On the Brighter Side

I most recently let loose my disdainful stance on inclusive education. But it's not all bad - let's explore that a little further.

Habermas would probably label me 'Situational Interpretive,' and that's great because I wouldn't want him to label me as any other. I really do feel that we're chasing our tails when we look at inclusive education from a 'critical theoretic' standpoint. Similarly with 'empirical analytic,' I simply cannot accept an all-encompassing viewpoint (or statistic) about inclusive education when I know that it is a field that is comprised of countless individuals. This might explain why I don't believe there will ever be a general protocol in the education system that works for all involved - there will always be individuals who just don't fit the mould.

To begin to accept that we are moving toward an inclusive system, teachers need to remind themselves to look at the bigger picture. Who says that emphasis on curricular outcomes need be the same for every student? I'm getting ahead of myself. ***

Cindy in Eastview's LAC offered some suggestions as to why we are moving into this system. Some were head-shakingly pessimistic, others were a little more positive such as that students with special needs will be surrounded by models of good behaviour when they are in regular classrooms. She also said that kids learn better in a regular classroom, but the critical thinker in me has no idea what basis that lies in.

A comment that really made an impression on me in support of inclusive education was from Lavoie's 'Beyond FAT City' video when he said that "self esteem has to come from regular educators." This made a lot of sense because he explained it in the context that students in special needs classrooms know that they will be graded as successful, more or less regardless of their academic achievement. The grades and the praise from special educators has become meaningless to them - it is praise and success in a regular classroom that they yearn for.

Going back to my ***ed paragraph, I can absolutely see the validity of the movement to inclusion for social reasons and for purposes of self esteem. After talking to so many educators during observation week, I left with a sense that they are very concerned about inclusion because of these students' inabilities to keep up with work and meet curricular outcomes. One can't blame them for this; a teacher's job is to teach the curriculum (that's their job on the surface of a nutshell, anyway) and the inclusion movement threatens teachers' success levels in this arena. But if we can shift our thinking, as life asks us to do now and then, to an ideal that we are teachers not only of curriculum but also the grand concept of life skills, maybe then we can be more accepting of having students in the classroom who will present new challenges. We can understand that we will be able to teach curriculum thoroughly to the majority of the class and we will do our best to teach curriculum to students with special needs at the same time. We can take comfort and pride that just being in a regular classroom might be one of the most valuable learning experiences a student has ever been subject to!

I may have just inadvertently explained this from a critical-theoretic standpoint, but I assure you that I am insistently situational. One could be very lost as a teacher in an inclusive classroom if there weren't always resources in place to help when help is needed! The ideas I've described above can't be beneficial to absolutely everyone; nothing can be beneficial to everyone! In a general sense, I do like the idea that students with special needs will have an enriched education by being in the mainstream, but some of those students might just be too disruptive to a classroom for learning to occur for everyone else. Some students might learn far better in a quiet setting where one on one help is always available.

Now I'm chasing my tail! Whatever; it's all situational.