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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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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