|
Services
 |
|
News & Articles
|
|
Special Needs Research and News
Gainesville Music Therapy parents receive frequent e-mails with the articles of interest to the special needs community, including research on Autism, Down Syndrome, ADHD, etc.; conferences and trainings being offered in the local area; and information on music therapy practice. If you would like to receive these articles, and/or our monthly newsletter by e-mail, please e-mail us to join the mailing list.
Monday, March 12, 2007What do we mean by Inclusive Education? Some Comments from OthersExcerpt from “Parental Models Go To School,” from An Unexpected Joy:How you think you should behave as a parent and how you think your child should be taught come of the same deep place inside. Schooling is a very emotional topic. We all know stories of horrible things going on in classrooms, and there is much righteous fodder for the educational reform movement. But rigid thinking about a school’s structure erupts from the same dark source as rigid thinking about a successful family. It gets even more emotional when you throw in disability. With the abandonment of the developmentally disabled by the medial system, the societal responsibility has been shifted to the school systems. A lot of good has come of this. Special services can most conveniently and effectively be served up in this setting. What an experienced special education teacher or occupational therapist or autism specialist has to say about a problem is much more likely to be helpful than what your physician has to say. There is no disputing the advantages to our kids from the ADA and the development of services and accessibility that has resulted from this legislation. I am always shocked when I run into resentment toward special needs kids and the amount of money spent on their education. I am not aware of people resenting speech rehab services for their elderly stroke relatives or post-closed head injury rehab for young adults after their skiing, diving or auto accidents. The public is quite naïve about medical insurance. Many people in my state are so used to extraordinary coverage that they think of their insurance cards like a charge card, with the bill going to someone else. The notion of insurance money being a pooled, collective resource is lost on them. A more visible form of pooled money is the public-school dollar. This is probably because of the election of local school boards and public voting on school millage issues. Parents feel they have more control over this money and are therefore more vigilant stewards. So they resent the extra dollars it takes to educate disabled kids. They see it as money not being spent on their kids. They are unaware of the shift of this responsibility out of the medical dollar – which they view unrealistically – into the more visible public-school dollar. The idea that these dependent individuals will otherwise end up on welfare, another pooled money pot, is lost on many of them. Basically, the biggest bang for the buck is the money spent on schooling these kids. It will result in less money being spent from other pots. The passage of the ADA resulted from years of persistent, effective lobbying by disabled individuals and their families. Part of that early activist movement was the radical notion of inclusion. The concept of least restrictive environment was introduced and determined to be an important goal in meeting the needs of special education students. This was good. It brought many problems out of the closet. All kids benefit enormously from effective inclusion programs. Both the special-needs child and the typical child benefit, as they do from anything that increases healthy diversity in the classroom .…Ineffective inclusion programs are another matter altogether. When they’re bad, everyone loses. But in too many schools, the trend is to push everyone into the mainstream. When that happens, an individual assessment of the child’s needs isn’t considered, and inclusion is hyped as a goal for all special-needs children. Nic didn’t benefit from inclusion. The worst year of his school career was the year he spent in the mainstream classroom. And this was with the cards stacked in his favor. He had a marvelous teacher, whom he knew from his PPT (pre-primary impaired) classroom. He had a loving and experience paraprofessional. The parents of the other kids in his class bent over backward to include him. It was simply too much for Nic. There was too much noise, activity, and visual stimulation. All that enrichment was right for the regular kids, but it was toxic for him.I have two concerns about mainstreaming. The first is what I call malicious mainstreaming. Parents who are still in denial about their child’s prognosis commit this. They insist on mainstreaming because they mistake the process of role modeling provided by the other students for a normalizing process. When a year goes by and there is no change in their child, they think the teacher has done something wrong or someone is to blame. My other concern has to do with the basic nature of humans. My son has known he was different from the get-go. He has communicated this to me in many ways, most of them nonverbal. When you put a child who is profoundly different in with a bunch of fully equipped kids, everyone knows what’s going on. If the children have been brought up well, they are polite and practice acts of inclusion as they are able to. Many are very kind. If they have not been brought up well, they can be cruel. Neither of these is an ideal environment because both preclude the development of a real peer group .…I believe a critical mass of time spent with real peers allows true friendships to grow. This is as good as it gets. We found this in Nic’s contained classroom. A good teacher uses these real relationships to teach. Renee, Nic’s current teacher, is the gold standard in my book. My son knows about “showing heart” and “giving zingers” because these behaviors are illustrated and discussed in his classroom every day. Renee is able to make these principles concrete. The continuity we have been blessed with has allowed a real classroom culture to develop. This in turn benefits the younger kids who come into the room. For my son to be a role model for a seven-year-old is huge. He sees himself as competent and feels pride. This is true growth. It helps interrupt the cycle of constant dependence that so many of these kids suffer from. When they’re around the regular kids, they are never fast enough or smart enough or acceptable enough. This is an exhausting way to live. If we didn’t have a contained classroom, I don’t believe these trusting relationships could have developed. The children in Nic’s class are remarkable. They show pure and simple tolerance of diversity. They are sib-like with each other, which means they can be joyful with each other and then turn around and give each other a hard time. The kids gloves are off, and they’re on as even a playing field as they’ll ever get. This is a much more balanced environment for them to grow in. Mainstreaming cannot provide this kind of intimacy. …One of the specialists we saw was a woman who has studied the educational needs of autistic people for more than twenty years. She gave me a wonderful gift. AS we were going over the summary of the recommendations they were making, which was all in educational and psychological language I didn’t understand, she paused. She looked up, right at me, and said “Basically, people with autism never stop learning. I’ve seen people learn to read at eighteen. I’ve seen people learn to live independently early in their thirties. They aren’t restricted by these developmental stages like regular learners seem to be.” She opened a door for us. She gave Nic a future. I don’t even know if it’s accurate, but the notion that Nic will continue to grow and benefit from enrichment changed the way the horizon looks to us. It feels a lot different than the smaller and smaller world we envisioned for him at the worst grip of our fear.” (From An Unexpected Joy by Mary Sharp, M.D., pp 102-108. |