S10E26 Kate de Bruin | Inclusive Education in Australia

7:14PM May 17, 2023

Speakers:

Tim Villegas

Kate de Bruin

Keywords:

school

kids

inclusive education

teachers

work

disability

australia

inclusion

system

talking

people

classroom

class

students

inclusive

school districts

education

parents

practices

law

MCIE Australia is known for many wonderful things. The Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef shrimp on the barbie. But did you know about their movement toward inclusive education practices? Stick around to find out more. My name is Tim Vegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you were listening to think inclusive, a show where with every conversation we tried to build bridges between families, educators, and disability justice advocates to create a shared understanding of inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. You can learn more about who we are and what we do@mcie.org Dr. Kate De Bruyne is a professor of inclusive education at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. She has taught in secondary school and higher education for 20 years. In her academic work, she has developed inclusive education courses for the Master of Teaching and master of education programs. At Monash University. Dr. Ruins research focuses on inclusive education policies and practices. she examines evidence based system level and school level practices that promote quality and equity for all students. With a focus on students with disabilities. Dr. De Bruyne regularly provides professional development to school teachers and writes for both academics and the general public. She is a member of the academic advisory board for all means all the Australian alliance for Inclusive Education. Here is what we cover in today's episode, the significant differences between the Australian and American education systems, the long history of Australia segregating students with disabilities, and the growing movement in Australia to move towards inclusive education. Before we dive into today's amazing interview, I've got something important to share. Have you ever felt like you're losing touch with the people in your life, but you don't want to be glued to social media all the time just to get updates? Well, Brett no more because I've got the perfect solution for you. Together letters. It's a fantastic tool that can bring you closer to your loved ones. How does it work? It's simple to gather letters, is a group email newsletter that gathers updates from all its members and combines them into a single easy to read newsletter for everyone. No fancy apps, no complicated platforms needed. Just good ol email. We even use together letters to keep our think inclusive patrons connected with each other. Plus, here's the best part. Groups of 10 or less can use it for free. So why wait, head over to together letters.com and sign up right now. Reconnect with your favorite people, because together letters has got your back. And now my interview with Kate de Bruin. Thanks for being here, Kate. I really appreciate it. It's okay. If I call you Kate. Right. It's very nice. Okay. You. So we were talking right before we hit the record button. And you said that you don't have school districts? So could you just unpack that for me first before we dive into the questions, because in the United States? Oh, gosh, I used to know this. I think there's like 15,000 school districts. I want to say that might be low. But I think that's it. I think it's around 15 to 16,000 across all 50 states. I don't know if that includes territories? Because I don't that's not I'm not an expert in that. But so how does that work? Then if you don't have school districts?

Yeah, that's a really good question. So we are a federated education system a bit like the United States, we have states and territories. And they run their education systems, they have sort of constitutional authority to run education. And the federal government here provides some funds most of the funding for that. And then we have several school systems. So we have state education system, but we also have an independent school system. So they're the private schools. And then we have another set of private schools that are run by the Catholic education authorities. So we've kind of got three systems, and then multiple states and territories. And so if we just focus on the public school system, so the state education systems, they are generally divided into regions, so the kind of quadrants of the state if you like, and within that there are regions that have offices that for administrative purposes from the department of education perspective, but they don't seem to work in the same way that districts do in the United States. And so I visited the United States a few years ago and I talked to you I went to some went to different school districts and talked to People from the Education Office and, and so on. And I got a sense of how completely different the system is there. So we have a very decentralized system here, which means that the authority to make decisions and do a lot of stuff has been devolved to the level of the school. So for example, professional learning budgets, you know, schools and individual teachers can do whatever they like, whatever they deem is relevant to their class and their interests. Whereas what I saw, for example, in Kansas, which I visited was that at the district level, there's a lot of decisions and responsibility that rests there. So in one district that I went to, they said, Look, we have a lot of kids in state care, we have a large number of kids who've been affected by trauma. So they determined that that was a priority for professional learning. And so that's what the majority of teachers were able to access there. And the quality checking was done at the level of the district, and, and so on. So that doesn't happen here. It rests all the way down at the level of the school and the teacher.

