Why is an examination of inclusive education needed in both countries?
There are more reasons for an examination of inclusive teaching in the classroom than we realistically have time or space for on a platform of this type. There are of course the obvious reasons—like the way inclusivity demonstrates a commitment to diversity, how that diversity strengthens civil society, and how we have a responsibility to offer all children (all humans) equal opportunity where education is concerned. These are all true and paramount, even as they sometimes become platitudinous for their overuse in the absence of real action. In other words, it’s one thing to tout something verbally: it’s another to actually do it. But I’m digressing. There is another concept here that I’d like us to consider. It’s the fact that we shouldn’t only be examining the need for inclusive education globally for all the things it should do (those things sometimes can feel far off and even unrealistically utopian to our skeptical human nature), but also because we have a responsibility to NOT exclude as much as we have one to include. These might sound like one and the same thing, but they aren’t. We have a responsibility to NOT “other” our students. To NOT instill fear in them. It is an activist approach in the vein that many of us consider education itself a form of activism. I’m thinking here of chapter three of Culturally Responsive Teaching & the Brain. If we know, as Hammond (2015) points out, that culture and sociopolitical contexts are what trigger fear in the brain, then our responsibility is not simply to include the whole lot of our students in our lessons (this alone is not culturally responsive education), but to ensure that the environment we create for students with varying sociocultural backgrounds is not one likely to foment culturally bound concepts of threat. This is our responsibility. And this is why we must examine inclusive teaching in both the U.S. and in South Africa—because instilling threat or fear in students is contrary to our vocation as teachers. What is the “Wicked Problem” and how can we solve it? According to Elizabeth Walton’s “Inclusive Education: A Tame Solution to a Wicked Problem,” “wicked” problems are problems that are “complex, dynamic, multifaceted and intractable” (2017, p.85). Exclusion in education, she argues, is one of these wicked problems. It will not be solved using buzzwords or tame, ultimately non-performative measures (I’m using non-performative here in the spirit of Judith Butler’s work on gender whereby we can perform a representative act repeatedly without achieving the desired performative result). Instead, it requires real action. In her own words, solving the wicked problem of exclusion means treating it as a “social and political project that is bold enough to identify and challenge the impediments to meaningful inclusion and make radical changes necessary to ensure quality education for all” (2017, p. 85). I wholeheartedly agree. References Phasha, N., Mahlo, D., & Dei, G. J. S. (Eds.). (2017). Inclusive Education in African Contexts: A Critical Reader. Springer. Hammond, Z. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain: Promoting authentic engagement and rigor among culturally and linguistically diverse students. Corwin.
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1. Provide a brief summary of your social location essay- why do you think it is important to establish yourself in this work as we begin a comparison of countries, cultures, and experiences?
Rather than summarize my social location essay, I’m including an excerpt of it below. I think this particular excerpt speaks to why I find it so critical that we examine our social location with frequency. For many of us—in fact, for most of us—that social location shifts with us throughout the day, the month, the year. I believe that cognizance of our various social locations in life helps us put in broader, more intersectional terms the social locations of those we encounter during our travels. An excerpt: This exploration of self and location makes me think of the concept of privilege, especially in the ways privilege helps dictate our social location in life. A number of years back, I read one of Roxane Gay’s books, Bad Feminist. She wrote something in that book that hasn’t left me since. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was essentially this: We don’t have to go to war over our various privileges and disadvantages in life. It doesn’t have to be a contest that one person wins. We can be privileged in some respects and disadvantaged in others. We can be privileged in our education, for example, but not in our skin color, privileged in the manner and comfort of our upbringing, but not in our gender or sexuality.We can understand privilege broadly without having experienced each form specifically. For clarity, Gay is not suggesting that some forms of privilege don’t carry with them heavier responsibilities; without question, some do. Instead, she is commenting on the fact that privilege is not an all or nothing game: we can and often do live in the in-between. Gay’s framing speaks to my own experience and location in society. I am, for example, strikingly privileged in many respects. I am able-bodied. I grew up in relative comfort and without ever facing real hunger. Though I am part Panamanian, my fair skin presents otherwise, a status that lends me an almost unending amount of ease in the societies that I navigate daily. I am a PhD student and teach in a university. I am literate and articulate and speak three almost achingly privileged languages fluently (French, German, and English). And while I am not wealthy in the classic (American) sense, I can afford simple vacations and new clothes when the inclination arises and a Starbucks whenever I like. I live in a house. In California, for god’s sake. But I am in some ways not amongst our most privileged, and this matters, too. I am, for example, a woman living inside the confines of a patriarchy—a