Inclusive Education

Inclusion in the context of education is the practice, in which students with special educational needs spend most or all of their time with non-disabled students. Implementation of this practice varies; schools can use it for selected students with mild to severe special needs.^[1] Description: Inclusive education differs from previously held notions of ‘integration’ and ‘mainstreaming’, which tended to be concerned principally with disability and ‘special educational needs’ and implied learners changing or becoming ‘ready for’ accommodation by the mainstream. By contrast, inclusion is about the child’s right to participate and the school’s duty to accept the child. Inclusion rejects the use of special schools or classrooms to separate students with disabilities from students without disabilities. A premium is placed upon full participation by students with disabilities and upon respect for their social, civil, and educational rights.

Inclusive schools no longer distinguish between “general education” and “special education” programs; instead, the school is restructured so that all students learn together.^[2]

Proponents want to maximize the participation of all learners in the community schools of their choice, make learning more meaningful and relevant for all, particularly those learners most vulnerable to exclusionary pressures, and to rethink and restructure policies, curricula, cultures and practices in schools and learning environments so that diverse learning needs can be met, whatever the origin or nature of those needs.^[3]

• All students can learn and benefit from education.
• Schools adapt to the needs of students, rather than students adapting to the needs of the school.
• Individual differences between students are a source of richness and diversity, and not a problem.
• The diversity of needs and pace of development of students are addressed through a wide and flexible range of responses (so long as those responses do not include removing a student with a disability from a general education classroom).

Inclusive education is a process of removing barriers and enabling all students, including previously excluded groups, to learn and participate effectively within general school systems.

(Courtesy: Wikipedia)

Filed under: Inclusive education

AMAIDI School4all in India

AMAIDI Foundation is planning to start a new type of school in India, a school for all, preparing the children for a world where we are all free from fear, where we do not only tolerate but seek differences between people as a way to experience the richness that human society has to offer to all of us. This new school is a place where children gladly want to be, where the bonds that tie us in our community are not lost but involved to guarantee a rich experience in which student and teacher roles interchange constantly in a context where all participants feel safe to interact freely and develop individually towards self-confident and relation sensitive makers of a new society.

AMAIDI School4all wants to include all children

Normally a school is founded by one person or a small group anticipating a future for which they design an educational system and present that to the world as a product of their personal imagination. AMAIDI wants to design this new school in a different way: through networking with all who are interested to re-make education and bring it back to its roots where the teacher and the student enjoy being together in interchanging roles. And where creativity is not a subject but the basic energy on which all that happens thrives. AMAIDI School4All wants to support efforts undertaken by the Government of India in achieving the Millennium Development Goal ‘Education For All’. It therefor seeks coöperation with the private as well as with the public sector and the government involvement in supporting inclusive education in India.

AMAIDI Foundation invites you all on this terrific journey of re-creating education in India, using this weblog as our pied-a-terre where we touch down, reporting from the field and gathering information, opinions, benchmarks, initiatives from other countries etc. We’ll be generously taking up links, creating a flood of information emerging ourselves in it in the hope that being intuitive and receptive as we go will keep us on track.

To have an idea of what ‘inclusive education’ means in modern India, to create a quiet starting point perhaps, you may click here

Thank you for reading this, for being with me.

Camille/AMAIDI Foundation

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