PART II
INCLUSION IN EDUCATIONAL SETTINGS
Lecturers: Alice Udvari-Solner, Ph.D. and Charles Degeneffe, M.S.S.W.
Unit – Segment I: Inclusion Definition and Intent
(Don Anderson) The next interview for today’s class is with Alice Udvari-Solner. She holds a joint appointment as assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin- Madison in the Department of Curriculum Instruction and the Department of Rehabilitation Psychologyand Special Education. Alice teaches graduate and undergraduate courses that focus on the inclusion of students with disabilities in general education settings. She has established both masters and doctoral programs in the area of inclusive education. During the past four years, she has been the principal investigator of a federal research and demonstration project entitled, "A Collaborative Process for Designing Effective Curriculum Adaptations." This grant investigated innovative strategies in curriculum and instruction for supporting diverse learners in general education settings. Alice has provided presentations and technical assistance to school districts and state departments across the country in the area of inclusive schooling, curriculum adaptations, collaborative teamwork, cooperative learning, and community based instruction, vocational training, supported employment, and programming for individuals with dual sensory impairments. With this introduction we will begin today’s second lecture on inclusion with professor Udvari-Solner.
(Charles Degeneffe) Alice, how do you define inclusion of students with disabilities?
(Alice) I think a good way to look at inclusive education, is to see it more as a value based practice that’s occurring in the public schools. Which is really aimed at trying to bring students into membership, full membership within their local school communities. And when I say bring students into membership, I really mean populations of students who in the past have been marginalized, maybe disenfranchised from school, unsuccessful in a typical school setting, or segregated. And that’s one reason why the term inclusive education has often been associated with students with disabilities, because those are the students that have had previous programming that has been separate or segregated.
The intent of inclusive programming goes beyond the idea of just bringing students into their local school community. But there are, right now, some really basic standards of practice that are associated with it. One would be that students would attend the school that they would attend if they weren’t disabled. And, that sounds like a very simple idea, but in reality many students with disabilities are not able to have access to their local school. Many students are bused to different schools outside their community or outside of their neighborhood where programs are available related to their specific disability. And in inclusive schools the premise is that those students have a right to be educated in their neighborhood or home school. And so along with that, there’s the idea that there’s value and benefit to having students educated together in regular Ed classrooms, which is significantly different from the way we’ve configured special education services in the past. And I think that is a critical component when people begin looking at the values and philosophies and practices that come out of inclusive Ed, is that the way we deliver special education services is substantively different than the way that we’ve looked at them before; sort of a reorientation to the way we deliver specialized support. In the past we’ve thought of special education as a place, as a room, as a location; a place where a child goes to see a teacher that’s trained to assist them in a specific area. In inclusive schools, people are reorienting their thinking to the idea that support can be provided in the context of general Ed; so the student still receives specialized or special education support, but it’s brought to the child so that the child can maintain relationships and build relationships with peers who aren’t disabled.
Unit – Segment II: Importance of Home - Based School Environments
(Charles Degeneffe)One of the things you mentioned is that in your definition of inclusion, it occurs within the child’s home environments or home districts, why is that important?
(Alice Udvari-Solner) Well, I like to just put myself in that situation or think about my own child, my own daughter, who is going to be coming of school age soon. The idea is if she were disabled, she may not be able to go to the same school as her sister or her brother. She would be bused away from, or from her neighbors, who might already be supportive of her as friends or as school mates. And so in a sense the child’s schooling is very fragmented from their community and family life. And so the intent is to create a more cohesive life for the child from the point at which they enter school with the intent to foster and develop long term systems of support both within the family, within the community, and within the school.
(Charles Degeneffe)Two of the terms that are commonly associated with inclusion are mainstream and integration. Now, in your definition of inclusion are those the same things?
