A Sure Way To Help Teachers Be More Inclusive

Bindu* works as a teacher within a special needs department in a private school in Bengaluru that segregates students based on their achievements and disability.

She uses three key strategies to encourage inclusive education practices in her school.

First, she ensures her classroom activities engage every child in her classroom, regardless of the diversity in her class.

Second, she uses her time on the school bus to ask her peers about their methods for working with children with disabilities or other learning difficulties in their classrooms.

And third, she uses assessment reports to communicate with parents about planning the academic path for their children according to their different learning needs and emphasises that they continue their learning practices at home.

Bindu’s time as a parent volunteer previously showed her the value of a conciliatory approach to nudging her school, parents and colleagues into inclusive practices rather than to make suggestions or apply the moralistic rhetoric of inclusive education — often easier said than done.

According to a study by UNESCO, under the provisions of the Indian government’s Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan (education for all programme), three million teachers received inclusive education training of two to three days and 42 percent of teachers received additional orientation of three to five days, which has raised awareness but not led to improved learning outcomes for children.

Yet preliminary research finds that such training can empower teachers to become advocates for children with disabilities as well as reformers of curriculum.

However, hesitation from school management to take active steps to include children with disabilities, along with systemic loopholes that maintain the status quo, hinder teachers who want to herald inclusion and social justice.

Access to education for children with disabilities in India follows a multi-option model of education delivery as initially adopted in the Sarv Shiksha Abhiyan and more recently emphasised in the National Education Policy 2020.

The inherent flexibility in the model has meant that different states are likely to implement it in ways that they see fit. Some states have also refused to implement the National Education Policy for political reasons.

Many scholars have highlighted that India has a robust policy foundation for inclusion. There is an exciting opportunity to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of these policies and programmes by increasing initiatives to equip educators with high-quality theoretical and skills-based professional development courses.

Preparing teachers to be inclusive

Bindu says her peers find it hardest to prioritise the needs of children with learning difficulties amid the stresses of covering the syllabus and exams.

Shivani*, an English teacher at another private school in Chennai, credits the school for motivating her to academically explore inclusive practices in schools.

While discussing the influence of professional development on her practice, she recalls her earlier perception towards learners.

“The red flags are only the visible ones — the children who struggle to write, the children who struggle to read and so on — but attitude or behavioural patterns are also red flags,” she said.

“I was not really aware of this. I used to think they were just lazy … like this because of their upbringing … but after the diploma … [I learnt that] no child wants to be like that… there is a reason behind a child being or behaving in a certain manner.”

Shivani emphasises the need for “a broader understanding from … people” in enabling support for the different needs of learners, such as recommending remedial intervention in the example below.

“I was able to identify what Arun* [her second grade student] was going through,” she said.

“I told his parents that he might need this kind of help. They took him for an assessment, then they were able to find a person who can give him that remedial health intervention.”

Bindu and Shivani both describe how they use an inclusive approach to tackle the roadblocks they face in their schools. This indicates that perhaps these challenges are only problems they have not yet found solutions to.

They also said they miss the professional development space, which included other educators with similar predicaments, since it helped them develop solutions together.

A common space for support

Teachers expressed a need for a space or forum with a clear purpose which is available to them all year round to develop themselves.

Research is finding that participants of the professional development group seek to keep in touch after the programme to continue to be resources of support to each other.

Elsewhere, these are known as professional learning communities.

Their aim is to provide teachers with an open space for collaborations, collective and individual reflections, collective responsibilities towards learners, inclusion, common support and trust.

Through such spaces, teachers can depend upon networking and partnership opportunities to bring about necessary changes in their schools.

In the context of educators’ immediate school environment and colleagues, having a professional learning community might provide a space of agency for teachers to individually and collectively develop strategies that can address barriers to inclusion.

In contrast to Bindu and Shivani, Shobha, a public school educator in Bengaluru, has a busy schedule of more than four hours of teaching per day and attending to other state-mandated responsibilities such as PM Poshan Scheme (earlier known as Mid-day Meal Scheme). One of these is to track the inclusion of learners and to individually call parents of absentee students.

There are 40 to 50 students in each class in her public school. The number of absent students is sometimes more than half the class size. Shobha has to have conversations to identify what difficulties different students, including those who are absent, might be facing.

But she lacks support from the existing schooling structure — with overburdened educators, lack of sufficient in-service training for educators from governmental institutions and a large percentage of learner absenteeism — in taking the necessary steps to implement any changes that may be suited to learners.

She also faces difficulties in conveying this to parents, many of whom face social and financial constraints in participating in their children’s schooling experience.

When asked if she received support from the assigned special educators of the block where the school is situated, Shobha said that the sheer number of schools assigned to each special educator only adds to the stress under which the public education system is working.

She also noted that the parents of absentee students mostly come from poorer families, which makes it difficult for them to attend meetings with teachers and discuss the issues faced by their children.

While the lack of communication with parents does not indicate their disinterest in their child’s education, this becomes a barrier for parents and creates “disillusionment with the regular schooling system for parents across social classes”.

Moving forward together

Research indicates that professional development for inclusive education should equip educators to ask critical questions about the welfare of the child and how the school as a whole can aid the process.

As seen in Shobha’s case, even within the constraints of the public education system, an educator who engages in professional development for inclusive education is aware of the home environment and wellbeing of the children. .

Professional development should also help educators identify roles and opportunities within their sphere of influence where they can see possibilities of inclusion rather than going for an ‘all or nothing’ approach.

Additionally, educators could benefit from learning how to build a team of allies in the school to collaboratively promote inclusion.

In the end, inclusive education is about responding to exclusion as it occurs.

Professional development programmes have for too long focused on ‘best practices’ or ‘strategies’ without considering the context and conditions teachers are actually operating under.

The language of ‘best practice’ also hints that what you are doing currently isn’t the best and inherently carries a tone of “let me tell you how it is done”.

Rather, teachers need to be seen as partners in the endeavour of development and not people who need developing. It is this that can best enable them to create inclusive classrooms.

(Originally published under Creative Commons by 360info™. Read the original article here)