MODULE 7: "HOW TO INCLUDE THE STUDENT"

Inclusive teaching is above all good teaching. Within inclusive settings, students who experience disability as well as those who don’t, have been found to receive higher-quality instruction that is better suited to individual needs.

This module examines what is inclusion and what it’s not; provides an introduction to Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and differentiation, and gives parents, teachers and students the tools and framework to achieve inclusion in practice.

• All children can learn and deserve to learn

• Positive in Approach

• Student Centred

• Student voice is paramount 

• Vision

• Trial and error

• School and home life are always intertwined

• All children can learn and deserve to learn

• Positive in Approach

• Student-Centred

• Student voice is paramount 

• Vision

• Trial and error

• School and home life are always intertwined

As we plan to work through how we can best always include the student in our planning, we need to have a look again about the importance of a VISION, which we discussed in Module 2. The vision is the guide to how to include – if we do this, will it enable the vision or put the vision at risk.

Watch Al’s Story, a film documenting Al Graham’s inclusive education journey from Kindergarten to Year 12 at Turramurra High School in NSW (crafted by Citrine Pictures for Family Advocacy).

Inclusion is:

• A commitment to creating environments in which all children feel welcome, accepted and honoured for who they are
• The belief that everyone benefits from knowing, interacting with, and learning from a wide range of other individuals
• The understanding that we are ALL different – and ALL the same. We are all human beings that seek connections, affection, opportunities to learn and grow, and to belong. And we all have different strengths, challenges, and needs for support
• The recognition that if we want to make a better world for everyone, we all need to learn to be comfortable, skilled and enthusiastic interacting with a wide range of people.

Inclusion is not:

• A place
• A service
• Letting children with disabilities join typical children for particular activities

From All students learning together – Taking action on education, Family Advocacy

Inclusion in education is recognised as a basic human right and the foundation for a more just and equal society (European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education, 2012). Article 24 of the UN Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities recognises that education should be accessible “…without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity…within an inclusive education system at all levels….”.

Educational environments for students with disabilities range from a complete denial of formal educational settings to equal participation in all aspects of the education system. In the paper “A summary of the evidence on Inclusive Education” (2016), the authors described the educational experiences of students with disabilities using these four categories:

The world is full of experiences, opportunities and possibilities that, if they are properly tapped into, can mean that the person gets to enjoy life more richly and to fulfil their greater potential. However, if they cannot get to these experiences, then all of this will be lost. The means to get to these life-giving experiences and opportunities are valued social roles. Roles are the vehicle through which a person gets to be part of community life and enjoy what community life might offer. These roles can include, for example, friend, neighbour, club member, employee, sports fan, adventurer, athlete, relative, travel mate, colleague (Kendrick).

Valued roles are the key to the good things of life for everyone. When we have work, community, civic, relationship and recreational roles we have opportunity to meet people, develop our skills and project a positive image of ourselves with others. Extra effort must be made to assist people with disability into valued roles, so they too can reap the wonderful benefits.

Potential roles of interest to the student are an important aspect of defining their goals rather than having goals simply for the sake of completing a plan. Some examples of goal areas include:

• Building skills – building coordination skills so that the person can be a soccer player and part of a team
• Developing a new role – for someone who loves to play the drums, the role could be drummer in the school band
• Enhancing a skill – for someone who loves to draw, not only participating in the art class but also contributing to a mural or other piece of collective art for the school environment
• Roles such as ‘school play cast member’ offers many different roles within that role. Actor, stage hand, lighting controller, costume maker, announcer, promotions officer and so on.

Teasing the roles out gives us the opportunity to think which role would best suit the student’s interests and capacities.

Valued Roles in the classroom can look like, but are not limited to:

• School captain
• Prefect
• Camp leader
• Kinder/new student buddy
• School choir member
• Band member
• Audio/visual expert

Just attending the same classes does not enhance social status but those assigned socially-desirable school and classroom roles does have a higher sense of social acceptance. They were found to have reinforced confidence and increased social capital (Mpofu, 2003 cited in Foreman & Arthur-Kelly, 2017).

Read more at Building Belonging in the School Community – Community Resource Unit

We often focus on the ‘intentional’ curriculum, such as the lessons and learning outcomes, as the most important part of a student’s educational experience. However, there is a lot more going on in the regular school environment which allows that ‘child culture’ to flourish. This is the “hidden” or ‘incidental’ curriculum: the experiences, relationships, activities, events, even mistakes that are constantly happening on the side, completely undirected by the teacher. Incidental learning takes place within and outside the classroom, through facing new situations, interacting with peers (not just academically but also socially), trial and error, and by simply ‘doing’ things.

If you ask yourself “what do I remember about high school”, your memories are more likely to be about the friends and social aspects of your school life, than the algebra or periodic table. Students with disability who attend segregated settings often miss out on the incidental curriculum.

When inclusion is seen as a disability issue and not as a whole-of-school issue, inclusive education becomes a code for ‘special education’ and as such can work against inclusive practice….and an expanded view of inclusive education allows it to be seen as a human rights issue, with marginalised and excluded groups being discriminated against and denied what is readily available to others in the mainstream (The Australian Research Alliance for Children and Youth (ARACY), 2013:9). You can read more at ARACY’s Inclusive Education for students with disability.

Decades of research demonstrates that inclusive education has benefits for the academic, communication, positive behavioural and social development of students labelled with ‘severe’ and ‘multiple disabilities’. Genuinely inclusive education allows students to build and develop friendships that they might not have considered or encountered otherwise. Research outlines that students who experience disability who are educated in ‘mainstream’ settings demonstrate better academic and vocational outcomes. Within inclusive settings, students who do and do not experience disability have been found to receive higher-quality instruction that is better suited to individual needs. Further, the education of teachers to be equipped and prepared to teach all students – in a fully inclusive manner – is essential to inclusive education (Taken from Cologon, 2019).

