Preparing school to meet the challenge of inclusive education for children with disabilities: A collaborative action research network

Pages: 72-75
Sneh Bansal (Chandigarh College of Education, Mohali, Punjab)

Educational Provisions for children with disabilities varies from region to region and from country to country.
Although there is widespread support for inclusion at a philosophical level, there are concerns that it is difficult to implement for a number of reasons, including that schools do not know how to do it. For Inclusion to work effectively, there is a need to expand and develop the capacity of schools to respond to diversity among children and to move away from traditional practices to innovative approaches of teaching and learning. Regular classroom teachers and special teachers need to be equipped with more comprehensive knowledge and skills required to cater special educational needs of students with a wider spectrum of disability. The study highlighted on building capacity and enabling the existing institutions already working with children to enhance their competence in handling disabled and non-disabled children in regular schools by using whole school approach to promote education of children with special needs in inclusive setting. In a developing country like India with huge resource crunch, the approach/ strategy implemented in the study has tremendous scope for promoting ‘Social Inclusion’ in the true sense.