Why Practice Inclusion?

So, as promised, here is the companion piece to my "Philosophy of Inclusion":

Why Practice Inclusion?

It follows that children with special needs should be included in the classroom for the same reasons that children of different cultural and socioeconomic backgrounds should be included:  it is ultimately good for the individuals and good for the general society.  

By meeting the diverse needs of diverse learners, we are telling our children and ourselves, that we are valuable, that we all have a place in this world and that we all have a right to succeed and experience health and joy and pursue our potential to the best of our abilities.  On a fundamental level, children are more apt to solve problems together, to arrive at real discoveries, cognitively, socially and emotionally when they try to collaborate.  True collaboration requires a person to see things from a fellow’s angle, to really listen and to then work and build off of that knowledge.  

If everyone felt and thought the same, if everyone arrived at school, at the lab, at work or at home with the same set of abilities and strengths, collaboration would not happen.  Humans fill in the gaps of knowledge and experience through diverse knowledge and experience.  In outcome-based, standards-based, conformity-based education, the lack of collaboration and the dearth of opportunities for developing creative and critical thinking skills may be an issue.  Graduating students who are not so great at thinking creatively and critically may pose problems for our society in the future.  Temple Grandin has become one of the world’s best architects and designers of humane cattle processing facilities because she can literally think like a cow.  It is now thought that Einstein arrived at his theories because he lacked executive function control.  Such “gate keeping” control might have stopped him from obsessing over and arriving at those same theories.  Individuals with diagnosed spectrum disorders are now seen as uniquely qualified for employment in high tech jobs.  The percentage of employees with spectrum disorders at companies like Microsoft and Apple is thought to be quite high.  It is becoming increasingly apparent that it is just plain ignorant and dangerous for our society to practice exclusion.  Economies and environments need fixing.  Cancer needs a cure.  These problems are likely to be solved by the most creative teams of thinkers, people who can cross disciplines and barriers of all kinds to find answers.  

In our class, the best pirate ships are built by rangy, rag-tag multi-age teams of excited kids.  There is the kid who can write, who labels the ship with a name.  There is the artist who fashions the skull and crossbones on the paper flag.  There is the child who is obsessed with car washes and understands mechanics to the degree that she devises a working rudder (I’m not kidding).  There is the three-year-old who quietly fits tall tubes into hollow blocks in order to create masts while her fellow six-year-old boys fight about who has the right to be captain.  There is the boy who is content to be First Mate because the First Mate “reads the maps,” and there is the highly verbal child who pretends to be “Polly the Parrot, piping proudly in her cage while she paddles.”  And there are the quiet children who like to watch the whole show, who observe for days and then find a quiet corner to construct their own tiny pirate ships out of clay or small blocks.  And there is the boy who seems not to participate at all, but goes home to teach his little sister how to build pirate ships.  The pure joy and excitement of collaboration alone is reason enough to include all children in this classroom.  There is a place and a purpose for each and every child.

All students walk through the classroom door with an experience and background I must work to understand and empathize with if I am to practice my craft with skill and compassion.  Last summer, Dodge Nature Preschool invited a small panel of parents to share with our staff their personal experiences of parenting an autistic child.  The listening experience was humbling, moving and eye-opening.  As with all kids who walk through our door, the school experience is but one facet of a child’s very complicated life.  For special needs parents, and for all parents, the wish is for their child to be accepted for who they are, valued and respected.  

For myself, as a parent, my greatest fears for my children center around issues of exclusion.  I fear that my children will be rejected, turned away, misunderstood or undervalued.  Conformity often seems like a potentially dangerous value and social edict.  Here is a little anecdote from my family life:

One of my kids struggles with organization of information and attending to tasks that do not interest her (who doesn’t?!).  In school, one of her teachers repeatedly marked her down for “disorganization” and “having a messy desk” (this last was actually inserted as an line item addendum in her year-end rubric-based report card).  Of course, her teacher’s observations came as no surprise to me, or her father.  We have been hounding this child to stay on household tasks, clean up her room, and get out the door in a timely fashion since birth.  What did surprise, and annoy me, was that her teacher continued to go out of her way to decry this habit of disorganization, despite the fact that my daughter managed to get stellar grades and get her work done.  During a brief fall conference, when the teacher expressed initial concern about this disorganization, my husband and I called our daughter “on the carpet” in front of her teacher, working to respect the teacher's expectations, encourage responsibility and value her point of view.  To our true surprise, our kid dug in her heels, defiantly refusing to show remorse or to abdicate to the teacher’s request for more organization.  

my kid:  selective focus at work

This might be a rather classic example of how kids with executive function challenges are difficult to motivate because they lack that sense of urgency that keeps the rest of us on our toes.  It's also an example of how we think about each other, what we value and the role of conformity.  My daughter may never suffer from the seasonal nightmares that seem afflict my husband and I all these years later each fall when school starts up again:  you’re late for school, you forgot your homework, you don’t remember your room number, you forgot to put on pants… Jody Van Ness of the Fraser School pointed out in a lecture that executive function challenged people tend to fix absolute focus on things that interest them, causing them to make some of the greatest breakthroughs in science, literature and the arts.  Van Ness’ insights make me realize that the composition of my daughter’s brain may just allow her the selective focus, and the right lack of guilt to discover how to fix the hole in the ozone or to cure cancer.

