Today we watched William Ury's TED talk. He presented a general idea of how to stop war on the planet through a vehicle of hospitality and tourism. It was pretty wild. There are different ways to interpret his talk, and I'll get to that, but as I sat down to write this blog I thought about how in many classes, we are presented with material and then immediately asked for our thoughts (even though today we had ample time to discuss it groups) and how I often feel on the spot with that sort of thing. I use this as a springboard to express the value I place on having this blog to come to, where I can just type and type and type - it really helps me figure out what I think!

Ury wasn't off his rocker; something that he did which hit home for me was his simple comparison of the present middle east to WWII stricken Europe. I am definitely excited to see, over the next 60 years, if we as a world can figure out how to fix our broken parts. But I digress.

More pertinent to me is Ury's 'balcony' from which we can gain a different perspective on our most every struggle, no matter how big or small. We talked about this in class and I left feeling like I just wanted to go out into the world and focus on perspectives and goals rather than rooted positions. I'll always take Ury's balcony with me so that I can always have a 'third side' to look at things from.

When we moved on to the discussion of how Ury could apply to our case study from the previous week, I felt like we came full circle to the idea that inclusive education is very situational. This could be construed as frustrating, but it isn't, because I think that the 'third side/balcony' idea was a refreshing way to step back and revisit how we approach a lot, if not all, of our conflicts in life. Outstanding!

End thought.

New thought:

I had a thought during class. It started when Nellis (2011:) talked about inclusive education in the Canadian context that although we are seeing an emergence of more students with disabilities taking advantage of the public education system that there remained an issue of underachievement...

A few weeks ago my wife's hormones started shifting slightly back toward what I'm sure we'd define as equilibrium. In the process, her milk supply became slightly stifled - not ideal with a baby of four months. She said that it was very frustrating for her because the baby asks for one thing: milk - she wasn't able to provide that for her and it caused her to question her ability as a mother, even though she cognitively and consciously knew that this wasn't being called into question at all. This situation, for the record, cleared its self up and all is well.

This was, in my opinion, a parallel story to why so many of us get our backs up about inclusive education: we are afraid that we won't be able to properly fulfil our role as a teacher.

So often it has been repeated in our semester that we need to look at ourselves and our own behaviour as teachers, but mostly this has been in the context of classroom management. Evidently it is just as applicable in IE. If I was a teacher, I think that I would be apprehensive to learn that I will have a full time student in my classroom who is disabled - it changes everything! Wouldn't it be easier to just... not have that student in my classroom? Probably. But the new question for me today is what am I so afraid of?