Unit – Segment III: Description of Mainstreaming, Integration and Inclusion
(Alice Udvari-Solner) No. But it is really important to look at those terms together and to be able to see what the differences are. The way I like to look at those terms, main streaming, integration, andinclusion, is really a documentation of the evolution of the way we’ve conceived services, special education services. And if you look at mainstreaming, that term became popular in I’d say the mid 70's, when the primary legislation was enacted so that students with disabilities could receive free appropriate education. I am referring to public law 94-142 or at that time it was called the Education For All Handicapped Children’s Act. And it has language within that law that indicated that there is a preference for educating students with disabilities alongside their peers without disabilities wherever appropriate. And that became interpreted into the language of mainstreaming. And so in the mid 70's we saw some of the first attempts to bring students back in to general education, which had been in special education placements, special education classes, or separate schools. And so that really marks an important point in history.
But there are some very very concrete differences between the practices of mainstreaming and the practices of inclusive education. In a mainstreaming model, students are still based in a special education classroom. So they are essentially viewed as students who are separate from the general education system. They are the responsibility of special education educators rather than there being shared ownership between the two professionals of general and special education. And at the time, students who were mainstreamed into classes, those classes were selected very carefully. They were often prerequisites for the student to be able to attend a regular education class. And in many cases, and I should say most cases, those students who proved that they could make it in mainstream, were those students with mild disabilities. They needed very few adaptations to sort ofnegotiate the curriculum. And so mainstreaming is sort of associated with that time and that practice.
Integration followed in the mid 80's. The term integration was an important one because it moved educators thinking beyond those students with just mild disabilities, to think about whether or not students with more severe disabilities could be included, or at the time the popular term was integrated into general education. What it did for educators, is push people to sort of to the next level of thinking; that perhaps students could be educated together even though they didn’t learn the curriculum in the same ways, or learn the same scope of curriculum, or need the same exact type of instruction. And it also pushed educators to depart more dramatically from traditional teaching techniques, because there was clearly an individual within that setting who wasn’t learning in typical ways. So that was again a critical point in time. But in the integration efforts, students were still typically based in special education classes. Those other places and systems that still kept people segregated were existing within schools.
So as people have moved to more inclusive models there has been an effort to think about what it means to be truly based in a general education class. And that means that when you leave there, you don’t go back to some place segregated. So in many schools that are attempting to practice inclusive education, they are looking at doing away with what they might call a segregated environment so that students are no longer educated in homogeneous groups, but that they have access to all the learning environments that any other child would within the school setting. And when I say that people are attempting to move away from a segregated class model; it doesn’t mean that the services disappear, but that those people who were providing the services would provide them in different ways within general education settings.
(Charles Degeneffe) So it sounds like inclusion where it is today has really been an evolutionary process. It is not just an idea that one day we’re going to put children with disabilities in the classroom and leave it at that. It’s evolved over time.
(Alice Udvari-Solner) Very clearly. And I think it represents the changes in values around education as a whole. It also represents the dramatic changes that we as professionals have made in our technology and our understanding of how to teach. What we knew in 1970, is not what we know now about teaching people with disabilities, or teaching kids in general. And so our practices, I believe,are improving to reflect that knowledge. And inclusive education is one piece of that change or reform
Unit – Segment IV: Training of Teachers for Inclusive Practices
(Charles Degeneffe) Currently, what are some of the ways that teachers who are being prepared to become teachers, how are they trained in this idea of inclusion?
(Alice Udvari-Solner) That varies from place to place, and university to university. I’d say a pervasive piece that has been there for many years,(required by law in most states),is that general educators, in their pre-service programs,must take a course that is related to disability. And in many parts of the country those courses have been shaped to educate general educators about the idea of inclusive education. What does it mean when there is a student with disabilities in your class and what are some very practical techniques and strategies that they can use to teach that child. That is on a very basic level. I think that people are recognizing that one course in the area of disability, for an educator that will be seeing very diverse students in their classrooms, is insufficient. And so in many settings, including the University of Wisconsin, people are going through reforms within their teacher training programs. Some of the changes, which are dramatic, are the ideas of joining or unifying teacher education programs between general and special educationso that students actually may come out with dual certification. And that there is a stronger strand of preparation around the education issues associated with students with disabilities. That is one type of program that is being explored here at the university. The other piece is that many other preparation courses within the general education pre-service program have expanded to looking at the issues of diversity and multicultural education, and understanding of students who come from low socioeconomic status, students who are learning English as a second language. And many of the issues related to those learners are applicable to students with disabilities. And so there is, I would say, far more attention to looking at really how diverse a general education classroom is, and then how teachers can individualize their techniques and strategies to address those students.
