Puppets as a Pedagogy for Inclusion

As a signatory to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) all educational settings and early childhood centres in Australia must legally "ensure an inclusive education system at all levels (Article 1, United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with a Disability).Yet despite this legal obligation and national priority, inclusion for all children has remained out of reach (Graham et al., 2020).In this paper, I will explore the artform of puppetry and its possibilities to bring about genuine inclusive practice.The findings emerged from a larger research story that included three preschools that enrol children with disabilities in their program.Together with the researcher, the children and staff engaged a range of drama strategies, including puppetry and found they significantly increased the participation and contribution of all children in their learning experiences, creating a more inclusive learning environment.This paper focuses on the potential of puppets as a pathway, if not a shining light towards a pedagogy that is inclusive for all.Despite the international impetus, policy and extensive research, the move towards inclusive education has been difficult to translate into practice and complicated by systematic and attitudinal barriers (Graham 2020;Schuelka et al., 2020).It is argued that many of these barriers can be attributed to an absence of a shared understanding of the terminology or a clearly defined notion of "inclusive education" (Graham, 2020).To avoid such misunderstanding, in this paper, inclusive education is aligned with the interpretation in the CRPD and General Comment No. 4 (GC4; United Nations: 2016), that is, a way of thinking about education that recognizes individual difference as natural and includes a range of approaches, individual preferences and strategies to engage all students in their learning.The focus strategy in this article is puppetry and in the following sections I will outline how educators can utilize this magical object for authentic inclusion.