Presuming competence, belonging, and the promise of inclusion: The US experience
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Presuming competence, belonging, and the promise of inclusion: The US experience Douglas Biklen1
Accepted: 27 August 2020 © UNESCO IBE 2020
Abstract This article examines the US experience with school inclusion, highlighting effective policies, practices, and school reform efforts. Specifically, it reveals how a caseby-case assessment of whether a child can be included works against the goal of full inclusion. Despite this policy limitation, inclusion is moving forward, especially when guided by the principles of presuming competence, belonging, and full citizenship, and informed by the experiences of students who have grown up within the change movement. Keywords Inclusion · Presuming competence · Autobiographies · Disability · Inequality Ironically, the concept of inclusive education exists because of segregation. In fact, my own interest in disability and inclusion began in the world of segregation. An early research project focused on the concentration-camp–like conditions of locked institutions, where people with disabilities endured malnutrition, disease infestations, isolation cells, absence of books or other educational materials, shabby clothing and nakedness, overcrowding, high death rates, verbal, as well as physical abuse, and widespread application of tranquilizers (Biklen 1973). At the Willowbrook State School, for example, hepatitis reached 100% of residents in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It did not take long to realize that the only way to eradicate those conditions was to shut down the institutions (Biklen 2011; Blatt, Biklen, and Bogdan 1977). The reason that children could have been sent to these wastelands was that public schools and early childhood centers excluded many disabled children, leaving parents with few or no program options (Children’s Defense Fund 1974). During the early 1970s, my colleagues and I used our research as evidence in litigation and for community organizing, to win excluded students’ access to public schools (Biklen 1983) and then to effect full inclusion (Biklen 1992, 2005). * Douglas Biklen [email protected] 1
Syracuse University, 230 Huntington Hall, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA
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In this article, I draw upon those experiences, as well as other resources, especially from Disability Studies research that analyzes disability and schooling through a cultural/social/ political lens (Connor, Gabel, Gallagher, and Morton 2008). In the first section, I examine a problem inherent in federal US education policy. In the second section, I present three complementary accounts of inclusive schooling: a) one student’s reflections on what makes for effective inclusion, based on his own experiences from preschool up to University, b) an examination of how Disability Studies researchers are recasting understandings of inclusion away from solely technical aspects to a more socio-cultural lens to formulate school change, and c) a student’s firsthand account of how a person with a disability can play a central role, along with educators, in fashion
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