Acceptance and empathy seem like far more healthy values than conformity.  Through diversity in the classroom, we see what we have in common, that we are all on a spectrum of experience.  Seeing our commonality gives us access to empathy and understanding, making it far more likely that we can get along and work toward common goals, meeting each other’s needs.  At Dodge, every fall, we invite all families to sit down with us privately before school starts.  We use an excuse of a tool called the “Intake Form.”  This questionnaire really just gives us an opportunity or excuse to sit down and get acquainted.  These initial meetings are invaluable, particularly when they are less formal, more chatty and more personal.  We learn so much about the child when we learn about the family, and that is because we are seeing things from their point of view.  To my mind, really valuable education is necessarily personal, and personalized for the needs of each learner.  When we value and respect the individual, we increase awareness of “the other” and come that much closer to a civil, collaborative society.  

When I was in high school, in the 1980s, “the special ed kids” were isolated from the student body.  They had their own mysterious room, they walked the halls at odd times.  They were a secret and strange entity that seemed aside from our general population.  The kids sat at their own table in the cafeteria, and most distressing, they policed the high school grounds, picking up the trash and litter of the “regular kids.”  On a daily basis, these kids were made fun of by the basketball team, publicly derided by an esteemed subset of our community.  It is hard to shake those memories.  In those years, I was an outsider too, transferring in from another school and then beset by an illness that left me suffering from the side effects of heavy drugs that altered my appearance drastically.  I too was made fun of by the basketball team, made to feel other and different and therefore less.  My tenth grade biology teacher had me stand up in class and used me as a living example of the side effects of steroids.  It was the eighties, but looking back, it seems like the Dark Ages.  

Holly:  "We all learn differently."

I like to think we’ve come a long way since then.  My twins have attended school with a handful of special needs kids who are in the girls’ minds and perceptions accepted and integrated in the common experience.  From kindergarten on, the girls have had personal relationships with these kids, and their aides.  Their questions have been answered and we are happy to see that our girls and their classmates see differences in each other and value and accept those differences.  For now, it is not “cool” to make fun of people for being different.  When an adult asked my daughter Holly what was "wrong with" her classmate, she said, "What do you mean?  Zach is just Zach.  He learns differently.  We all learn differently."

I’m sure the parents of the special needs kids have stories to tell that I have yet to hear, but my general perception of inclusion, and that of my own kids is vastly different from my own childhood experiences.  Inclusion seems to be expected as the norm in public school these days, and is not the exception.  If the education system here in Minnesota has managed to do that alone, to make inclusion the norm, then it has succeeded in one very important way and I have a lot of hope for the future of our society, as we are raising a generation of kids who value their differences.  

Here at Dodge, we are working to understand how to better serve the needs of all children.  We invite your visits, your ideas and your criticisms.  We want to continue to talk about inclusion, so please accept our invitation and join the conversation:  mbrand@dodgenaturecenter.org.

If you haven't yet, you should read, "Welcome to Holland," by Emily Perl Kingsley.

Philosophy of Inclusion

Well, helllo again!

The Catalyst has been on a seasonal hiatus of sorts, sort of too busy to write about what's been going on.  And so much is going on, it's rather a pity not to document it.  I pledge to write more, if anybody is still reading!

So, lately inclusion has been on my mind.  I recently attended the Inclusion Institute at Concordia University here in Saint Paul (a joint venture between the Center for Inclusive Childcare and Concordia), and I completed some attendant course work, which required me to think about inclusion, and write about it.  Of course, inclusion was already on my radar, and I wound-up at the Institute precisely because I'm interested in supporting the increasing number of special needs students that are enrolling here at Dodge Nature Preschool.  But putting my experiences and thoughts about diversity and inclusion in the classroom into words was a great excersise and I wound-up even more committed to the mission of inclusion.  So, while this is a bit of a cheat, I'm going to crib from my own paper right here in the blog.

I was asked to compose a Philosophy of Inclusion, and here is an abridged version of my Philosophy:

I have a hard time imagining working in a classroom that does not promote inclusion.  My personal experience and my life, each and every day, is enriched by working with children with special needs, and their families, in the context of my classroom, and nature-based education.  At Dodge Nature Preschool, we are in the fortunate position of offering a very flexible and open-ended early childhood experience.  Because we believe that early childhood curriculum is, and should be, emergent, that is, it is informed and led by the interests of the child first, we are well-suited to meeting the needs of all kids, including those with special needs. 

