What Do Students Think about Inclusion?

LEARNING to be a teacher means learning about students, understanding their preferences, and considering their points of view. The best way to get these student views is to go to the students themselves. I make this point every year in a course designed to prepare future teachers to work with the students with exceptionalities who will be in their classrooms. Students in my course are sophomores and juniors who are just beginning their formal teacher education. They are preparing to be teachers of general education in elementary, middle, and high school classes. While they have made a satisfying decision and have even begun to picture the classrooms they will have, their mental images rarely include students with exceptionalities, at least initially. They imagine their classrooms' design, decorations, and even furniture, and they imagine eager, achieving children who all want to be there and are enthusiastic and capable learners. If these teachers-to-be have been in inclusive classrooms themselves, most seem to have taken little notice. They arrive in my class without having thought much about the varieties of learners they will have in their classrooms. They have not considered ways to meet the individual learning needs of the diverse range of students likely to be present in their classrooms, and in particular they have not considered interactions between students and ways to foster them. It is not unusual for the views of students to be overlooked. It is rare for researchers even to consider students' views in their studies. In fact, I attempted to locate studies that asked students with disabilities about their views of and preferences regarding inclusion and found very few. (1) What I did find, though, was the complaint, voiced by several researchers, that students are rarely asked their own views of any initiatives at their schools. Students of all kinds are not asked what they would prefer, nor are they given an opportunity to give input into decisions or express any of their concerns. Since so little is known about students' own views, it is not surprising that there is little opportunity for prospective teachers to find out what students are thinking. Lin Logan's 1996 Kappan article, Want to Teach? First Go to the Mall, describes sending preservice teachers to the mall to interview adolescents about their likes and dislikes, as well as more substantial topics. (2) Logan's purpose was to enable the college students to find out about adolescents in general. I decided to follow that lead with a narrower purpose--to discover the views of today's young people with regard to the inclusion of students with exceptionalities in their own classrooms. Although initially I wanted to have my students go to the mall to find young people to interview, the largest local mall would not permit it. They regarded it as soliciting. So my students and I brainstormed where we would be likely to find today's students and came up with a list including sporting events, recreation facilities, churches, movie theaters, parks, and, simply, the neighborhood. When I send out my students, I emphasize that they should talk to students who are old enough to have noticed the differences among their classmates. So my students don't interview subjects younger than 10. Even though the students in my course aspire to teach at various levels, they are not required to interact only with students whose age is the same as those whom they will teach. Before my students encounter their first interview subjects, we spend some time discussing interview methods and approaches. For example, because they will probably be interviewing students whom they don't know, how should they make a safe initial contact? They can often break the ice by telling a prospective interviewee that this is for a college assignment and asking for help. Then we discuss wording, and this turns out to be quite a conundrum. …