S11 E4 Look Both Ways: Exploring Disability with Brooke Ellison

8:57PM Sep 22, 2023

Speakers:

Tim Villegas

Keywords:

disability

people

inclusive

learner

classroom

talk

students

school

brooke

life

questions

inclusion

book

day

years

inclusive education

kinds

ways

supports

conversation

Hi friends. I'm Tim Vegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you are listening to think inclusive, our podcast that brings you conversations about inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. Wow, wow, wow. If you are listening to this episode on the day that it publishes, my wife and I are celebrating 20 years of marriage today, on September 28 2003. We were married in front of our friends and family at discounsel Gardens in LA Kenyatta, Flint Ridge, California. So thanks so much for sharing this moment with me and to my beautiful bride, Brianna. Love you so much darling. Here is to the next 20 Okay, enough mushy stuff. We have another fantastic guest with us today. Brooke Ellison is a disability rights advocate, author and professor at Stony Brook University. She became quadriplegic at the age of 11. After being hit by a car, and brick has gone on to do some fascinating things. She graduated from Harvard University and even ran for the New York State Senate. Brooke is passionate about promoting inclusivity and changing societal perceptions of disability. For this episode, Brooke discusses her book look both ways and shares her personal journey of living with quadriplegia and how it shaped her understanding of disability. She discusses the importance of shifting the narrative around disability from one of pity and shame to one of strength and empowerment. Brooke emphasizes the need for inclusive policies that consider disability as a cross cutting issue in all aspects of public policy. She also highlights the significance of universal design and the benefits of inclusion for all individuals. Thank you so much to our incredible sponsor for this week's episode, changing perspectives, an international nonprofit that partners with schools and districts to create inclusive and equitable learning communities for all students. They offer customizable teacher trainings, family workshops, and curriculum resources. They've already helped over 300,000 students, 12,000 teachers, and 500 schools, visit their website at changing perspectives now.org To learn more, and schedule a free meeting, we've got a great conversation for you today that will help all of us to think inclusive, stick around till the very end for the mystery question. And for free time I address some comments from social media about getting into the nuts and bolts of how we implement inclusive education. We'll be back after a quick break.

Brooke Ellison, welcome to the thinking cluesive podcast.

Oh, thank you so much, Jim. It's a pleasure to be here.

Brooke, your book. Look both ways is fantastic. Thank you so much for writing it and for sharing your life and story. There's so many things I learned about you. Like you ran for the New York State Senate that you graduated from Harvard. But why don't we just start with? Why did you want to tell your story? And what do you feel it's relevant?

First, Tim, thank you so much for welcoming me to your show. And for your thoughts on my book, as I'm sure you could tell, that both ways is a deeply personal and important work for me. I view it as one of the most important things that I've done. And yeah, I've done a lot of interesting things in my life, but yet I was deeply committed to reading this book. So as I read about actually, it looked both ways. And I've mentioned it in many times in the past. Yeah, I first wrote a book. I just graduated from college just out of out of Harvard in 2000. My graduation generated quite a bit of attention and interest and so I wrote a book thereafter. And so at that point, it was I was 10 years after my accident, I 10 years post accident and even though I was I lived Titan years was part Just procedure at that time, like I, I had still I didn't really fully understand what it meant to be disabled, right, I lived with disability for 10 years I had accommodated my life to living with a disability, but I didn't really understand what it meant to be disabled. And by I think there's a distinction between being disabled and living with a disability. But for all those years after I wrote that book, I knew that I wanted to write another book, I knew that there was a part of myself that I wanted to share, I just didn't really know what it was gonna look like. And so it was actually, as you mentioned, my 40th birthday, and I became pretty sick, I was battling some, an infection that was persistent, and not really you're not going away, it was a pressure ulcer that if you're not familiar with what they are, they can be quite catastrophic to people who use wheelchairs. And I said to myself, if I don't write this book, now, I might not ever have the opportunity to write it again, like I didn't want to be frivolous about my life or not understand the kind of severity that I could experience. So that summer after my 40th birthday, which, as you mentioned, was like such a fantastic day. I Voxer, myself in my bedroom, and I said, Yeah, Brooke, think about the things that you actually want to share with people, what are what are the most important parts of who you are, and things you've learned and things you may need to ever have the self confidence to talk about before. So that's what I did that tire summer, I just kind of closed myself off, and it just poured my heart out into my laptop, you're talking about things that I just never thought that I had the capacity to talk about before, whether that is instances of love, and what that means to be some of the hardships and feelings of Yeah, questioning of myself that I've experienced because of how people have perceived me or how I think people perceive me, for being the disabled member of my family and what that meant, and then how I needed to shift those thoughts to the virtues that have come at my life, the kinds of understandings I've come to, because of the disabilities I live with. And that was quite powerful. That was really meaningful for me. And that's really where the title of the book came from. Right. So you look both ways is, you know, obviously, the acknowledgement you had were taught to cross the street, right, I was hit by a car, it's kind of the the, the instructions or the guide books. So it's about being hit by a car and look both ways. But at the same time, it's really, how do we need to understand our lives and looking at our lives in terms of instances of difficulty in instances of struggle, but also the lessons that we learn from that. And you're to touch on the second part of your question. The beginning of LiquidSpace. And I'm very deliberate about acknowledging that, you know, when I set out to write look both ways, I wasn't trying to write a book about disability, right, like, that was not my goal. But in so doing, you know, in putting words to paper, I came to understand very clearly that disability is just one representation of the many different kinds of challenges that we all experience, right? It's a very obvious one. But getting through life with disability is a very, requires the very same skill set that I think we all need to draw upon when we're dealing with any challenges in our lives, right? Learning to understand our lives differently. No less valuably, but differently. And that was really kind of, I think, the center piece of the both ways. And I think what unites many of us, irrespective of what our experiences might be.

