INCLUSION : THE WAY FORWARD

Welcome to the online course ‘INCLUSION- THE WAY FORWARD’.

This course has been started by ANUGRAHAM in collaboration with the Institute of Community Integration at the University of Minnesota to increase awareness, acceptance and inclusion of individuals with special needs. ANUGRAHAM is an initiative to train teachers, parents, principals, Special educators to achieve inclusion in every school of India.

The Institute on Community Integration (ICI) at the University of Minnesota pushes the edge of inclusion through an intensive focus on policies and practices that affect children, youth, and adults with disabilities, and those receiving educational supports. ICI’s collaborative research, training, and information-sharing ensure that people with disabilities are valued by, included in, and contribute to their communities of choice throughout their lifetime. ICI works with service providers, policymakers, educators, employers, advocacy organizations, researchers, families, community members, and individuals with disabilities around the world, building communities that are inclusive.

The National Educational Policy 2020 (India) envisages Equitable and Inclusive education. The term Inclusion is a broad umbrella term encompassing diversities of gender, abilities, learning styles, languages, socio-economic status and backgrounds. All classrooms across the globe are essentially heterogeneous. 

In this course we will be addressing the inclusion of children with disabilities and diverse learning needs. The pandemic of 2020 has taught us to re-invent ourselves. Online learning was not so common in India, but now it has not only become an accepted way of learning, but a way of learning that is accessible to teachers, parents and principals around the country.

I have come across teachers, supervisors, special educators, and principals who want to continue their learning. Due to the lack of time and schedule of the courses, this interest takes a back seat. This course is just the answer to such challenges. 

The course is designed to help you learn at your own pace. It is an 8-week course. The participants can pace themselves and move at their own comfort levels to complete the course. All participants will have a log -in ID and password through which they will access the modules of every week.  Every Monday, the participants will receive their material which will include videos, reading material and assessments. They need to complete their reading and assignments and submit them by Thursday morning. There will be an online session for 1.5 hours every Friday on Google meet during which the weekly topics and performance in assignments will be discussed, questions will be answered with robust peer interaction. The course material will be in English and during our synchronous sessions, both Hindi and English will be used.  

The course will thus operate on both synchronous ((live meetings where instructors and students are together) and asynchronous (activities students engage in on their own time) modes. 

We all learn by making connections. When we associate one concept with another by memorising, by experiencing, by conversing, by analysing or by responding, we are making connections. 

This course tries to incorporate all of these by setting up the conditions to learn. We need to react to the changing world around us, by new learning, discussing and holding conversations that will help us to make the deeper and more abstract connections between concepts.

We hold conversations with ourselves, when we watch a video or read a text, then relate it to our previous knowledge and experience, finding new information, solving problems, and being confronted with different and challenging view points.

Each of us has a unique way of learning. There is no universal “best” learning method, but generally we learn well when we set our own goals; make active choices about what we do and don’t want to learn; and think about what we have just learnt and relate it to our knowledge.

Most importantly, we learn well when we share and enjoy the experience!

Thus by being expert goal directed learners ourselves, we will learn to make expert learners of all our children irrespective of the diversities they face. Let us together make education in India more inclusive, open opportunities to the marginalized to be included and make our society a better place for individuals with disabilities. 

So ‘All the best’ for this journey!!!

Subha Chandrashekhar

RCI Rehabilitation Practitioner

Fulbright DAI Scholar, Arizona State University

ADA Fellow, University of Minnesota