Well, that must be really difficult, then, especially on our topic, inclusive education, because how do you have any sort of accountability on who gets what resources? And you know, and then, you know, the other question I don't even think I put in here is the differences between the special education system of a district versus a school in Australia, you know, because we have the Office of Special Education Programs OSAP, which is, is kind of it. I mean, there's the law, there's the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. But then you also have federal funds that are distributed to the states. So how does that work in Australia?

That's a really good question. So we have something sort of similar we have, your laws are much better than ours. And so we have non discrimination law, that includes education, it's got section 21 education, but it also covers housing and transport and employment, and you know, all those all the aspects of non discrimination across the whole of society. And it so there are a set of standards that have been written that go alongside that their standards for compliance. So if schools are meeting their obligations under our federal Disability Discrimination Act, then they hear the standards you should be meeting to do so standards for enrollment standards for participation, and so on. But I look with great envy at the systems of accountability that you have in your country. And for transparent reporting, we don't have those. And that's a matter of some frustration, to me, it's not a particularly sexy topic when I keep banging on about transparency and accountability. And it's hard to get people excited about it. But in reality, that's where the magic could be happening. So we don't have transparency at all. The only kit we have a very long standing and well established system of quite stratified segregated options for students. So when I say options, many of them are many of those students. That wasn't very optional at all. So we have separate special schools, and then they're counted, they're countable. So we know in each state how many kids attend those. But then within many schools, we have what's called a separate unit, which is like a mini special school over in the corner. And it's often got a separate fenced in playground. And you know, for all, it might share and address but nothing else. And then in some schools, children are sort of integrated on a part time basis, if they are in those units. So they might share the playground and the library and maybe the art room, what do you know, so it's very, it's quite very variable. And then there are schools with special education classrooms. Now the kids who attend segregated units and classrooms are counted as being in mainstream because they are on the grounds of a mainstream school. So we actually have no idea how many kids are segregated in this country. And there was a big review of our Disability Discrimination Act done by what we have here called the Productivity Commission. And they found that that was very problematic. That was a long time ago, was when the law was only about 10 years old, but it's never really been addressed. So back to your question, how does that if we don't have districts How on earth does this work? In terms of transparency and accountability? It kind of doesn't. Yeah, there are federal there are federal initiatives designed to introduce accountability. They're only about five years old. But they're really designed for the purposes of financial accountability and not really much more,

Wasn't there some sort of National Commission on Disability? I should have had it up before you came up because I have wanted to talk to you about it. Let me see if I can find it.

I can jog your memory with ongoing it's the Royal Commission into violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation of people with disability.

Yes. And so how long has that been going on?

That's a good question. It's been going for a couple of years now. I'm afraid I don't have there. Let's see span of years to here. And I actually was summoned as a witness to that the year before last.

Let's see. Okay, so I wrote about it in 2019. So, you know, that's been three years. Well, actually, it was it's November of 2018. So yeah, almost exactly three years ago. And, but it's so disability a Royal Commission on inclusive education in Queensland.

So that was one of the hearings have been, I think, three hearings on education. Again, it's got it's very broad ranging in scope, they're looking at employment, housing, COVID-19 responses, access to health care, all that, you know, the full spectrum, we have a really fabulous senator in this country, who lives with disability and has been a really strong advocate for, for this royal commission. And it wouldn't have happened without his advocacy and insistence, and you know that, but nonetheless, it's still going on quite slowly. And those of us who work in inclusive education are fervently hoping that an outcome from this royal commission will be that there's a planned closure of separate special schools, but it's got another good year to run. So watch this space.