There's a lot to unpack there, but I wanted to focus on you said you weren't sure how to be a disabled person. Like in your early 20s, right, so like, I guess, I guess, I guess thinking back, I'm not sure if we really know how to be people in your early 20s. But I wonder because of your experience of becoming disabled, even if it was at 10 years old, of seeing life through a couple of different ways. You If that has informed you on how to think about disability, because this, this book really resonates with me, because I have three children, but my youngest is 10. And she is very interested in my work. Not that my kids don't. It's not like they don't care, you know, but but Imogen, like, asked me questions all the time. Daddy, who are you interviewing today? You know, what are you writing? What are you doing? And I mentioned, like, Oh, I'm interviewing Brooke Ellison. She wrote a book and, you know, and she was hit by a car at 10. And she became disabled and, and stuff like that. And so, she asked a lot of questions. And she asked a lot of questions about, well, are you disabled? Like, what's the difference between if you become disabled later? And if you're born with a disability? And is is like, is that different? You know, and is it? You know, and she's learning about inherited traits, and, you know, stuffing, like in school? So is that an inherited trait or not an inherited trait? And so I'm explaining this to her. But I think the reason I bring that up is because there's a lot of questions right around disability and, and how to think about it. And so as a person that became disabled later in life, even if it wasn't 10, how was that informed you with? How to talk about it? And how you think about yourself?

That's a really powerful question. Actually. It's, I've heard so many questions. And that's not one that I've ever been asked before. So I think that's really that's a phenomenal question. So it's, I lived your 10 years of my life without disability. And in those 10 years, yeah, I was able to do things that you're not able to do right now, at least not in the same way. So I was a dancer. And that was a huge part of my life. Since I was two years old, yeah, I set up a church choir, I was involved in Little League Baseball, I studied karate, right. So things that I've been a had I been born with congenital disability, I would not have had the opportunity to take part in NASA, my life would have been lesser as a result of that for things that I would not have been able to enjoy and then have since become very much a part of who I am. What I think is interesting is that I was very young, at the time of my accident, the accident left me paralyzed from from right back down. And at that time, it was just, you know, they teamed it early on. Actually, the Americans with Disabilities Act had just been passed you two months before my accident. So July of 1990, by accident happened in September of 1990. And I think at that point in social history, society really not had not come to any great understanding of what disability meant, what how to include, or, you know, even till this day, that exhibit will disappear, disabilities had to value their lives, appreciate them. And I was very much a product of that social thinking. Right. So I thought that disability was something to be ashamed of, I thought that people with disabilities are the people you should pity, right, like people who are living some kind of less lesser life, less valuable life, less worthy life, I remember being discharged from rehabilitation for the hospital. So I was at the hospital for nine months, six weeks in intensive care, and then seven and a half months and rehabilitation. And in that rehabilitation setting, for as long as I was there, I was kind of taught to accommodate my life to, to disability rights and to make the modifications that I needed to try to get a lot of get get by, right and not really feel proud of who I was, but just kind of accommodate my existence to a world that was not going to be welcoming to me. And I suppose that was just the right way to approach it. Right. That was the mindset that I had that the life that the comparison point that I had was only going to make my life lesser than what it had been. I think it that was an unfortunate interpretation of my life. They carried me through for a great number of years like I was always evaluating my life as a person with a disability in comparison to some better life or some other life. That was the right life and I think that was unfortunate that kind of clouded my sink. For a long time, it wasn't until years after that, probably many years even after I graduated from college probably headed into graduate school, when I could understand myself differently like not as a weaker or lesser person, not as a manifestation of all of the negative stereotypes that I had understood to be associated with disability, but one of strikes and one of empowerment and one of resilience and creativity and problem solving, like all of these really strong virtues that are clearly the product of living with disability, living life differently, even living in a world that was not designed for me, like all of those things, I think were really, really valuable in helping me to understand disability differently, but then also understanding humanity differently, allowing me to see how people can thrive irrespective of what they're told they can do Thrive irrespective of whether or not the world is welcoming that level of of thriving, and understanding that the challenges that we can initially anticipate as being way too much to bear, right way more than any one person has the capacity to handle actually are manageable are things that we can continue to move forward with, nonetheless, or even sometimes, because of

