IN Canada, ongoing advocacy efforts from disabled communities have resulted in an evolution of education over time.
Generally speaking, “inclusive education” promises the equitable inclusion of disabled students in kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) schools.
But true inclusion requires more than existing in the same building or classroom. It requires envisioning models based in a human rights approach that recognise diversity and acknowledge that people are not defined by one characteristic.
Disabled students continue to face barriers constructed and enforced by our schools. Students and their support networks, families, advocates and experts can no longer accept school systems which uphold inequality for the disabled community. There are ways we can combat these encroachments.
CONFINEMENT AND RESTRICTION
In many provinces in Canada, students with disabilities experience aspects of confinement and restriction in K-12 education.
The term “transinstitutionalisation” describes a process in which people with disabilities experience being confined in dehumanising ways, throughout their lives, despite the promises of inclusive education.
Disability advocates and scholars note how educational practices and policies continue to maintain a new form of institutionalisation for people with disabilities, without the bricks and mortar of a traditional building for the disabled community.
In this way, students with disabilities are set up for future decades of similar exclusion, confinement or marginalisation.
ENVISIONING DIGNIFIED VOCATIONAL PREPARATION
Although meaningful vocational training is beneficial, advocates have noted that many times people with disabilities are undervalued or exploited, including through unpaid labour.
After graduation, without a regular diploma, when students do work, they earn a paltry amount. People often face income precarity, and the disability community has had to advocate against disability support payments being clawed back when people are employed.
This needs to be tied to wider community and societal work, in conjunction with multiple levels of government, to envision, create and prepare disabled students for non-exploitative and fair employment where they are paid for labour without prejudice in jobs after high school.
POPULAR MYTHS ABOUT SPECIAL EDUCATION
There are a host of popular myths that play into the defence of special education as preferable to inclusion.
Editor Linda J. Graham and author Kate De Bruin in Inclusive Education for the 21s Century explores these in an effort to accentuate the benefits of inclusivity in schools.
For example, justification for disability-based exclusion or segregation is often presented as factual and conceptualised as inclusive. These justifications insinuate disabled students may cause undue hardship for schools and school boards or divisions and therefore should be segregated from other students.
This mythology continues to maintain broken systems that extend beyond kindergarten to Grade 12 education.
REPRESENTATION AND REFORM
First and foremost, our school culture must shift. Schools need to hire, support and promote disabled educators.
Systems must undergo curricular reform that is representative of disability studies, employing community members and experts in the field for the purpose of short- and long-term strategic planning.
Full article published March 2024, Theconversation.com.au