Right, right. And then even if there is some, even if there is an outcome, there's the amount of time that it would take to actually close the schools. And then what do we do with the students of the learners, the learners would have to go back to their neighborhood schools? Do you I know since you don't have school districts, but are the schools neighborhood schools,

they are so and look, again, we're state based, and I live in Victoria, which is that one of the southernmost states in Australia, on the eastern seaboard, and schools generally serve a local community, and they have what's called a catchment zone. So you are mostly required, if you're going to go to a public school, you need to generally be within that the zone of that school. And in my state, it used to be that you could bypass your zone and request access to a school outside your zone. And what that led to was a lot of distortion of student numbers, you know, a school would start up some program and do some, you know, incredible PR around it. So and it might have an often had, it might cream a certain number of students out of the local community, and, or it might distort it in other ways. There's one fabulous school not far from here that's made an excellent name in reading, and teaching every kid to recommitting to teaching every kid to read. So what happened was a lot of the kids who weren't you know, kids with specific learning disabilities, for example, was suddenly seeking to enroll in that school because they weren't getting access to high quality reading instruction in their local school. So we get things that can distort the enrollment patterns. So it's now being made much harder to do that you need to go to your local school, and then you need to press your local school to lift their game if there's something in particular that you think they need to be doing. Okay,

I think there's this, we are not answering the we're not asking any of these questions yet. But I think there's an impression about Australia, and apologies that it's a generalization that that you're doing something more right in certain schools than we are in regards to inclusive education as it being as it as it's being, as there's a focus on it. Because in the United States, we do have the law. And the law is pretty clear about learners, at least me included to the to the maximum extent. Now, there's a lot of interpretations about that, about what that actually means and a lot of misinterpretation about it, but the words inclusive education and it meaning all learners, especially those with extensive support needs that seems to get missed sometimes here when we're talking about inclusion. Oh, not for those kids, not for the kids with significant, you know, intellectual disabilities, not for kids with with extensive medical support needs. You don't mean those kids inclusion? Sure. co teaching great learning learning disabilities. I have no problem with that. But when we're talking about more extensive support needs, then that's where people there's a disconnect. But there's a there's an impression that because because you have the UN Charter, and because it's more on Top of Mind with at least from from my perspective, that you have something more going on, is that a incorrect? Is that an incorrect assumption?

I'm really sorry, but it is so. But that said there are some really standout schools. The thing about having this level of decentralization and school autonomy is that you have some amazing schools doing amazing things. So the first hearing of the disability Royal Commission heard from three different you know, school leaders talking about how they've created fully inclusive environments and what they did. And that just goes to show that it's is not impossible. But it's not widespread. It's not widespread. And in fact, I would argue that the the ongoing presence of the system of segregated schools actually acts to hinder that kind of innovation and reform, because they offer operators a release valve. And in particular, for the kind of kids that you've mentioned, surely you don't mean those kids, we have no idea how to do that. And so there's the you know, at enrollment, parents can be told, we have no idea how to do this, your kid would be way better off going to this other place. And sometimes that can be so the law says they're not allowed to refuse an enrollment. So the thing about an a non discrimination law is it says, you're entitled to enroll in your local school, but you have to press for your entitlement. And you don't have very clear recourse for action, if that isn't what's coming. So yes, you're right, your laws are way better, they're much clearer. They may, as you said, not have really translated into the kind of outcomes that everybody wanted to see for certain groups of kids in particular. But here, I mean, I get as an academic who writes, you know, I write in sort of public places, as well as in academic journals. And so I'll write something in a, you know, like, or I'll get interviewed for a newspaper article, and suddenly, I'll get a, you know, a number of parents contacting me saying, Can you help, and one parent contacted me as an illustrative example. And the school where their child was enrolled without telling them had rang the local special school and requested that they contact the parent and handed over the parents contact details and said, Could you line up an interview with this kid, we think can be better in your school. So now, you know, that's not that widespread. And I try to remember when I deal with parents and with teachers, that everybody comes from a well intentioned place that we do share in deep in our hearts, a desire for kids to get a good education and feel, feel safe and welcome in school, and you know, all of those good things. But the ongoing presence of separate schools acts as a signal that says there's somewhere else for these kids to be not everybody belongs at their local school.

So would you say that that is the biggest issue or a major struggle for people who are pursuing inclusive education in Australia? Is it those special schools? Or is it something else?