I feel like, as a society, we're, we're getting better. We're certainly not where I think either of us want us to be. I wonder if you because you talk about experiences of people saying to you, like, oh, that what you're going through, it's, it's too much? And they're not sure if they could do it? I'm not strong enough. Right. So, like, what, what kinds of things do you say to people who think that way? And, you know, what do we what do we need to do as a society to move people beyond that type of thinking?

Right, so there's, there's like, no multifaceted way of approaching that question. Right? So in some ways, it's, it's, it's kind of demeaning. It's kind of like, Oh, your life is so terrible. How could you possibly survive that kind of awful life, which I think is in itself feel, at minimum, a bit dismissive and a lack of understanding of what my life is all about? Right? My life is full of beauties for you. It's of course full of pain and difficulty, but at the same time, full of love and beauty, and all these things that really make it so so valuable. So the first there's that and then there's kind of this whole notion of, but many people in the disability community call it inspiration porn, rather than the dead people need to kind of benchmark their own lives versus somebody's life, who they perceive to be less fortunate. Right? So I'm gonna make myself feel better based on somebody else's life. Right. So I have mixed feelings about that. I think that we're all we gain a lot of insight and a lot of encouragement from how we inspire one another, so I'm not. So I don't reject that idea quite as much as I think others might. But at the same time, like I think that we've undervalue our own capacity to move through instances, shall I think we fail to appreciate and as a result, underestimate our ability to move forward with our lives and times of greatest difficulty. And I mean, that certainly applies to me as well. So if somebody had said to me, you know, the day before my accident that you'd spar, you're going to encounter your devastating life changing accident, you know, live for the rest of your life, or for however many years unable to move your body and breathing through a ventilator like I don't know if I would have been able to say, okay, yeah, that sounds great. And like, that's just like, does it those pieces don't fit together? They don't meld with any kind of, like social picture of what disability is all about. Right? And I think that that's unfortunate. So I talked about this in the book that he wanted the classes that I teach America Professor at Stony Brook University I teach medical ethics is kind of my area of focus in addition to some others, and many of the questions around medical ethics revolve around people who have undergone life changing your very, very difficult circumstances, whether or not they ought to live their lives, whether or not they think their lives are worth living, whether that's through a diagnosis or some kind of injury or what have you. So when so whenever we get into that conversation, I asked my students, you know, what, for them, would constitute a life not worth living? So I want them to think, yeah, kind of very proactively about this, especially if they're going into the health care fields. And many of them say things to me, like, oh, well, if I were dependent on machines to live, you, I wouldn't want to live anymore. Or if I was confined to a wheelchair, or if I couldn't do all the things that I used to be able to do. Or if I was dependent on family members have been burned into my family. Like all of these things, they they say to me, almost without even realizing they're talking.

I'm just like, oh my gosh, like, Yeah,

like that, like, had to swallow hard and say, Hey, like, I couldn't be offended by that. Like, in some ways, it's kind of it's kind of funny, and kind of a little bit liberating. But um, but then as we get go through the course of the semester, we talk about things a little bit more deeply. You know, they come to realize, wait a sec, it, many of the things that I had typically understood about disability or understood about life struggles are not necessarily how they ought to be understood. And you're like, I'm a very firm believer that we have been taught to understand disability in terms of the physical components of it, right, like just parts of our bodies that are, in some way impaired without understanding that disability is much more than that, right? It's a socio cultural construct that takes into consideration the kinds of policies that we enact, or the environments that we build, or the social services that we put into place, or the technologies that we that we innovate, all of which either can enable somebody or further to save or somebody and I'd like, those are all equally as much a part of disability and to just kind of focus on why this physicality, I think this is the role that we play in helping to either Empower or disempower somebody. And I think my students ultimately understand that they have a role to play in, in that conversation as well. And when those kinds of things are put into place like that, those are the kinds of things that I think people fear the most about disability, like if they if I were to do like a thought experiment asking people, What would they be most concerned about, if they were told that they were going to be disabled tomorrow, like, it would be things like, Oh, I wouldn't be able to have work on my job, or I wouldn't be able to have a relationship, right? All of these things that are purely socially based, that we have a capacity to make a difference. If we actually invested our time in that way, right. You can you can get through the physical part of disability, but it's all those other social things that we don't really pay as much attention to, and almost abdicate our responsibility and trying to fix. So like there's many pieces to that very question. I think that they are, they're all relevant and are really important to have. We all have a role to play at this.