I see endless opportunity in the act of enrolling students with special needs.  We are saying to the community at large, “We welcome everyone here,” and we are saying to each other, as a school community, “We value differences in the human experience and we cherish learning more about those differences.”  We like to think that our school community is enlivened by diversity, across cultures, economies, classes and needs; kids with “special needs” are like all children in that every student has a unique set of needs. 

Because we believe that young children learn best through building a social scaffolding (we are proponents of social constructivism), we are in a good position to meet the needs of "special needs" kids.  Our classrooms are social laboratories, where the emphasis is on learning about differences, promoting tolerance and developing empathy.  Children develop as citizens in the group setting.  Kids (and all people, I think) become functioning members of society through:

-trying, and struggling, to cooperate and collaborate  

-trying to meet the general needs of the whole group

-trying to meet the needs of fellow individuals

-trying to help one another

-trying to control impulses

-trying to practice patience & empathy

*Note the emphasis on the word, "trying."

It is important to note, that nature-based education is a sort of “companion piece” to social development.  The child interacts with the nature world, and the seasons, through first-hand experience.  It is “come as you are” on the child’s end, and on nature’s end.  Each must interact with the other, day in and day out.  Coping skills are developed, as nature is as ever-changing as the child and she must learn to adapt to and learn from its differences.  The child comes to see herself in the context of the larger world, a part of nature, rather than aside from, or excluded from nature—the ultimate inclusion!

At Dodge, our theory of inclusion, includes the notion that children have rights.  They have the right to express themselves, to get their needs met and to be treated with dignity and respect (the natural world, all of its flora and fauna, basically has the same rights too).  We also believe in and practice the theory of “you can’t say you can’t play.”  Children may not practice exclusion at school.  Although the practice of exclusion seems to be a sort of developmental milestone, kids and teachers must work hard here to prevent any peer from being or feeling "left out."  Our approach is to discourage exclusion and to help children find ways to include and incorporate peers in all play and all tasks.  This is challenging work.

Our classrooms are mixed-age, and always mixed-ability.  Sometimes, other educators marvel at this practice, but when one points out the fact that no two four-year-olds are alike anyway, the notion of hard and fast chronological, age-based conformity sort of falls apart.  Our education system in general may be based on this general chronological approach, for better or worse, but, here at Dodge, we see the value in a diversified learning population.  Children not only note differences, they value them.  One of my autistic students may not be able to sit through group time without drawing on a clipboard and singing, but he can write sentences, add sums and recite poems as no other learner in the room can.  The children who can sit through group time may want their own clipboards and wonder why they are not allowed to sing through group time, but when the situation is explained to them plainly and respectfully, they in turn respect the autistic child’s needs and abilities, as well as their own needs and abilities.  To my mind, a truly healthy society is based on accommodation and tolerance and it is our duty to engender the ethics of inclusion and tolerance from early childhood on. 

Research citied in The Meaning of Inclusion (required reading at Concordia) certainly supports what I see in my classroom day in and day out.  Everyone benefits from inclusion of all kinds of learners with all kinds of abilities.  Children in the inclusive classroom seem to arrive at empathy and acceptance much earlier than children who are not exposed to all kinds of different people.  It is the very nature of the developing brain of a child to discern differences; it behooves humans from an evolutionary and scientific standpoint to develop sophisticated skills of differentiation, but it is what we do with that information in the social arena that determines our capacity to empathize with our fellow humans.  

Learning to accept differences, and to see the potential value in them, rather than to fear them, seems to have far-reaching implications for our culture.  I believe that captial "D" Democracy stands a better chance of succeeding in a tolerant social climate and children may develop into far more creative thinkers if they are able to look for and perceive differences, to see things from another point of view and to think outside of their own personal box.  The hue and cry for creative thinkers in today’s economy seems to indicate that we are on the right track in education when we include children of all backgrounds and abilities in our classrooms.  The Meaning of Inclusion does not overtly refer to new research that suggests that children with special needs are now going farther in society as they develop because society in general has now grown more tolerant of differences, especially in the tech sector.  The immediate values of inclusion for all participants, empathy and tolerance, for instance, as evidenced by research in The Meaning of Inclusion seem to support the idea of better outcomes for everyone involved in the inclusive classroom.   

Not a day goes by that I do not learn something from trying to take the perspective of a child or parent that trustingly walks through our doors.  Perfection is not possible when it comes to inclusion, but the spirit of the mission seems to be what counts the most.  I've made many mistakes, and will continue to make them, but I'm trying really hard to keep my mind open to the possibilites.

*If you're still interested in inclusion, help yourself to the companion entry, Why Practice Inclusion.