Look, I think that's a huge part of it, the fact that they continue to exist and send that signal that there's another place for them. And, you know, I work in a master's of education program, I teach it for inclusive education. And I teach teachers who are already doing this work. And many of them work in these separate special schools. And they often come into my courses, presuming that I'll see them as kind of like the opposition or enemy. And I don't, because we're all involved in the same work of trying to make sure kids, the most vulnerable kids in our system, let's be honest, get access to an education, but the fact that they continue to exist, and the expense of maintaining two separate systems means that the system runs in efficiently and it acts to funnel kids somewhere else. And it's painted here as choice for parents, you know, well, you can choose your local school, or you can choose to go to your special school, but it is, it's not really a choice. If you're a parent of a child, let's imagine you've got twins, you've got two four year olds, and you're looking to enroll them in school next year. And one of them has, let's say, an intellectual disability. And so when your choice for one child, there is no choice, the one child one goes to the local school, that's the school child number two, that's where it's painted as a choice. But if you're told, Well, this other school has speech pathologists and occupational therapists, and we have much smaller classes, and there's a bus system, we can pick your child up, you know, it's actually not really the same, they're not a choice on an equal basis. And then if you go to the school to enroll them, both the local school, and that school says, we don't really set up for your child, we haven't done this before, we don't really, you know, we don't really have a model to work on. Our classes are big, we don't have any Allied Health to support your kid. But they've got all of that on tap up the street, it's not a choice. So a lot of it is about the kind of political narrative and it would be a brave government that said to parents, we're going to take away your choice. Or to the parents who've had who've attempted to enroll their kid in their local school and had a really bad experience, and maybe left, you know, a bit a bit damaged a bit brutalized by that experience. And to say, we're taking away the place where your child feels safe. That's a very hard sell. So getting back to your question about the time it might take, if we did get someone to say, right, we're going to be brave. Let's do this and put a time on it. It will take time, it will take time. We need to we need to build the capacity of teachers in local schools to do this work and the and do a lot of work on the values and attitudes that go along with that. But I have a lot of people say to me, Look, the system isn't ready. We need to wait until it's ready. And I said Well, look we'll be waiting forever. Mmm, that day won't come on its own, you have to have a timeframe in place to say we're going to make sure we're ready by this date.

Is there a organization in Australia that assists? Well, I guess would be schools because it wouldn't be state agencies necessarily because schools, the local schools make decisions. So is there an organization in Australia or in a particular province or state that assists schools with, like a school transformation towards inclusive practices,

not in the kind of formal way that you've painted it. So there are a number of organizations that work in the field of disability and education, there's the Australian Coalition for Inclusive Education, known as all means all. There's children and youth with this children, young people with disability, Australia, they have lots of good resources, they've just worked with the federal government to produce some really fabulous resources that are accessible for families, for example, but there isn't a formal push for school transformation, the way there has been in the United States. So the kind of reforms that happened with IDA in 2004 exerted some pressures on the system, it's a matter of great interest to me, they, from my reading, correct me if I'm wrong, but from my reading of the history and the research, it looked like a lot of that was driven by kind of LD initiative, and the rise in the number of kids with learning disabilities, and the numbers of those that exploded after the original reforms in the 70s. Now, Australia has got a really interesting, an opposite experience. Those kids were never funded for additional support in our system. So they're called there, those kids were referred to as having learning difficulties. Yeah. So they were never funded. So those that's one group of kids that fell into that giant crack that opens up when you have a funding model driven by a disability label. Okay, so you've got a physical impairment, you can have some targeted funding in the school can put in ramps and, you know, widen the doorway, or you have a hearing impairment, we can put a sound field system in for you. But those kids with, you know, what we've always referred to as things like dyslexia and dyscalculia, for example, we're not, so the pressure on the system hasn't been exerted in the way that it was in the United States. So we don't have a big appetite for school transformation. In fact, we have a really tired workforce of teachers who've just survived a pandemic. So there isn't a lot of appetite for school transformation.

So you recently wrote an I guess, an article a piece in it was LD

Bolton, any difficulties? Australia's bulletin? Yep.

Okay. And, and so I wanted to ask you some questions about that. And that it reminded me when you were talking, because I think you addressed that in your article about how, for those, for those learners with learning difficulties there, there isn't the funding, but that you like that didn't stop you from helping them or doing something about it. So I'm wondering, could you tell me that story in the best way that you get?