You mentioned public policy. And I know that's something that you worked really hard on when you were running for the New York State Senate. I'm assuming that something that's still is on your mind. So what are some of the policies on top of mind right now that that you feel like are we really need to work on?

Right? Yeah. So actually, just a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel discussion at the Harvard Kennedy School talking about disability and disability policy and how people with disabilities are often you know, a opponents of the population are left out of left out of policy conversations. And I think what we have typically done over the years is look at policies related to people with disabilities as disability policy, right, like its own category or one siloed category. And as a result, it almost becomes an afterthought, right? It almost becomes like, Oh, this is a population that we could conceivably think about or not or people we either are a part of or are not right, kind of this this authoring of people with disabilities, rather than looking at disability as a cross cutting intersectional issue that that cuts across really every aspect of public policy, whether it is employment policy, whether it is educational policy, transportation, healthcare, right, every aspect of public policy, even things like immigration, right, so So last year, I was a part of a top panel conversation on immigration and how immigrants and people of immigrants with disabilities have so regularly been denied access to the country, right? From this larger, they're going to be has Social Charge kind of conversation, and they're willingly going to exact resources rather than give to the community given to the population. I think all of those things are totally wrongheaded, a really unfortunate way of looking at things. So I mean, there are many policy questions that I think needs to be tackled much more forthrightly from a much more proactive standpoint, right. So within the context of the disability community, what of what, especially for people who have very significant disabilities, one of the biggest fears is whether or not they'll have the capacity to live at home, right, live in the community right there. As we all saw throughout the course of the pandemic, people with disabilities, to people who live in medical institutions or other kinds of institutions were very much at risk, right, their eyes are extremely imperiled by not just the pandemic itself, not just COVID-19. But isolation. Right, the surgeon general just mentioned the other day, how deleterious isolation can paint in one person's health, right, that's equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day or you're not exercising at all right? That's a tremendous effect on people's lives and people with disabilities experience huge, tremendous loneliness, there. Their fear of living in a medical institution is a real one is a really strong we are experiencing a tremendous healthcare shortage and without people who can provide care for people with disabilities live with the community, they're at risk of having to move away from their families and friends completely, living in an institution or the secondary unsafe or in some way detrimental to their, to their lives. So I think that is a big, I think issue. During the pandemic, fortunately, many people with disabilities were able to be employed in ways that they hadn't been before I right through remote work opportunities that didn't really present themselves before. I like we need to make sure that that kind of paradigm shift and societal change maintains itself right. Some of the lessons learned during the pandemic can actually stay in place so that people with disabilities can actually be a part of their community society, Ed's employment, I think we need to look at access totally differently. Right. So one of the the courses that I teach here at Stony Brook is a course called inclusion and innovation. And, you know, I'm basically training future engineers how to be inclusive, people with disabilities when it comes to their future innovations. And my students, you're, we're talking about a great Denver, potential technological advancements, but ultimately focus their attention on accessibility and how to make sure that our future cities and towns are accessible for people with disabilities how they want to structure this is rather than looking at some of the kinds of compliance and mandate based approaches to accessibility, which is kind of what the Americans with Disabilities Act has taken right now. Like, what are the bare minimum standards you need to put into place in order to make your business or to make your building accessible, rather than looking at it from that direction? Like talking about in terms of opportunity? And like, what are the opportunities that we're all given by virtue of of including people with disabilities, either in a business setting or workplace and like changing that conversation from bond, I've just token gestures to how we all benefit from inclusion. Like I think that's a really important shift in conversation. And all of this really is to say that the, the way disability has been understood and then as a result has been legislated upon is almost a result of this unfortunate understanding or framing of disability where it's looked at as a medical issue rather than a more societal one. Right? Look, again, disability almost as like, how somebody is a medical failure. And as a result, like people we meet who you as contagious or like people leave once you share a shy away from or thing Gar vulnerary Fall or represents human vulnerability rather than the opposite, rather than the strength base kind of approached you disability that I've come to understand disability to actually be reliving all these years with disability, I understand it very differently than I had. So I think all of these different understanding speeds up our public policies, right, right from the get go right, not as an afterthought, right, not trying to like wage disability into some other piece of policy that we've already created. But thinking about it from the get go. Like as we talk about matters of public policy that I think are so important coming out the pandemic, whether it is an infrastructure bill or a built back better agenda, like disability needs to be a focus of it right needs to be a central component of how we think about things you not only for people with disabilities right now, but also for people who are going to be disabled think forward, right, those who are living with long COVID, or are going to understand their lives very differently as a result of experiencing COVID. Then also with a mindfulness that the kinds of modifications that we make to the world, often because of people with disabilities ultimately ends up benefiting many people, right, universal design is kind of a growth of that, that the modifications that we make just ultimately end up benefiting just about everybody right to have that level of inclusion, right from the get go is ultimately creates a better world for sure. Just about everybody.