(Charles Degeneffe) So it sounds like some of what teachers are learning as far as inclusive practices can also have applications beyond just students with disabilities; who really can benefit teachers who have to now teach a very diverse student body, maybe compared more so than 20 years ago?
(Alice Udvari-Solner) Yes, clearly.
Unit – Segment V: Effective Inclusive Teaching Methods
(Charles Degeneffe) What about for the teacher who, maybe who was trained 20 years ago and has been teaching from a certain orientation. How does that teacher learn best inclusive practices? How do they learn those kinds of techniques?
(Alice Udvari-Solner) That I think is a really important question, because the efforts that have been made in schools have been made by existing staff, both novice teachers and veteran teachers, who have decided that they will, in fact, change their more traditional practices. The kinds of thingsthat I see happening, include strong leadership within individual schools, or within a district, to really assist teachers to re-examine what their values are around learning and teaching, and setting a tone for responsibility of all students, within the school. There are large scale efforts nationwide in order to provide in-service training to teachers who are currently practicing so that they have access to some of the new information, or actually just time to think about how they might reorganize their classrooms in order to be more accommodating to a range of students. We see in some schools mentoring programs between teachers. Teachers who are experienced with including students with disabilities are providing peer coaching to other teachers who may be new to the idea. But I think in most cases, it means that we are providing an opportunity for people to talk about what the change in practice means, talk about their values around education, and also get some really concrete assistance within the classroom. It also means that there has to be a larger discussion about the roles of general and special education educators. Often times, what is a barrier or stopping block for general educators who are feeling concerned or reluctant to jump whole heartedly into such a practice is that they feel they may be abandoned; they feel they’ll be doing it without support. The old statement ofhaving students dumped into classrooms is a real concern for folks. And so where I see it working well in districts, administrators and the teaching staff have taken those concerns to heart to assure that there is a clear distinction about what the general educator does and how the special education educator may provide assistance within the classroom, or information about specific kids, or working together in different kinds of teaching configurations.
(Charles Degeneffe) What do you believe makes general teachers effective in teaching in an inclusive manner?
(Alice Udvari-Solner) That is an important question for me, because I actually tried to shape some research around exactly that question. What makes certain classrooms inclusive? What are teachers doing to effectively include students with disabilities? I had the opportunity to spend time with a number of teachers within the Madison school system, and in fact, was invited in to see exactly what they were doing. And, on one level, I observed sort of some very basic underlying philosophies that teachers adhered to, that really influenced their practice. What I saw a teacher doing is really creating a learning community; stating up-front that they valued a positive social climate in their classroom and they fostered that. Many teachers had community meetings. They allowed students to voice their opinions and create rules and guidelines for their own classrooms. They took time to discuss conflict or peace making within the classroom so thatstudents were integral decision makers. And underlying those actions was the sense that every student was valued within the classroom and could contribute. And, in addition to that, I saw teachers saying statements about how they saw students learn; that all students learn differently, that the way I teach one child may not look like the way I teach another child. And, in addition to that, I saw them building instructional arrangements that really facilitated student to student interaction. They saw that as a critical part of learning. And so the atmosphere in many of these classrooms was established in such a way that it was very welcoming for a student who might learn differently to come into the classroom, and that each member of the classroom had an important part to play in the learning that took place there. So that, to me, was a basic foundation across many classrooms where I saw teachers doing this well and doing it comfortably.
(Charles Degeneffe) Do you find students generally take up that role; that if the teacher asks them to give their opinions on what they think is needed in the classroom, and also if they need to assist another student; do they actively participate in that?