Articles > Interaction Journal Articles > Volume 17, Issue 2

Julius and his peers
show us how it’s done.

The following article is a summary of what we have learned primarily from high school students of a school in the northern suburbs of Perth whose teachers took the decision in 2003 to escape from the continuum concept, the notion of “least-restrictive” that used to mean “most-restrictive for some(1). The article is best understood by reading what the children have to say (below) and viewing their project on the video (use the link on the right)

As reported in Keeping In Touch(2) (July/Aug 2003):
“Julius is 13 years old and another student who is enjoying mainstream schooling for the first time. Julius has an intellectual disability and autism. As a consequence he has very limited speech. Yet this has proved no barrier to his total acceptance by his classmates who have found other ways to communicate with him, including Makaton sign language.

Julius’ classmate, Hanna, says that at the start of the year when she heard that they were going to have Julius in her class she didn’t really know how she was going to react. “But now I’m really glad we have Julius in our class because now I can communicate and have fun with Julius. He is a lot of fun. He makes everyone laugh.”

Hanna also thinks Julius and other children with disabilities like having other students work with them and they have a great time. “I have also learnt that the special needs kids are just like us.”

Melodi, another classmate of Julius, agrees. “Julius and the other children with disabilities are just like us because they have special needs and we have needs as well.”

Julius’ teacher, Peta Scrimgeour has also observed that the other students have learned so much from being with Julius – particularly patience, tolerance and compassion. And this has flowed through to the other kids in the class so that they now rally around other children who might be having difficulties and support them too. “Previously, these children would have been subject to teasing and bullying”, says Peta.

In fact Peta says that in her 20 years of teaching she has never had such a low level of teasing and bullying in a classroom. And she puts this down entirely to Julius being in the classroom. “I believe the other children recognise that despite the severity of his disability, Julius is one of them and it’s helped them to better understand the needs of other students who might be struggling as well.”

Julius’... inclusion in a mainstream class for the first time is a result of Ballajura Community College (BCC) deciding to disband the special class it had for students with the most severe disabilities. Each of the children who were in the special class last year are all now in a mainstream class.

The special education teacher’s role has changed from direct instruction to assisting each of the mainstream teachers modify the curriculum and develop the individual education programs for each child and to provide other support as necessary. BCC has a total of 50 children with disabilities who are included in mainstream classes.

As we learn more and more about what inclusion has to offer, we begin to see in practice that learning and teaching are not the single direction of teacher to students as has been conventionally thought. From these students and this school we see practical examples of students teaching teachers and parents. We hear of parents teaching teachers and related-professionals. We hear of students labelled “the most severe” teaching peers, teacher and community. These are the new multiple-directions of learning and teaching that come from inclusion. Here we see them in practice. It IS possible. It is powerful. We need only to create the opportunities as these students, teachers and the school community have shown.

The video shows glimpses of how the students have participated as teachers as well as learners in developing a multi-level teaching project around gathering data (early statistics) that would be both relevant and powerful for Julius as well as for themselves. This is not unusual nor, as you will see, difficult. It is practical. It is “state-of-the-art”. It is “outside of the box”. It exemplifies the learning that ALL students do whilst designing an activity as well as carrying it out. These stratagems are highly practical and simple to understand, yet they are so rarely applied when including students who cannot read or write, who cannot speak well and students who have limited sign language. These sorts of ideas aren’t often applied to students who have spent their whole primary careers in segregated education, not because they “don’t work” but because they haven’t thought to try them.

The comments here and in the video teach us, the adults who are still ‘in the segregation box’, to begin thinking outside of it. The student comments ‘show and tell’ us how to recover from the millennia of segregation that had us caught up in a continuum of segregation.

As we see from their comments, the other students and the teachers are learning as much from the inclusionary interactions as Julius is. Problem-solving skills are becoming highly sophisticated. Learning and teaching others how one can adapt to meet anyone’s level are powerfully expressed, as are the lessons of morality, compassion and ‘just having fun’.

Friendships, as well as real learning, feature in this inclusion project and these friendships extend to the playground where other students now include Julius in their activities. We were told that, the previous year, Julius was left to himself and only mixed with other children in the segregated class. Building the social capacity of the schools to include is one of the things we adults have not found easy. These students teach us how it is done.

It is an important footnote that Peta told us that she had decided the aide wasn’t needed to ‘mind’ Julius. She has since moved to reduce aide time, something often thought ‘necessary’ for inclusion, particularly with those students viewed as ‘most severely disabled’.

Lessons:
What can we learn from Julius, his peers, his school and his teachers?

The level of disability is not necessarily a barrier to social or curricular inclusion.
The label of disability provides little or nothing instructionally useful for the teachers. Outside of the continuum concept, typical grouping and learning theory applies to all (if one is as creative as these folks are).
It isn’t any harder to think and act creatively and inclusively in high school, than it is in early primary.
Even though it is so often thought as ‘easier’ in primary school because of the ‘widening-gap’, here we see this may be a myth that has fed our adult fears.
Inclusive education of this calibre is a ‘work-in-progress’. It is ‘an art form’ involving, allowing and acknowledging:
1. Students as teachers as well as learners
2. Parents as teachers and partners, as well as learners, integral to building inclusive capacity of schools.
3. Good, experienced teachers with a focus on adapting to include rather than providing ‘special alternatives’ (e.g. parallel lives and lives dominated by teacher-aides) can produce far superior results using typical, albeit creative, methods.
4. Everyone can benefit. No one needs to be ‘the burden’ at a ‘cost’ to others, if we design it to be so. The laws of synergy have yet to be stretched.
Teachers don’t need massive re-training or in-service to be inclusive – even though they do need creativity, support and encouragement to apply multi-directional learning and teaching with students, parents and colleagues.
Peta shows us that students with labels, even ‘most severe’ ones, don’t ‘need’ teacher aides to be included. (In her case, Peta found that having an aide allowed her class to slip back into the old paradigm. Even though extra help can always be put to good use somewhere in the school, we really do need to think more creatively and inclusively about such usage.)(3)
Although one cannot see it on the video, we have learned in the background that the collaboration of parents and teachers is essential, supportive and helpful.
It is heartening and important to know that schools can recover from segregated histories(4). BCC is an excellent example of re-building their inclusive capacity with leaders with the will to learn and access to skills to develop such capacity.

In just seven and a half minutes of learning from the children in “Purple 5” any parent, teacher or school can see the practical changes one might take on a path of inclusion. The students in Purple 5 teach those of us with a passion for ignorance(5), stuck in the old paradigm, that developing a passion for knowledge about inclusion does not require ‘rocket science’. These students have a passion for teaching, as well as learning. Thank you Purple 5. We could never say it better.

Endnotes

Taylor, S. (1988) Caught in the continuum: A Critical Analysis of the Principle of least restrictive Environment, JASH. V13/1 Pp. 41-53.
Colvin, David (2003) District Newsletter of the Disability Services Commission (WA).
Giangreco, M., Broer, S. and Edelman, S. (1999) The tip of the iceberg: Determining whether paraprofessional support is needed for students with disabilities in general education settings, JASH. V24/4, pp.281-291.
Wills, D. (2003) 12 Steps of recovering Segregators: - An extract of “the New IQ.” Interaction Vol 16, No 4. pp.38.
Felman, S (1982) Psychoanalysis and teacher education: teaching terminable and interminable. Yale French Studies 63: 21-44, in Allan, J. (2002) Productive Pedagogies and the Responsibilities of Inclusion.

Reference: Wills, D (2004). Escaping the Continuum. Interaction v.17 #2 p.21-23.
Reprinted with permission from the National Council on Intellectual Disability.