I'm glad, I'm glad you brought up universal design, because that is something in the educational space. It's a word and a concept that has been that's gaining traction. And I'm wondering, because you in the book, you talk about coming back to school, after your accident. And I know that that would have been in the 90s. And what kinds of supports were available then. And I wonder, you know, if if you were to if you were 10 years old, and you know, had your accident and had to come back to school now, if what kind of differences you would see if that's even something that you think about?

Dad don't think about that all the time. And again, you've had this question. So after I after my accident, I was in a coma for 36 hours, right? So for a day and a half, it was highly questionable as to whether or not I was going to survive, like the EEG readings or be done on my brain are extremely abnormal, flat, essentially. And the expectation was that I was not going to survive either. If I were to that, I'd likely be severely cognitively impaired. When I awoke from the from the coma that I was in, I was able to make eye contact with my parents and recognize their faces. The first thing that I was able to communicate to them was am I going to be left back in school? Right so like that was the first thing that I cared about the first thing that I wanted to make sure was that clean see me? However bizarre that may have been. So at that point, my parents are cool. I'm worth the time younger than I am now. But yeah, by several years, they made a promise to me that, that that would not be the case that I would get back to school and be able to return to school with my friends. I didn't understand fully at that point, what that path was look like from where I was in the hospital bed. So ultimately returning to school. But fortunately, one year, exactly one year to the day, if my x is September 4 of 1991, I was able to return to school, now that we did not have any idea what kind of bad or that was going to be. So I remember I was discharged from the hospital in May of 1991. So I missed that entire academic year from September of 1990. Until May of 1991. Not the last like I was gung ho and like so excited to get back into the classroom and to start learning as quickly as I could. So my teachers, who would have been my teachers that my seventh grade year, they came to my home, and they work with me that entire summer. And I made sure that I was as fully prepared as I possibly can be to start back school back says, Hello, I'm in eighth grade with my class. That said, there was a great deal of resistance from the local school board and school administrators about what my presence in the classroom was going to be or look like, or the kinds of fears that it was going to create for my classmates. Right. So that was one drum that was being bagged that, yeah, that my presence in the classroom was going to achieve me either disruptive in some way or traumatizing to my, my classmates, or because it makes me feel uncomfortable in some way, or that what they thought I was gonna be doing in the classroom, really, so they don't really know what they were envisioning. But they were absolutely not not comfortable with it. But my family and I said here, this is this is an important battle, this is something that we need to help to try to change, right, if not only for me that for other kids who are coming behind me. And we fought and we freaked out. And the only way that we were able to make this happen was that because I'm on a ventilator, I could at any point become detached from the ventilator, in which case you're my life would immediately be at risk. If there's not somebody who is there to reattach a tube that has come loose or something like that, then they would not be able to breathe and would die. So at other medical needs, that needs to be taken care of throughout the course of the day. So I needed to have somebody with me who could do those things. We had initially a nurse lined up to go with me to school, and that morning, or the day before she that nurse cancelled. So my parents were like, if this is not sustainable. On day one, yeah, our daughter's ability to go to school is going to be contingent on somebody else, you know, this could happen in a given day, this can go on for weeks, weeks, weeks, so the only way that we could make it work, the only way that we knew that there would be kind of a reliable system in place would be for my mother to go to school with me. So my the day of my accident was actually my mother's first day as a special education teacher. It was also her last day, so she left her job, she kind of took a leave of absence for that year, but not knowing that that was gonna be she's gonna have to go on your permanent leave. So she left her position as a teacher, which was consequential in many ways, right? Not just to her but to our entire family, like my parents were We were potential salary or future salary and how we're gonna continue to live our lives. But she kind of far went that so I could go to school. So she was with me every single day throughout my junior high school years high school years that you've had to college and graduate school. And now that is one extreme example of how families have to modify that how they operate in order to accommodate the needs of children who require additional additional supports in order to get to school. Fortunately, the legislation has changed since the time that I was in school right now school districts have to pay for nurses for kids to to return to school if they need them. school classrooms are much more accessible. All right, we're thinking, as you mentioned, right with universal design or making sure that the classroom is accessible for as many kids as possible, right create creating the least restrictive environment so that kids with all levels of ability can learn in the same in the same setting. I know that since I was a student at Harvard, there have been other students with quadriplegia, or other kinds of disabilities who have not only traversed the same halls, the same path that I've had, that I did, but also stayed the very same dorm rooms that I did, or it's rooms that were constructed or modified so that I could use them have been used by other students with disabilities. And I feel very, very proud about that, like the level of beef and supports that I have are quite considerable. Right. So I think that many other students who have possibly fewer needs can benefit from the kinds of things that that were already put into place to accommodate me. And I think it's either his, that's fantastic. And if this if my experience is at some of the past that was able to forge can be a transformative process of experience for other people that my gosh, like, I can't think of a better way to have lived my life. So I think that there has been change that has been progress. But certainly not enough, I think we need to do a lot more to make sure that there are many more kids with disabilities as fully integrated into classrooms as as possible. So I have two nephews who live right down the street. And one of them, the older one. Key has been like a presence in my in my house for as long as he's been on the planet. He's to stay here with his little baby, and my sister went back to work. And so he's here all the time. And he is. So like we said for that he doesn't have a wheelchair, and he wants to know when he can get a ventilator. So there's, there's a boy in his class who uses a wheelchair and he pushes him around, he helps him get in and out of the doors. So like, he has such a level of depth of understanding of diversity and experience. I think that that is a true gift. And I think the more exposure that other kids have similar experiences, like that only benefits everybody, right, that creates a kind of world I think many of us want to see where people don't feel like they're marginalized for some potentially unrelated part of who they are. So I think that we've made progress, but certainly there's much more distance to go.