crumbling one, perhaps—but one with a death grip so strong as suffocate some of us at mere view. I am queer, and more specifically, bisexual, a fact which means that I am neither straight nor gay, and rarely accepted by either group in full. I grew up in a household virtually absent books and to parents absent post-secondary education. And I was raised in part by men who were prone to objectifying and degrading the women around them, including me. Especially me. My social location, then, reflects the very malleability of my identity experiences and my subsequent need to flit about amongst them. I picture myself something like an abacus, one line moving higher in perceived numerical value, another lower—a calculation that, in the hands of the accountant, is unending and merciless. I am fair-skinned, up. I am female, down. I am highly educated, up. I sleep with women, down. I live in a house brimming with books, up. I grew up in a house without them, down. And on and on and on. Up, down. Back, forth. Step, fall. 2. What similarities and differences did you learn about inclusive education in SA and USA this week (in presentations and readings) I think what struck me most about the idea of inclusive education in South Africa versus inclusive education in the U.S. is that inclusive education in South Africa was historically defined as education that supports students with physical disabilities. In the U.S. inclusive education is largely understood to be broader. For example, inclusive education in the U.S. might be defined as understanding, accepting, and appropriately challenging students of various cognitive, emotional, social, linguistic, and physical backgrounds and proficiencies. Certainly, this chasm between South Africa’s definition of inclusive education and ours has some roots in our historical differences, but even that doesn’t fully explain it in my opinion. What I am thinking after this week’s readings is that regardless of the breadth and depth of understanding that we may have come to regarding the definition of inclusive education in the U.S., we have not made all of the strides in practice that our expanded rhetoric suggests. 3. What did you learn about in your group textbook chapters? Why is understanding the learner so important? What information is important to learn? I have worked with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students for many years. As an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor, this is my day to day. As a result, there wasn’t as much entirely new material in the book for me as there might have been for others. What I appreciated about it, however, was the connection between culturally responsive teaching and cognitive science—areas I don’t see intertwined as often as I’d like outside of research into second language acquisition and associated pedagogies. Understanding the learner is as critical to teaching as knowing ourselves as teachers. It allows us to connect with our students, to see where additional scaffolding is required in our pedagogical practice, and to consider where we might draw from our students’ knowledge and life experiences to positively impact learning outcomes. There is, simply put, almost nothing more important. 4. What do you hope to get out of the Changemaking experience? As with any assignment in this course, I hope to continue my own growth in the area of education and educational leadership. This includes, but is never limited to, expanding my knowledge of how to work with those who are different from me. I teach English as a Second Language (ESL) at the post-secondary level. All of my students are immigrants and a fair number of them are refugees. I am faced with the challenges of a socioeconomically, culturally, and linguistically diverse classroom every day; I suspect that these challenges are inherent to the South African educational system as well. I believe that I have a responsibility to seek out experiences that will help me better manage a diverse classroom and the conflict that occasionally arises within it. I hope this course will help me hone the skills necessary to continue my work with a diverse body of students while simultaneously helping me broaden my knowledge of the international contexts in which my students have lived and learned.
As my first assignment in this course, I read the novel Cry, the Beloved Country. It was, in retrospect, a good first choice for this course. Having read Mandela’s autobiography a number of years ago, Cry, the Beloved Country helped put some of South Africa’s history into perspective. But more than that, I found the novel superb in its humanizing quality, in the manner in which it highlighted the dignity that all humans seek and that all human beings have the opportunity to grant one another. In fact, I would go so far as to say this was my major takeaway from the novel—that the things that connect the South African experience to the American experience rest in the ways we seek and either are or are not offered dignity in return. After completing Cry, the Beloved Country, I watched the film In My Country. The film centered on the experiences of a white South African journalist and an African American journalist reporting on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) of the mid-1990s. I learned a tremendous amount about South Africa in this process, both as a result of the film itself and as a result of extracurricular reading that I completed on the TRC after watching the film, but what really sticks out for me is the African concept of ubuntu and how it both governed and nourished the TRC. While perhaps flawed, my reading suggests to me that the TRC was largely viewed a success. I’m left wondering how American society might be different today had we enacted restorative justice of this type at any number of points in our history. |
AuthorI'm Kelly. I teach English as a Second Language, business English, and writing. I eat poems for dinner. Archives
January 2019
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