One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion: 1 (Reimagining Inclusion: The ONE Series) - Softcover

Moore, Shelley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1553796586 ISBN 13: 9781553796589

Publisher: Portage & Main Press, 2016

Synopsis

In this bestseller, Shelley Moore explores the changing landscape of inclusive education. Presented through real stories from her own classroom experience, this passionate and creative educator tackles such things as inclusion as a philosophy and practice, the difference between integration and inclusion, and how inclusion can work with a variety of students and abilities. Explorations of differentiation, the role of special education teachers and others, and universal design for learning all illustrate the evolving discussion on special education and teaching to all learners. This book will be of interest to all educators, from special ed teachers, educational assistants and resource teachers, to classroom teachers, administrators, and superintendents.

About this title

About the Authors

Originally from Edmonton, Alberta, and now based in Vancouver, British Columbia, Shelley Moore (she/her/hers) is a highly sought-after teacher, researcher, speaker, and storyteller and has worked with school districts and community organizations throughout both Canada and the United States. Shelley’s presentations are constructed based on contexts of schools and communities and integrate theory and effective practices of inclusion, special education, curriculum, and teacher professional development. Her first book entitled, One Without the Other, was released in July 2016 to follow up her TEDx talk. Shelley completed an undergraduate degree in Special Education at the University of Alberta, her masters at Simon Fraser University, and is currently a PhD candidate at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the interactions of inclusive education, curriculum, and teacher professional development.

@tweetsomemoore

Leyton Schnellert, PhD, (he/his/him) is an associate professor in UBC’s Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy and Eleanor Rix Professor in Rural Teacher Education. He focuses on how teachers and teaching and learners and learning can mindfully embrace student diversity and inclusive education. Dr. Schnellert is the Pedagogy and Participation research cluster lead in UBC’s Institute for Community Engaged Research, inclusive education research lead in the Canadian Institute for Inclusion and Citizenship, and co-chair of BC’s Rural Education Advisory. His community-based collaborative work contributes a counter argument to top-down approaches that operate from deficit models, instead drawing from communities’ funds of knowledge to build participatory, place-conscious, and culturally responsive practices. Leyton works and learns on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded territory of the Sinixt who were declared extinct by Canada’s government in 1956 and stands in solidarity with the Sinixt in their reclamation efforts.

Leyton has been a middle and secondary years classroom teacher and a learning resource teacher for grades K–12. His books, films, and research articles are widely referenced locally, nationally, and globally.

From the Back Cover

inclusion, inclusive education, classroom, learning

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PART 1

What Is Inclusion?

Debunking the Myths

You may be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t believe in inclusion and the values of diversity on some level. Plus, it is pretty hard to avoid. Ken Robinson (2009) said it best: “The only thing students have in common is the year of their birth!” The individuals of the world are not packaged into neat little packages of people organized by age or ability, gender, or language (although I suppose there are some who would like to try!). Can you imagine if, when we walked into a grocery store, access to checkout tills were determined by these labels? It would be an absurd idea in every place in society, except in the classrooms of our schools. This unnatural arrangement is where the practical aspects of inclusion get messy, definitions of the concept start to get fuzzy, and our practices become a mismatch to our beliefs about what inclusion means in the world outside our classroom doors. It doesn’t take long to notice how frequently we all, even if in the same school or community, understand inclusion differently.

Early in my career, I realized this discrepancy, and it caused tensions in my quest to understand inclusion in both philosophical and practical terms. My first question was: If we are to believe in and try to move forward in our inclusive practice as educators, don’t we all need to have a common understanding of what it means? The unfortunate reality, however, is that the term inclusion has become contaminated (Thomas and Loxley 2007). A once-powerful word that drove equal access campaigns for students of different abilities, strengths, and challenges, the term inclusion has instead come to be associated with lack of funding, time, and supports – a political playing card that has turned our most vulnerable learners into a burden, defined by ratios and deficits. Further tension emerges when trying to create a consensus of how to enact practices of inclusion across districts, schools, and classrooms, leaving both teachers and students feeling like they are being shuffled around a building without the supports, resources, and understanding behind the inclusive rationale. The reality, however, is that there is no answer. There is no one way of being inclusive. Addressing diversity can be achieved in many ways, depending on the history, experience, knowledge, and philosophies of the stakeholders involved. Somewhere along this quest, however, answers have collided, and where once stood a common philosophy bringing educators together, myths and assumptions have formed about the practicalities of inclusive education that divide staff, parents, and students alike.

Reclaiming the word and concept of inclusive education and calibrating our definitions among teachers, administrators, support staff, parents, and students was the beginning of my inclusive journey, and so, I thought, what a perfect place to begin this text. What is inclusion – both philosophically and practically? And how can we align these definitions so that our practices better match our beliefs as individuals, schools, and communities of natural diversity? Part of this reclamation is to simply debunk some of the myths driving the education silos, but also to start to reconstruct the practical realities of inclusive education.

In the following chapters, I attempt to describe these practical implications of inclusive education to help situate the rest of this text and to connect our values of inclusion to our everyday practices.

Edition details

• Publisher: Portage & Main Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1553796586
• ISBN 13: 9781553796589
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 90