Developing a Positive Attitude Among Students, Parents, And Community Towards Inclusive Education

 For Your Amigos Foundation, Authored by Aleena Jose

As a social worker, I heard more about inclusive education and I didn't know more about inclusive education. But when I was done by last semester fieldwork in Shradhanjali Integrated School in Bangalore, from there I understood and learned about what is inclusive education and the importance of developing a positive attitude among students, teachers, and community towards inclusive education. Shradhanjali integrated school (SIS) founded in 1973, is a primary school up to Class VII recognized under the SSLC Board. It can educate up to 200 children. The school maintains an 80:20 ratio of children with disabilities and able-bodied to promote inclusion. SIS focuses on activity-oriented learning, sports, and arts and crafts to ensure all-round development. What do you mean by inclusive education? Inclusive in education refers to a model wherein students, regardless of any challenges they may have been placed in age- appreciate general education classes. It can be simply explained as students with special needs spend most or all of their time with non- special needs students.

Successful inclusive education happens primarily through accepting, understanding, and attending to student differences and diversity, which can include physical, cognitive, academic, social, and emotional. In an inclusive education system, students never need to spend time out of regular education classes, because sometimes they spend on speech or occupational therapy. From field experience, I can observe the activities in an integrated school. The students give more support and care to their friends who need special attention. They help each other in studies, sports, etc. Teacher plays a significant role to bring positive attitude among students towards inclusive education. There different approaches to teach, to bring positive attitudes to students towards inclusive education. They are:

·       Child to child approach:

Child to child approach strategy Develops a positive attitude among students towards inclusive education.  In this strategy, one student who has a problem in learning a concept on a one-to-one basis, a competent student is paired with one who has difficulty in a given academic area.

·       Cooperative learning:

Cooperative learning is a method to develop a positive attitude towards inclusive education in students.  The primary elements involved in this technique are positive interdependence or the feeling that individual goal attainment relies on the performance of all group members, student's responsibility, face-to-face interaction with peers, and use of social skills and involvement of a group as a whole in the completion of a given academic task.

·       Children supporting children:

Children need to be actively involved in the transition to a caring inclusive school as they are key stakeholders. Often children do not treat their disabled peers with respect because they are uncomfortable with, or unsure about, the difficulty.  To ensure that students learn to work and play together, they must be given the knowledge they need. Inclusive classrooms require structure and organization to facilitate students learning together. 

There must be a strong parent-teacher association group that states on the importance of parental involvement for an ideal inclusive program. This would enable us to bring attitudinal changes to disability-related issues in parents. Nowadays parents are made aware of the goals of inclusive education. Most parents get the awareness of the inclusive program but many of them are not willing especially difficulty child parents are protective, apprehensive that their child will be teased, left out, and not receive a quality education in an inclusive setting. In the same way, normal child parents don't want to sit their children with difficult children in an inclusive classroom. It is the school's responsibility to provide information and reassurance to the parents. To bring positive attitude among parents towards inclusive education schools should explain to parents that their child being educated in inclusive school can improve the child’s social abilities and academic achievements and family participation in the education of the child, the child does better in school. Challenged children need advocates, the parents are the best advocate for the child. Parents and teachers need to work collaboratively to develop individual education plans for their children.

Community involvement in planning activities and providing services such as education, health, and skills training are crucial for building local capacity. Inclusion is a social and educational philosophy. Those who believe in inclusion also believe that all people are valuable members of mainstream society. The attitude that ‘inclusive education’ is developed in the community by providing awareness on educational policies that enable everyone to find their place in the community to which they primarily belong and at the same time be given the means to open up other communities. International Commission on Education for the Twenty-first century reminds us that education policies must be so designed as not to become another cause of social exclusion and that schools should foster the desire to live together. [UNESCO, 1990]. As a social worker responsible for creating the link between school and community and have been able to successfully mobilize community forces to support inclusion.

The future is very bright indeed for this approach. Inclusion is not a soft process. It requires a lot of struggle and commitment to overcome all types of barriers mainly attitudinal and social. The real challenge of Inclusive Education is to meet the special needs of all children with and without disabilities. Inclusive Education can only flourish in a system, which generates inclusive ideology. So people must change their negative attitudes towards inclusive education, we see that with exposure both parents and teachers become more positive. Training and support allow regular education teachers to implement inclusive education with success. Inclusive education is a worldwide movement that is transforming the educational system. Inclusive education is a real need, but primarily involves changes in attitudes, if each member of a community, normal student and his parents realized in the sense that "If a challenged child in my house what can I do?"