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Diverse student needs are accommodated within general class activities while maintaining quality of education for all students. Educators have to embrace the daily challenge they face to meet the educational and socio-emotional needs of learners with diverse abilities. Skilled and educated teachers are meeting the challenge with enthusiasm and creativity through thoughtfully and collaboratively planning and implementing instruction that meets the individual needs of each student.
Inclusion of students with disabilities cannot be achieved alone with attitudinal change. We know that a team of like-minded people, has the power to make many things possible. We know, too, that it will never be free of all conflict. It will always be dynamic, ever changing process. The multiple perspectives brought together by different people, will not only give energy and vitality to the process, but will back you up when you need relaxed time, new information, a shoulder to cry on, a friend to remind you of the focus of your efforts and someone to give you constructive feedback. A team is built on the principle that each voice is valued and necessary for effective inclusion. But our experience tells us that teams are not born, they must be constructed through the relationships that you have with each other. Everyone will have a unique understanding of what constitutes a team and sharing such views will be the foundation of what a team can become. In present times it has become popular to speak about collaboration. Sharing ideas, co-operating in activities, assisting in one another’s growth, changing from the bottom up, and advice giving between fluid, active networks of teachers sharing their own experiences are all descriptors that educational leaders use to describe the concept of collaboration. It is believed that by collaborating, each individual is able to contribute what he or she knows best. Some researchers have reported that students benefit academically when teachers collaborate.
At AVM our vision of Inclusive School has given us hoards of experiences that made all of us extremely malleable individuals.
The four principles (guidelines) that were articulated right from the beginning are clearly the foundations of an inclusive school. They are necessary conditions or parameters. They are:
- Within the limits of allocations of staff time, maximal inclusion shall take place.
- All students have the right to participate in all aspects of school life.
- All students will be participating members of a regular classroom with the support to meet their individual needs being provided through support system. This support may include modification of the curriculum within the regular classroom or outside of the regular classroom when specific skills CANNOT be accommodated in that setting.
- Placement will be age appropriate and within the student’s own area of interest.
This requires the building of a community, a community that goes beyond such simple things as school concerts or picnics. Our school must become a place of bonding. If you don’t succeed in becoming such a community of staff, students and parents, then you will always be a community that depends on such things as mutual compatibility, acceptable moods, acceptable ability, etc. Your survival as a community cannot depend on such simple things as mutual compatibility or homogeneous grouping. The “glue” that unites or combines you must be more than a caretaker
attitude – it must be a professional attitude. Students, too, need a sense of belonging, because many of them feel today that they don’t belong in school any more. This is even truer for Special Needs students. We must come to value Special Needs students as a gift to our schools because they bring out the best in the other students. Their presence allows values to come to surface and students take ownership of these values. We need to create environments in which values surface so that students take ownership of these values.
The more programmes we introduce in our schools, the more we seem to threaten our community. It is well documented that the categorization of special education has contributed to the disjointedness of education and our inability to meet the new morbidities. Inclusion, effective inclusion, demands building effective communities that provide a secure environment for its members and in which we feel we are all together. We can no longer accept the view or the popular attitude among some teachers that separate special education programmes be developed that serve the needs of students with a particular disability. If we accept the massive research and even our own observations, then it is clear that the goal of educational inclusion can be achieved. What is required is a shift to an attitude that recognises the necessity of modifying, expanding, and/or adjusting regular education to meet the needs of ALL
students. We know that program modification is inherent in good teaching.
It is quite clear, that for Ankur Vidyamandir to become an inclusive school that embraces educational inclusion, a number of things needed to happen.