Sure. So I was fairly new in teaching, I think I might have been in my second year. And we had a number of students who it sort of it all began with reading actually began with reading, we had a number of kids who couldn't read. So there's some backstory, I wasn't able to capture in that, that LDA bulletin piece. And we had a new person take over what was called the Learning Support Department. And she was fabulous. And she had done I think some reading this was around the time the National Reading Panel in the United States had, you know, it put out its report, we had another one happening here in Australia known as the row report. And so she became interested in reading and she concluded that if their kids in the high school that I worked in, and we have no middle school here, so we have primary schools from prep to grade six. And we have high schools from your seven to 12. And I worked in a high school. And she said, Look, we have kids that can't read, it ends there for them, they can't access the textbooks. They can't you know, it's all over. So she became interested in reading and I had in my first year, I've been completely unprepared for the number of the small but very present number of kids who couldn't read in my class. And I felt very underprepared to teach them and pretty angry about that, actually. And so the school was located on the urban fringe of Melbourne, the city I live in, in an area with enormous disparity of wealth and poverty. So it's on the bay, there are very wealthy multimillion dollar mansions on the bay, and then a couple of kilometers inland. There's a low income housing estate where the people are third generation unemployed and very disadvantaged, very disadvantaged, living really abject poverty, and all of those kids were at my school. So there were all sorts of forms of disadvantage present in this school. And that made it really a lovely place to work was a little bit like the world everybody was there. But there were these kids that couldn't read and I could see that they were going to get trapped in the life of their families, they were going to become fourth generation unemployed. And we had the power to change that. It's just that I had no idea how to do it. And I felt this huge sense of responsibility to make it make that different for them. I loved these kids, they were, you know, they were these fabulous, fabulous kids. And I could see that their futures were going to go off a cliff if I couldn't change. And I didn't know how. So I, you know, I made contact with this woman that had just taken over the Learning Support Department and said, I have no idea how to help but I want to help, let's do something. And so we started small, we started a homework club, and we served fresh cut up fruit and anyone who wanted to come and get help with their homework, good calm. And so it sort of started with these small initiatives. And we went and got some professional learning about reading. And we started running a reading intervention program called corrective reading, that was recommended is really the only one with any evidence to support its use for older students. So the following year, we had two little girls enroll in year seven with intellectual disability. And they were both put in my class because they shared it a teacher, a a paraprofessional, and I was given this 300 page novel will tell them that the kids was fighting, not only could they not read, but you know, they couldn't, even though we're reading at about a grade three level at that point. So there were just 1000 issues. But at the same time, I knew where schooling headed, I was also teaching you 12 I knew where it went. And so I thought, well, how do I get them within within within kuih points? So I sort of took this 60, I've got you in this school for six years, what do I need to do, aside from Teach You to Read to get you there? And so I thought, well, how do I give you access to the content of the book so that you can eat at least thinking about writing in structured ways I can teach you about topic sentences, and I can teach you about using evidence from a book. And so it was about giving them access to the book, only there was no ebook, they couldn't listen to the book. And so I kept thinking I'd found a solution. And then I hadn't because it didn't exist. So I thought, I'll get an ebook. And then it didn't exist. And then I thought, Oh, I'll make an ebook. And then I was told that that breaches copyright. So I, you know, I was, I'm a pretty tenacious person. And I thought, you know, we're all sensible people, we all want a good outcome here, there's got to be a way through this. So I just kept making phone calls and thinking and, you know, and eventually, I discovered that I could make an alternative format for a book, if it didn't already exist, if there was no kind of commercial reason not to. But then when I spoke to the copyright licensing agency, just to triple check everything that I wasn't going to make my school in breach of the law. They said, No one else can access this unless they meet the definition of disability under the Disability Discrimination Act. And it's like what now? So all those kids that I was talking about before those kids with dyslexia, who were in our reading program, or the kids were there been a huge wave of migration following the there was in like Iraq, and Bosnia, and there were these kids. And English wasn't their first language, and they couldn't access those recordings. And so I was sort of frustrated by the the limitations of the law and what I could do. But I just thought, Well, I'm just going to focus on these two little girls for now in my class, and then think about how I can expand that out. And so then I thought, well, how do I make how do we make audio recordings of books fast. And a my colleague and I, we sort of threw a few ideas out. And then she just said, let's see if anyone wants to help. And we sent this email around the staff. This was a big school, there were about 2000 kids in the school. And we were inundated with responses from teachers. And it was one of those seminal moments for me quite early on in my career. You don't have to do this on your own. In fact, you can't do this on your own. But these kids don't belong to us as teachers, they're not ours. They're everybody's, and if it's a whole school initiative, and if everybody's on board with the, you know, how do we help all these kids to succeed? It makes an enormous difference. So it was there, as I said that we they all responded, Well, probably 70% of the staff said, happy to help. And they each read a chapter aloud onto their computer and recorded it. So the students ended up with a navigable recorded version of the book that they could skip by chapter. And every teacher made, we asked them to make a summary of the chapter in bullet points. And each bullet point supported by quote, this happened is a quote. And so I could teach these little girls who were still learning to read how to write a structured essay, because they had access to the content of the book. And I could teach them the writing skills, the foundational writing skills that they needed. And both those students went on to complete all schooling. They did, all the way up to the end of year 11. So I would count them as a success. And we then scaled that out. So we started to think about ebooks, as you know, an important consideration when we were choosing books for the curriculum and accessibility came started to be we didn't call it that then I didn't know what I was doing was called inclusive education. But you know, inclusive education isn't an invented thing. It's an organized way of thinking about good practice and accessibility and high quality instruction that supports everybody. It's a tide that lifts all the boats, it's not special ed for the few. So all of that stuff that I did for those two girls trying to get them able to write text essays by year 10, that helped all the kids in my class, I taught really clearly and explicitly, you know, I had a bank of quotes and summary points of the book ready to go to help anyone who wanted to use them. So it was really informative. It shaped my teaching from quite early on

