Wednesday, November 3, 2010

"Setting the Direction"

“Setting the Direction” is the Alberta initiative to create inclusion in special education.  The main idea behind it is to create full inclusion in all Alberta schools, instead of having things such as special education classrooms in which students with special needs are separated from mainstream students. 

I have been thinking recently about how I feel about “Setting the Direction.”  In many ways I am against inclusion, because I find that students with special needs benefit more from one-on-one attention from a teacher, which is rare in a mainstream classroom.  Creating an IPP for a student seems to be very beneficial to students with special needs because they have their own individual goals to achieve instead of having to complete curriculum requirements along with the rest of the class.  I believe that special education classes or educational assistants are very beneficial for students with disabilities, and that completely ridding of this system could be dangerous.

On the other hand, I have been trying to see special education from another perspective.  I recently watched the hit movie “The Express”.  In this movie an African-American man plays football for the UCLA college football team in the late 1950s, but is not accepted by the league and the fans because of his race.  While watching this movie I began to relate it to children with special needs.  I began asking myself, “is this essentially what we are doing to children with disabilities?  Do we have a preconceived notion that they should be separated from “the rest of us” and that is where they belong?  What is this idea based on?  And do we simply think this way because this is the way people before us thought, and so this is how we have been taught to think?”  With these ideas in mind I began comparing the idea of segregation of students with disabilities to segregation of races.  Although there is evidence that students with disabilities do need extra help and attention to learn academically, whereas different races do not, there are realistically no differences between the situations socially.  Just like people of a race other than Caucasian, students with disabilities deserve to be placed in a classroom with the mainstream children, so they can have the same opportunities throughout their schooling and their life.

This new way of thinking has led me to believe much more in inclusive classrooms.  Students with disabilities deserve to be included in regular classroom situations to give them the same social and academic opportunities as all other students.  Although they may need to receive extra assistance in their learning, this may be received through an educational assistant in the classroom, or occasional “pull-outs” during which the student is removed from the regular classroom to work on their own goals.  I believe that there should be an “in-between” in inclusive education in which students receive the extra assistance they require but are involved in the regular classroom as much as possible.

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