4.1 Starting together
This tendency of paperwork to constrain actions and ignore the possibilities inherent in the context is not just an issue with IEP targets, of course. Consider some ways you might use planning to disrupt the tendency of individualised focus to exclude the individual.
Activity 8: Starting together
Watch this video by Paula Kluth, as you watch consider the following questions:
Transcript: Video 1: Ask autism expert Paula Kluth: Can inclusion work for my child in high school? (Brookes Publishing Co. 2010)
- What are your own views on this issue? Do you share the speaker’s enthusiastic tone?
- Are there other groups or ‘types’ of person to whom similar arguments need to be made to convince people that they should be in school?
- What is your view on the starting premise that the child was included prior to secondary education?
- In what ways might a creative response be possible in an early years or primary setting?
- How creative do you feel you can be in planning your practice and working context?
- Thinking about your working context, are there opportunities which might be available to you and young people you know?
Discussion
As you watched, you might have wondered why some secondary schools do successfully engage with learners who fall outside schools established ‘norms’ of behaviour and identity, but others struggle to do so? This is not a comfortable contradiction for anyone involved in education. The opportunity to make a difference through creative thinking of the sort suggested by Paula Kluth seems available to people working in all kinds of school roles too. In opening up thinking, you are also encouraged to think beyond the formal structures and to consider the wider school context. In doing so, you are more likely to consider the possibilities for social interactions which can arise throughout the day and beyond the typical classroom constraints.
The speaker seemed to base her guidance on a collective response to difference, seeing collaborative social interactions as the means for achieving an effective school response. Consequently, the approaches described were not focused upon individual challenges or subject areas but across the curriculum and across the range of difficulties pupils face in schools. You might have been aware too that this approach to opening up possibilities was much more than a single category issue. Disability categories as used in schools show strong gender and race bias in many systems (Cooc & Kiru, 2018). Gender is still a clear barrier to attendance for a range of cultural reasons in many countries, while the explicit racist policies of the United States (e.g. Jim Crow Laws), South Africa (e.g. Group areas act) and Empire (e.g. the slave trade) live on in the memory and understandings of many and are still exerting an influence in less formalised ways. In many countries it would still be necessary to fight for an openly gay person to attend school and their lives would be put at risk if they did so; and issues around how individuals define their gender are still hotly contested. Issues of religion, ethnicity, faith and economic well-being are also major barriers in many countries, as are difficulties arising from migration and language use. There are examples in all these instances where currently and historically the argument would be made that ‘they’ could not be educated and were in some way too much of a threat or too vulnerable to be included.