In Canada, ongoing advocacy efforts from disabled communities have resulted in an evolution of education over time. Generally speaking, “inclusive education” promises the equitable inclusion of disabled students in kindergarten to Grade 12 (K-12) schools.
But true inclusion requires more than existing in the same building or classroom. It requires envisioning models based in a human rights approach that recognize diversity and acknowledge that people are not defined by one characteristic.
Disabled students continue to face barriers constructed and enforced by our schools. Students and their support networks, families, advocates and experts can no longer accept school systems which uphold inequality for the disabled community. There are ways we can combat these encroachments.
Confinement and restriction
In many provinces in Canada, students with disabilities experience aspects of confinement and restriction in K-12 education.
Read more: Restraining and secluding students with disabilities is an urgent human rights issue
The term “transinstitutionalization” describes a process in which people with disabilities experience being confined in dehumanizing ways, throughout their lives, despite the promises of inclusive education.
Disability advocates and scholars note how educational practices and policies continue to maintain a new form of institutionalization for people with disabilities, without the bricks and mortar of a traditional building for the disabled community. In this way, students with disabilities are set up for future decades of similar exclusion, confinement or marginalization.
Marginalization from curricula
Canadian K-12 education perpetuates disability stigma and marginalization through segregated practices, policies and attitudes.
Programs serving children with a disability label have various names. In Manitoba, there are “individualized” and “modified” programs. Ontario has “modified” and “alternative-unaccredited” programs.
Individualized programming is described as appropriate for students whose intellectual developmental disorder prevents them from benefiting from participation in provincial curriculum.
As an educator for over 10 years, I have been taught, and teach, that all students can learn. Insinuating some learners do not benefit from curriculum is ableist.
Isn’t it the responsibility of our educational authorities to develop curriculum for all learners?
Lack of opportunities, unpaid work
Enrolment in programs for students with disabilities can trigger a process of restriction, sometimes lifelong, in government programs and services that begin as early as kindergarten and continue into adulthood through sheltered workshops and day programs.
In Manitoba, as explored in education professor Nadine Bartlett’s research, disabled students participating in individualized or modified programs have reported experiencing curricular restriction, programming claw-backs, lack of opportunities, inadequate resources and discriminatory attitudes and policies.
Manitoba students who participate in individualized programs do not receive an accredited diploma but instead a certificate of completion; students in modified programming receive an “m-designiated” diploma that differs from a regular diploma.
Envisioning dignified vocational preparation
Although meaningful vocational training is beneficial, advocates have noted that many times people with disabilities are undervalued or exploited, including through unpaid labour.
After graduation, without a regular diploma, when students do work, they earn a paltry amount. People often face income precarity, and the disability community has had to advocate against disability support payments being clawed back when people are employed.
Disabled students, regardless of clinical assessment and program registration, must graduate with formal high school diplomas and receive dignified educational and vocational preparation.
This needs to be tied to wider community and societal work, in conjunction with multiple levels of government, to envision, create and prepare disabled students for non-exploitative and fair employment where they are paid for labour without prejudice in jobs after high school.
Read more: Bill C-22 will provide income security to Canadians with disabilities, but it needs to be done right
For the disabled community, Canada’s education system seems liked a closed door. People with disabilities continue to experience systemic barriers in accessing education, something that negatively affects quality of life and can be devastating. The advocacy group Disability Without Poverty reports that one in six people with disabilities lived in poverty in 2022.
Popular myths about special education
There are a host of popular myths that play into the defence of special education as preferable to inclusion.
Editor Linda J. Graham and author Kate De Bruin in Inclusive Education for the 21s Century explore these in an effort to accentuate the benefits of inclusivity in schools.
For example, justification for disability-based exclusion or segregation is often presented as factual and conceptualized as inclusive. These justifications insinuate disabled students may cause undue hardship for schools and school boards or divisions and therefore should be segregated from other students.
Another myth is that the needs of disabled students are “special” and they should should be educated alongside other students with “special” needs by teachers with “special” knowledge and training. However, as many scholars have shown, this is not supported by evidence.
Each foundational myth constructs a pretense that seeks to justify separate, segregated and unequal educational opportunities.
This mythology continues to maintain broken systems that extend beyond kindergarten to Grade 12 education.
Representation and reform
First and foremost, our school culture must shift. The disability community is the largest global equity group. It’s also one that many of us will join throughout our lifetime and comprises roughly 27 per cent of all Canadians. Inclusive educators and administrators can pave the way for a more inclusive system by celebrating disability as a distinct community and culture.
Schools need to hire, support and promote disabled educators. Systems must undergo curricular reform that is representative of disability studies, employing community members and experts in the field for the purpose of short- and long-term strategic planning.
Future research in this area should explore how transinstitutionalization — the phenomenon where people leave one therapeutic community to move into other institutions — is implemented in different school districts, boards and provinces. This could involve mapping inequity and potential discriminatory policy, practices and processes in Canadian schools.
Comprehensive vision of human experience
Our local schools and public institutions are the bedrock of our democracy and society. Honouring the disability community’s human rights is a global challenge. We cannot afford to negotiate these inclusive values and morals.
We need our schools and governments to fashion policy that encompasses a complete and comprehensive vision of the human experience, one that understands the universality of disability and works toward remediating barriers.
Susannah Mintz and Gregory Fraser, editors of Placing Disability: Personal Essays of Embodied Geography ask us to understand that what disability means for our collective grasp of the human condition is connected with where disability happens.
Understood in the school context, this means that the way we encounter and engage with people with disabilities in our schools, and the labels and practices we introduce, tells us something about ableist assumptions.
It is only through ending segregation in education, while revisioning existing structures, school cultures and providing adequate resource support, that people with disabilities can be an integral part of society on an equal basis as others.
Dr. Michael Baker has worked for the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg as a contract lecturer. He has received funding from the Jewish Foundation of Manitoba (2024) to support his doctoral research. This work is affiliated with the Canadian Association of Teacher Education.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
