The job of specialised educator

The specialized educator helps people with disabilities or difficulties to become independent. With a dual mission: to contribute to their personal development and their integration into society. Each person has historical people who are related to their future job.

Abraham Maslow, born April 1, 1908 in New York and died June 8, 1970 in Menlo Park, California, is an American psychologist considered the father of the humanist approach. He is known for his explanation of motivation by the hierarchy of needs. Abraham Maslow remains a reference for many psychologists all over the world.

He was the eldest son of seven children of Russian immigrants of Jewish origin who arrived in the United States less than a year before his birth. After the Second World War, Maslow began to question how psychologists had arrived at their conclusions and, although he did not disagree entirely, he had his own ideas about understanding the human spirit.

This hierarchy is generally represented in the form of a pyramid that, from the bottom to the top, distinguishes five levels of need:

• basic physiological needs
• second, safety and protection needs
• Then comes the need for belonging, social needs that reflect the will to be part of a family, a group, a tribe
• then comes the need for self-esteem (for psychological needs)
• and finally, at the top of the hierarchy, the needs to be fulfilled.

Jean Piaget, born on August 9, 1896 in Neuchâtel, Switzerland and died on September 16, 1980 in Geneva, is a biologist, psychologist, Swiss logician and epistemologist known for his work in developmental psychology and epistemology through what he called genetic epistemology.

He was the eldest son of Arthur Piaget (1865-1952), professor of medieval literature, and of the French Rebecca Jackson (1872-1942), daughter of William Fritz Jackson.

At the age of eleven, Jean Piaget, a student at the Latin College of Neuchâtel, writes a short commentary on an albino sparrow seen in a park.

Piaget divides the child’s psychological development into several periods, each divided into stages, conditioning the next. The different moments of development are:

• The period of sensorimotor intelligence (from birth to 2 years), divided into 6 stages.
• The period of preoperative intelligence (from 2 to 6 years), divided into 2 stages.
• The period of concrete operations or operative intelligence (from 6 to 10 years).
• The period of formal operations (10 to 16 years).

I chose these two historical characters, because in my future job, I’m gonna have to use their theories with people in need. They are important because these theories will guide my future interventions.

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