Gina, a parent quoted in All Students Learning Together said: “Social skills come from an immersion in the regular class. He sees his peers modelling behaviour. Mac is an only child so it is important for him to see kids doing all kinds of things – the good and the bad. I don’t mind if he sees kids fighting. He needs to see and learn. If he only saw positive things he would not be getting the full flow of life. He needs full immersion in everyday ordinary life. Now he has a cracker of an angry face and I think that is terrific. We have talked about how and when to use the face appropriately.”

Inclusion in Education is about peers with and without disabilities coming together side-by-side in a grade-level classroom to achieve academic, social, communication, and functional skills. It occurs when communities of learners of the same age are educated together within natural school settings.

Click on the plus sign to see some of the things that inclusion creates

On 26 August 2016 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities adopted General Comment (No.4) on the right to inclusive education, clarifying the obligations of ratifying countries (including Australia, the United Kingdom and Canada) under Article 24 (Inclusive Education) of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In doing so, the Committee recommended that:

“… [Governments] apply the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) approach. UDL is a set of principles, providing teachers and other staff with a structure to create adaptable learning environments and develop instruction to meet the diverse needs of all learners. It recognizes that each student learns in a unique manner and involves developing flexible ways to learn:

• creating an engaging classroom environment;
• maintaining high expectations for all students, while allowing multiple ways to meet expectations;
• empowering teachers to think differently about their own teaching; and
• focusing on educational outcomes for all, including those with disabilities.

Curricula must be conceived, designed and applied to meet and adjust to the requirements of every student, and providing appropriate educational responses. Standardised assessments must be replaced by multiple forms of assessments and recognition of individual progress towards broad goals that provide alternative routes for learning.” [para 25]

(From All Means All, Inclusion toolkit for educators)

Read more at

How do we include the student – Access Symposium

Is your school inclusive? – Paula Kluth

Inclusion in Practice

Download and read Resources 1 to 4 below, listing what is inclusion and what is not inclusion within the classroom. Can you think of some more examples?

Using these documents and the examples that you thought of, list down instances of inclusion in the classroom and the school environment using the table in Resource 5.

Remember inclusive practices cannot be achieved in isolation. Who else in the school community can support you to achieve inclusion?

Universal Design for Learning (UDL) is based upon an idea that was originally applied in architecture – that it is more efficient and effective for a building to be “universally designed” from the outset so that it can used by all people, to the greatest extent possible – rather than the building being designed for the “average” user, and subsequently adjusted or modified in design to cater for other users.

If we try to design a building so that it is accessible to the elderly and people with disability, then we achieve a design that is accessible to most, if not all. It will include ramps and elevators, extra space in bathrooms to allow wheelchair transfer, broader doorways for wheelchair access, lever door handles, hand support rails in showers etc. The building may look much the same as any other – but its design caters for the most marginalized – and therefore for all.

In education, teachers know all too well that all students are different and that they learn differently – this fact is recognised by the learning sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, which underlies the Universal Design for Learning framework.

Some students love to write, some hate reading, some need to visualize key concepts, some have no trouble coping with the regular classroom, whilst others feel anxious with the noise and unpredictability of the classroom or struggle to stay still at a desk. It is not surprising that with such individual variation much of the teacher’s time is involved with “managing” the class rather than teaching – with trying to “engage” students that are not readily engaged by a lesson that is designed for and pitched to the “middle”.

In Universal Design for Learning these individual differences between students are acknowledged and class processes are developed from the outset to remove or minimize all barriers to learning (i.e. physical, cognitive, intellectual and organizational barriers) and to cater for the wide range in individual difference. A universally designed curriculum is designed to meet the needs of all students in the class, thereby avoiding or minimising the need to subsequently differentiate the lesson for individual students.

(From All Means All, Inclusion toolkit for educators)

Differentiation can sometimes be referred to as differentiated instruction, and involves proactively planning varied approaches to what and how students learn, in order to be inclusive of student diversity. When undertaking this approach to accessible learning, content, process, product, environment and affect are ‘differentiated’ according to where students are currently at with their learning, and recognises the factors that motivate students, including their individual preferences for learning (Adapted from Graham, 2020 Inclusive Education for the 21st Century).

Differentiation is an approach that encourages teachers to respond to relevant difference among individuals while maintaining high expectations for all. It needs to be used together with effective evidence-based teaching methods to minimise learning failure.

(From Teaching Methods: Differentiated instruction)

Prior to any conversations it’s good to have thought about what we want to talk about!

Let’s think about what we think inclusion is for our student, and how we are doing this, or can do this better. We recall and keep in mind the VISION as we make decisions about how to include our student.

Click on the plus sign to read the “Inclusion in Action” section below and watch the video clip.

This video clip produced by Down Syndrome Queensland (DSQ) in collaboration with students from the Griffith Film School and Pullenvale State School, highlights the difference between integration, perceived inclusion and true inclusion in a classroom environment.

Let’s make inclusion happen

Let’s share something positive to start with – on the topic of something we have discovered about our student or more generally.

What has been discussed, decided upon?

Has the student been consulted before, during or regards to the outcome?

What needs to be followed up, who will do this, by when and how will we know it’s been done. Is there a review required?

Who else is it important to share this information with? How will we do this? Who will do this? (Consider other staff, replacement teachers, peers).

Now go back to your “Conversation Guide” document and complete the “actions” section.