it, when did you decide to move into research? And was it was that like, was that your ground? Zero? Basically?

No, it wasn't that was I taught for a number of years beyond that I had, about five years later, I had my first child and took family leave from that, from that job. And then please later had my second. And I realized that I wasn't going to be able to return to full time teaching for a while that I didn't want to put both babies in full time care, and I had the luxury not to have to. And I had been running reading intervention, I'd been running cross curriculum support programs, you know, I'd been doing this stuff for a while now, I've been assisting teachers in accessibility, all of that stuff. So I thought, well, you could you can't be a part time English teacher, you can't really only be there for half the week. But you could do that role part time. And so I was experienced, but I didn't have any kind of credential. I didn't have any qualification. So I undertook a master's in inclusive education, which, ironically, is the course I now teach. And I was mindful of the kids that we'd never really been able to serve very well. So we've done lots of really good work for the kids who couldn't read. And kids with accessibility, you know, we we've done a lot of work around accessibility, we've changed the model of paraprofessional support and co teaching we, you know, people went into the classroom and supported teachers instead of pulling kids out. And, you know, we've done a lot of that good stuff. But I wasn't qualified. And I applied for a job and didn't get the job, or I didn't, I don't think I got an interview. And I was like, Really, but I'm happiness, how could you not? Do so I enrolled in his master's. And by the end of it, I was still really, I was actually getting quite crossed, there were kids that I'd never been able to help the kids on the spectrum. And the kids who live with trauma were the kids that really didn't get great quality support from us not for lack of trying, but we just didn't really know how I didn't have language back then, like executive function and executive planning. I didn't know how to I didn't know what was hard for those kids. And I didn't know how to help. And high schools are quite unique environments. They're distinct from primary schools, the kinds of things teachers can do in primary schools don't work when children moved from classroom to classroom every 40 minutes on a new staff member and you know, just that developmentally, they're at a very different stage that not everything directly applies. So I ended up doing a PhD because I felt that I didn't have the answers that I wanted to be able to take back to schools and say, Hey, do this. And I thought that I would get that out of my PhD back back then. I now know that answers are never simple.

So you now teach classes for a master's in inclusive education? That's correct. And the your your students? I think you just said your students are sometimes in those special schools, right? That's Yes, that's correct. Okay. And so do you ever get students who are rethinking their their job choice?