Yeah, so for instance, I love your example of, of Carter. And just because he knows you and is open to that experience, having somebody in his class that is different, that uses a wheelchair. It's no big deal, right. And that's, that was actually my experience as a teacher, specifically for kids who used wheelchairs, and maybe some other like adaptive mobility devices, where I found the biggest hurdle was when the disability was not physical, when it was intellectual. Sure. Or, you know, maybe there were some sensory, some sensory needs. And I had many, many staff members that would say, well, they, you know, that student has Down syndrome, and it has an intellectual disability, they do not belong in that fourth grade classroom learning everyone else, they need to be in a separate room, they need to be working at their own pace with kids like them. And I know that resonates with a lot of our audience, because most of our audience are educators and are looking towards how to make their schools more inclusive. And, you know, for all for all learners. And so I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about, you know, we've made progress, and certainly there are laws that had been in place that it make things more accessible and, and people have been able to not necessarily force but look back to the law and say, hey, you need to provide certain accessibility options for me because I have this particular disability. But what do you think is going to push educators In schools and school leaders more towards being more inclusive of those with intellectual disabilities, autism and other, you know, other disabilities that maybe aren't so obvious or physical.

This goes back to this. Number one, if this mandate refers to accessibility, right, like what is the bare minimum, or the minimum we need to do in order to make our public spaces, or schools on our places of employment accessible, right. So like what we just need to do to be to not be held liable, right, or to just offer some level of inclusion without understanding the exclusion to be of benefit to everyone, right. So a true inclusive classroom, understands the diverse ways that people that take kids learn, and then also understand the diverse ways that kids contribute to the classroom. So I, of course, I understand the importance of learning, obviously, first and foremost, but kids learn in very different ways, whether or not they've been diagnosed with or weren't classified as having a disability, right. They all add something very valuable to the classroom, they all add something meaningful to a conversation, I think that is really important that they all make children are richer as a result. So there's a synchrony debt, which I think parents want their kids to learn. But not everybody learns at that same pace. And that's a lesson that I think is important jet should be taught as early on as possible, right? Because what happens later on in life is a extension of what has happened in the classroom, and you want kids and adults to be as fully cognizant of how different people influence the conversation or the kinds of contributions that they make in various ways that maybe that might not be quite so obvious from the get go, right? I think of that as a really important level of understanding that you don't get unless you have that level of additional exposure to people with from different backgrounds

coming up next, the mystery question.

So we have a few minutes. And so I've made a couple new, not really new year's resolutions, but resolutions for the new for the new season. And so I got these, these interview decks, like a couple of years ago, and they're random questions. So are you game to answer one of these random questions? Sure. All right. I'm not sure what I'm gonna call it like, if it's going to be a segment or if I'm just gonna, you know, I don't know what so it's yeah, it's a bit. It's a bit. So here we go. All right. So I'm going to take a random question, hopefully, hopefully, it's a good one. All right. So here we go. Well, it's so what do you think is not fair in today's society? We've kind of been talking about it, but whatever you want, doesn't have to be disability related.

