Laboratory of Special Education and Family Counseling

SPECIAL EDUCATION AND FAMILY COUNSELING LABORATORY

Funded project in progress

The laboratory has received generous funding from the Onassis Foundation to support children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) and their families by offering therapeutic services based on the theoretical premise of Systemic Behavior Analysis. Systemic Behavior Analysis is based on the combination of two epistemological paradigms: the Experimental Analysis of Behavior or Behavior Analysis and General Systems Theory.

This project may be considered important for both its epistemological and research contribution as well as its social impact since it addresses mostly families with an impoverished socioeconomic background. 

It is important that this effort is materialized in the School of Philosophy of the first higher-education Institution established in Greece, the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, with a long tradition of excellence.  

Both the funding and the educational institutions supporting this project provide a guarantee for the quality of therapeutic and educational services that will be offered in the Laboratory aiming to support children with ASD and their families through a systemic-holistic approach that aims to address infants’, children’s, and adolescents’ adaptation to the major systems in which they develop and interact – predominantly their families and their schools.

The founder and Executive Director of the laboratory and of this project is Professor Angeliki Gena, a researcher with major contributions in the field of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Professor Angeliki Gena is also a member of the Academic Advisors Committees of the Onassis Foundation (Grants for Hellenes and Foreigners) and a member of the Advisory Committee of the Foundation’s Special Education division. 

To achieve the aims of the laboratory, it is essential to have the laboratory well-equipped in order to offer up-to-date assessment, diagnostic, therapeutic, and educational services which requires the collaboration of highly specialized researchers, therapists, and special educators as well as access to the latest evaluation and diagnostic instruments for the purposes of psychological and educational evaluations.  The highly-qualified special educators and therapists should be able to provide:

• Thorough and reliable assessment of the child's needs with an interdisciplinary orientation.
• Assessment of the family’s needs as dictated by the discipline of Family Systems Therapy – a most effective and up-to-date psychological orientation to family functioning.
• A framework for therapeutic intervention which ensures both special education and therapeutic treatment of complex psychological needs that children with Disabilities and Special Educational Needs may encounter.
• Family counseling and psychoeducation, since the family is the "matrix" of the child's identity and provides the child with the security and support needed for children to acquire psychological resilience.
• Work within the school context where all children belong irrespective of the severity of their difficulties. The purpose of school interventions is to ensure that school becomes the point of reference for the child’s educational as well as psychological and social maturation.  School provides unique opportunities for social integration and emotional maturation that prepare the child for integration in the social contexts in which adults are called to participate in.

The Onassis Foundation's support is critical in attaining the aforementioned ambitious goals and in ensuring the charitable orientation of the Laboratory. All evaluations and interventions have been and will be free of charge.