Yes, I do often. And one of the great things is because they say I can't, a lot of them. I've only ever worked in those environments. And one of them said to me, I know a lot of stuff. I know how to work with kids with really unpredictable behaviors, when they've experienced trauma. I know how to work with kids who don't speak and use alternative and augmentative communication. You know, I don't turn a hair if there's kids in my class in nappies or catheters. And she said, but I have no idea how to teach at grade level, none of our kids access the curriculum at grade level. And it's one that you know, sometimes hear students say things that ring in the ears for years and years, and that's one of them. And so that's kind of how I begin my classes with, we've all got different forms of expertise here, you know, and I acknowledge what people know and can do and what they can't. And I've talked about the importance of being both proud of what you can do and humble about what you can't and acknowledge it. Because it's frightening for people to say I've no idea how to do that. And people feel as if it's a kind of reflection on them personally, and it's not it's a function of the system that we work in. That's that's a dual track system that don't, that has low expectations of kids with disabilities, that as if accessing grade level curriculum is impossible for them when of course we know it is. So I do a lot of careful work around challenging that belief that some kids can't or shouldn't with The idea that, you know, a life skills curriculum is really appropriate for some kids, you know, there's, there's a lot of challenging of that, that I have to do, without telling people that what that you know that that somehow that makes them a bad teacher, if that's what they've always done, because that's the anxiety that they bring is if if what I've been doing is less than optimal, what does that mean for all of the work that I've done for so long, and that I felt so strongly about, that is a very hard conversation to have with people. And so I try to proceed at all times, by acknowledging the good place that we come from, that we get up in the morning wanting to do the best. And that when we know better, that we do better, and that that's okay. And I try to make sure that that's a culture in the class of acknowledging what we do and don't know how to do and then sharing. So at the, at a certain point in this master's, they do a professional placement. And I tried to I've worked hard to develop relationships with schools that do this well, and do different things. Well, reading instruction, positive behavior support, you know, really good use of teacher aides, rather than you know, having a kind of pull out model or a kind of, you know, Velcro in the corner model or whatever model they're using. And so I tried to have students exposed to good practice. And they often come back and say, I couldn't have imagined what I saw until I saw it. And so I think that clapping eyes on a different system is one of the most important things we can do. We don't do enough of it.

Yeah, there's this video. I'm sure when I referenced that you will, it will ring a bell? It is It was produced in Australia, it's a little girl with Down syndrome. I think it's called what is inclusion? Actually, it was produced from Queensland. Yep. Yep, that's the one. Yeah. So we, you know, we so my organization is called the Maryland Coalition for inclusive education. And we do a lot of training all over the all over the country. But we use that video a lot, because there's something about it that caught that the contrast between the different ways of explaining what inclusion is, so how in the start, it's just the little, the little girl in the back, sorry, my phone, need to turn that off. There's the girl with the teacher's aide in the back. And then there's the girl with the teacher aide in the middle of the class. But that's not really inclusion, either, because, and then there's the girl, and she's just included in the life of the class. And it's such a wonderful contrast, when we've played that video for people who just can't quite imagine it. It's like their eyes are opened. And it's a beautiful thing.

Yeah, it's I use that video a lot in my teaching as well. And it's the difference between placement and genuine inclusive practice. But it's painted in a very kind of easy to understand way. And it's told in the voice of the little girl. I traveled to the United States to visit school to look at school systems that had been running MTSS. Well, and to good effect. Yeah. So when to Kansas and Vermont. And when I saw it was it was clapping eyes on how a system is done really differently, and having conversations with people. And I felt like I traveled into the future, or perhaps that I'd come from the past. Because we don't have we don't have the laws, the funding models and the culture of school transformation that's had to be built to go along with those. So that that film that you talked about comes from the I think it's from the community resource unit in Queensland who do fabulous work. But the people who I ended up talking to and showing that video to people who've already come along to do a master's in inclusive education, they've already bought into that. And for some of those people, like I get teachers from special schools feeling a bit sad, saying, I thought I was doing inclusion. I thought that by teaching kids with disabilities at a school that welcomed them that what I was doing was called inclusion. And I say back to them, I think it's really important that we're precise with our language. I believe that your classroom is probably a very nurturing caring place. I think there are probably great things about you as a teacher. But what that is, is not inclusion, it's something different. And I think that videos like those are fabulous, but they are only viewed by people who are already ready to watch them. I wish that those kinds of videos were built into teacher preparation in all in all universities, but I do not believe that they

