, several specialists are engaged with the child every day – a defectologist, a music therapist, and an art therapist,” says he.
After presenting his PhD thesis (planned for next year), the scientist plans to combine his research and teaching and to work on a methodology of treatment of autism spectrum disorders.
Source text: Galina Khasanova
Translation: Yury Nurmeev