inclusion: struggling to understand finer points

Assignment: Based on discussion and readings, describe any misconceptions you had about inclusive education that have now been clarified for you.

I had (mis)understood from some of the earlier readings that all students would in fact be included in regular education classrooms 100% of the time. Mandy’s question during the class discussion—“Does inclusion mean that the student is in the regular education classroom full-time?”—and Prof. Udvari-Sollner’s response clarified my misconception on this point.

The slides shown in class of the young man learning to negotiate life skills (e.g. cooking and employment) helped me to understand why he would not always be in the same setting as his peers. The slides clarified the difference between an “appropriate” setting and a “segregated” setting. The young man was not always with his peers, but he was always in “real world” settings interacting with a variety of other people, instead of being hidden away in an over-protective artificial environment.

One reason for my misconception may be that the Davern et al and Grenot-Scheyer et al articles, which I read last week, were not as clear as the Lipsky and Arnold/Dodge articles about the amount of time a student might spend in the general education classroom. The latter two articles specifically spell out that 100% inclusion 100% of the time is not the goal. One of the interesting things about the Fuchs & Fuchs and Shanker pieces was the way they emphasized almost exactly the same points as the inclusion advocates, in terms of what they felt children with disabilities needed to succeed in school and life. The Maloney commentary inset into the Fuchs & Fuchs article sounded almost exactly like the inclusion advocacy articles. These observations made me wonder whether inclusion opponents were deliberately caricaturing inclusion advocates, or whether some more extreme form of inclusion advocacy really does exist, or whether these opponents had just misunderstood some of the literature as I had.