are no and that no, not even in the United States. Because we still, it's a while while it certainly sounds more the systems that are more closely aligned. They're still separate a lot of the times unless unless you're talking about a school district that's really made an that's been intentional about about integrating them. So I had a thought and it's gone. But I guess I guess I just wanted to read or two emphasize your point that the examples of authentic inclusion need to be part of teacher training for all teachers, not just those that are specifically being trained to work with, with learners with disabilities.

Yeah, I think that what people imagined inclusive education looks like and what it does look like, are very different. I've had journalists say to me, I've, they've come and talk to me, something's happened in the media, and they get a comment from me. And they often say, Can you recommend a school where we can go and see an inclusive classroom? And I said, What do you think you're going to see, um, you know, it will look like any other classroom, you unless there are children in there who look very visibly different. You're just going to see a classroom, you won't know that this one has language or attentional difficulties or that this one has, you know, really serious mental health difficulties, or that this one's autistic. If they're being included and learning well, you'll likely see something happening that's very separate and different for them if what's going on is potentially not inclusive at all. So that's never the answer they want to hear.

Right? That's a great point. That's a great point, Kate, because I recently went to a school district that is, has been historically very inclusive, their their placement data, you know, is is very high, their mindset when I interviewed a number of their their, like their top leaders, superintendents, directors, supervisors, everyone had the mindset everyone was, you know, and so and as I walked around and in observed classrooms, I'm like, where are all the kids with disabilities? But you're right, it's like, it's an eye in the eye. I mean, I think I knew that. But I even I remember asking them about this. And they're like, you're probably not noticing them, because this is just how life is here. And, and yeah, I think you're right. It's just, you know, when you when it's hard, it's hard to put into words. And it's hard to it's hard to imagine it unless you experience it. And you're like, Ah, yes, this, but to just say, okay, all learners are together, and they're being supported. It just, it's hard to imagine it.

It is until you've seen it. That's that's what we need to do much more of, unfortunately, teachers don't love having their classrooms filmed and plastered over the internet. And not all the parents of the children in they're particularly up for that level of publicity. So, and for kids who are visibly different. We're asking them to bear an extraordinary burden of scrutiny. And quite often the parents are exhausted from use of advocating to get their school to that point, you know, we do ask, we ask an unreasonable amount of the parents and the kids with disabilities to do the publicity for that.

That's a good point. Well, we're running up, but we're running up on our time, Cade, this is, I wish I could talk to you a little bit more. But just to wrap things up, is there anything else that we missed, or that you wanted to make sure we talked about for audience?

I think we've really covered most of it. I think that the I think the one thing I wanted to finish with in the United States, you have two separate ways that teachers can be credentialed, you have people prepared a special education teachers and people prepared as general education teachers. And we don't have that here. Because and what that means is, though, that we don't have the teachers in schools who have been given any any of the teachers in schools really exposed to sort of some of the inclusive practices, the evidence based practices that work for everybody, or ways to layer additional supports on top that work, you know, to supplement and complement what goes on in classrooms rather than something different somewhere else. And so, on the one hand, we don't have that structural separation in our workforce. But on the other hand, we lacked some of the lady the leadership expertise that I saw in schools, teachers who acted as instructional coaches and teachers who were able to come into classrooms and give professional feedback. And I think that's the next frontier for both both countries. But I think my I think in Australia, we need to figure out how to get more teachers trained in inclusive practice in schools. And I think the from what I saw in schools, the United States was trying to work out how to upskill that gen ed teachers and say this as part of their core practice. And I think that's the next frontier.

Absolutely, absolutely. We need we need teachers who go through education programs to be they don't need to be experts in in in working with learners with disabilities, but it needs to be an expectation, right? Yep. Ya, que De Bruyne thank you so much for being on the think inclusive podcast

are welcome as a pleasure to be here.

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