Not fair with society. Thank gosh. Okay. Oh, my gosh, all right, what is not fitting with the society? All right, well, maybe she can't get good bagels outside of New York. Like that's not fair to the rest of the world. That's that's fundamentally unfair. I would say. I think what is unfair, is that we are not taught to understand people, irrespective of where their lives before we place them in some kind of socially constructed idea of who they are. Right? Like, I think that we don't afford ourselves enough of an opportunity to get to know somebody make a judgement about what their lives are like. I think that is unfair for everybody who is involved in not only for the person who is being valued with the person who is doing the value make like I think that we deny ourselves that opportunity to to have our lives enriched and change by our subtitle is reluctance that's almost always completely born out of societal structures are things that have already been baked into the social cake. Teach us to think one thing as opposed to another about somebody, I think that is unfair to everybody. If I can be a part of shifting that not only for disability, right, like, I don't want it to appear that I'm speaking purely from that vantage point, but for everybody, right, like me. We do ourselves a disservice at the worlds and injustice by not understanding people before we place a value on them that sometimes even make decisions or behave in a certain way as a result of it.

Brooke Elefun thank you so much for this conversation. And for reading your book. Look both ways. We appreciate your time.

Thank you so much, Tim. It was a pleasure.

That chime that means free time. This week, I wanted to discuss some questions that came up on social media. After our episode with Dr. Schilling more dropped at the beginning of September. They were great questions. So the first one comes actually from a friend and former colleague. Hi, Deanna. And here's what she says, there's so much discussion about how inclusive settings are needed, or how LRE or continuum of services does not take into account the family or supports needed for children with disabilities to be educated with their typical peers. What I want to know and hear more about is how can full inclusion be successfully implemented? We all know the why. But there's not enough talk about the how, how specifically, can we as educators meet the challenging academic needs of students who do not know the alphabet, how to read or write when the curriculum requires writing multiple paragraph essays or reading novels? How do we meet the challenging academic needs of students who cannot count beyond 20? When the curriculum requires students to multiply? What kind of or level of supports specifically could be used in those scenarios I mentioned to adequately support the inclusive classroom, does the curriculum need to be changed? How many more personnel? Would we need an inclusive classroom to meet all the individual needs of the students? I feel like there is no roadmap leading towards inclusion. Deanna, thank you so much for the question. When MCIE goes around and supports schools and districts in Maryland and across the country, these are the exact questions that that we're getting. And part of the difficulty in answering these questions is that there is no quick answer, because the answers really depend on the learners that you have in the classroom and in the school, and also the educators. But I think at the heart of your questions, you're talking about what kinds of modifications will need to happen in order for the learner to feel like that they're a member in that community in that classroom, have a sense of belonging, be able to participate in the life of the classroom, and also to learn grade level standards. So let's take your first question, Deanna, how specifically can we as educators meet the needs of students who do not know the alphabet, or how to read or write when the curriculum requires reading multiple paragraphs, or reading novels, in that specific instance, beyond the systemic, and the school wide changes that will need to be made in order for a learner with that profile, to have membership participation in learning in that classroom, it comes down to the planning of the individual learner. So what kinds of modifications are going to be done for the learner to make progress towards grade level standards in reading, and so what that looks like is having some sort of plan. And we have a number of learning planning tools that can guide a team through asking these questions. But the idea is not just to modify the activity to something completely different, but it's to look at what everyone else is learning. And I don't know if you have a specific learner in mind, but let's just go ahead and hypothetically, say, we have a third grade student who is reading at a kindergarten level or maybe needs visual supports to read and comprehend text. So as a third grade class if you're reading something that is written at a third grade level How can that be modified, so that the student can access and read the best way that they can at their level, and still participate in the lesson. There are lots of ways to modify text. In fact, in one of our bonus episodes, we talked about using AI to help level text to address the time intensive work that it takes to level text on your own if you didn't have any sort of tool like that. And the same thing goes for your math example, we can still modify the assignment so that the student can participate in that lesson and work towards grade level standards, even though they may be at a very entry level point of that. The other thing that we know from the law is that if a learner needs modifications to their curriculum, that is not a reason to remove them from general education. So let's talk a little bit about how it is even possible to be able to modify because I think that is the other part of your question. It sounds great to be able to modify for one learner, or for a group of learners that are included in general education. But how do you get to the point where you have the time to do that? Well, that's where we get into more systemic and school wide and district wide implementation. And so when MCIE works with school districts, we typically start with a self assessment of inclusive practices. And we actually have a very long list of indicators of inclusive education practices on our website. It's called the quality indicators of inclusive schools. And this self assessment tool is based on our framework for effective and inclusive education. Now, once a school district team goes through these indicators, they have an idea of what they need to work on. So eventually, a school team can decide, hey, we need to support general and special education teachers to work together and collaborate for learners who need modifications. And so there's an expectation that that happens, when it's only one learner. And the expectation in that grade level or that school is not to have that practice, then it is easier for the school, the grade level, or even a program like an intellectual disability program, or an autism program, to look at that particular learner and say, See, they don't belong in general education, nobody else is getting this kind of modification, they belong in a self contained classroom. So while I wish I could just snap my fingers and make a school be inclusive, there are a lot of things that need to happen before we get to the point of authentic inclusive education. Now, for families who are advocating for a learner to be included, you can see why it is so difficult for a school team to understand and wrap their mind around what it means for a learner to be included. So to get down to the rest of your questions, you know, what kind or level of supports, does the curriculum need to be changed? Those are questions for the team that is planning for that individual learner. And for personnel. What we found is that when you take learners who have already been put in a another class or school because of a regional program, Take for instance, an intellectual disability program or an autism program. Those learners are consolidated into a school. If those learners went to their home school and were supported in natural proportions across the grade level in their home school, there wouldn't be an over representation of learners with a particular kind of disability. And so just hypothetically, imagine, with me, a school where if you have a particular disability, like an intellectual disability, or autism, and you live in that neighborhood area of that school, you would go to that school, you would go to the class and grade that you would if you didn't have any sort of identified disability, and you would be served by educators that were in that school, which means that there aren't any inclusion classrooms. There's just classrooms, and there aren't any inclusion teachers. There's just general education teachers, and special education teachers in the roles of the general and the special education teacher would be to serve all learners, but the expectation is that everyone is working together to support all learners. Now this is really a discussion topic for a complete and full episode. But I do want to say that there are roadmaps available. And while yes MCIE can partner with a school or district and provide the roadmap that we have, there are plenty of written resources. And so let me give you a few off the top of my head. The first is a book called The Way to inclusion how leaders create schools where every student belongs by Julie Causton, and a number of other authors. The other book I would recommend is an older one, called Building Inclusive Schools, tools and strategies for success by Anne Halverson and Thomas Neary is actually one of the books that helped me understand how schools could change from a non inclusive system to an inclusive one. And finally, leading for all how to create truly inclusive and excellent schools by Jennifer Spencer EIMs. And Josh, Flossie. I'm sure Deanna, you and a lot of other people have even more questions. And I look forward to being able to talk about that. But as you can see, it's it's a complex topic, but one that I do love talking about. So the second comment is from Erica, and she says, These are my questions to and and to them, which the Internet has not yet been able to provide me what is the roadmap to meaningful inclusion for students with violent behaviors that also keep safe everyone else in the room, this is also a complex issue, because one thing that the law does provide is that if a student is causing harm to themselves, or others, that that is a reason for removal. But I want us to think about it in a certain lens. If a school or a district already has an inclusive lens, that all learners are general education students, that they don't have to earn their way into a general education class, that even if a learner needs specific interventions, to help with challenging behavior, and that student is removed from the general education setting, the intent is that it is only temporary. One of the misunderstandings about full inclusion is that somehow it means all students together in the same area. And in the same classroom all day, every day, no matter what we are not in the business of trying to make the lives of learners harder, or the lives of teachers harder. And we also can't expect to do the same things that we've been doing, put everyone together and expect it to be okay, we have to change our practices. So in the instance of what Eric is talking about, when a learner is in crisis, we are going to have to figure something out for that learner so that they are safe and everyone else is safe. But the expectation is not that they go to a program where now they can stay. But it's that an intervention is designed for that learner for a short time so that we know that learner is going to be welcomed back into the classroom because that is where they belong.

