For years we have looked at Inclusion when we are referring to students with Special Educational Needs however, in preparation for the conference in Kuwait, I have just got to thinking about this in a little more detail.
The term inclusion is often used when discussing student with special education needs. The focus of inclusion is to identify and address a student’s individual needs in order to allow them to be integrated into lessons and to access the learning.
Now the term inclusion implies that those students without special needs are already included. So, in other words, the majority already have access to the learning so don’t need specialist inclusion measures to be taken with them. We are accepting that the learning opportunities presented will be sufficient for the majority and that either no or little modification is needed for these students to access learning.
This cannot possibly be the case as all students are different, with different experiences, backgrounds, cognitive abilities, skills, talents, fears and interests. The fact that we need to focus on inclusion for SEN students highlights the fact that we may not be valuing the individual nature of ALL students within our classrooms.
Now maybe there is some learning to be gained from special needs support as it, for years, has been focussed on meeting individual student needs. In addition SEN support has often involved a variety of technologies, each utilised in different ways, and maybe this is something else that can be learned from, in terms of technologies place in supporting students as individuals. Whichever way we look at it, the important fact is we need to look more at how we support all students as individuals as if we truly manage this, why would there be a need for inclusion?
Technology and Learning