Thanks again to Deanna and Erica for your questions. I look forward to answering more of them, and hopefully, develop a shared understanding of what inclusive education really means. As we go through season 11. For more information about inclusive education, or to learn how you can partner with MCIE on school transformation, or professional learning opportunities, visit MCIE.org. Thanks again to our incredible sponsor, changing perspectives. Love thinking cluesive Here are a few ways to let us know rate us on Spotify or leave us a review on Apple podcasts. Become a patron for extra stuff. This week, I have a bonus clip of my conversation with Brooke Ellison and her perspective on whether it is okay. As a disabled person to be pro cure. It's an interesting conversation. And it's all included if you're a patron, but if you're not, why don't you join these fine people? Thank you to Carol Q Aaron P. Jarrett T joiner a, Kathy B, Mark C, Gabi M. Kathleen T and Paula W. We appreciate your continued support. I think inclusive, think inclusive is written, edited, designed, mixed and mastered by me to Vegas. Original Music by miles credit additional music from melody. Thanks for your time and intention. And remember, inclusion always works right

Like I mentioned, my nephew, as I mentioned, there are when I talk about my friends and talk to my friends, often they convey to me that they would not understand disability in the same way we're not for Yeah, my friendship with them, and how that has made them deeper and richer people. And if they if that is not an important understanding and lesson in life like that, to me is in no way less significant than your house, you add two numbers together, right? It's a fundamental part of humanity. And like, that is all part I think of the childhood experience or the the growth process that you might not get if if you don't have the richness of diversity in the classroom.

Yeah, that's a great point. I wanted to I bookmarked a bunch of things and as you can see, right here, thank you. I appreciate MCIE