Abstract
In 1991 we started in Brazil a movement in favour of the school inclusion, and we have been taking actions aiming at making the public schools open to diversity. The students most affected by the school exclusion in our country, are not just the ones with intellectual, physical or sensorial disability, but also the socially and culturally underprivileged children and youngsters and those who differ due to race, genre and age, among other factors. On the other hand, we believe these differences are the main reason to improve teacher education and to review the teaching system at our schools, so as to transform them into inclusive schools.
I intend to present my work as both a professor at the Faculty of Education at Unicamp - Universidade Estadual de Campinas - Spo Paulo, Brazil, and as responsible for the Research Laboratory of Teaching and Diversity - LEPED at the same University, where we advise undergraduate and graduate students' thesis on inclusive education. I also intend to present my activities in the public schools systems coordinating continued teachers education courses which focus on both in person and distance programs through the kaleidoscopic site www.caleidoscopio.aleph.com.br
Schools open to diversity
The differences in social class, age, gender, intellectual capacity, race, and interests among the students as the key to the improvement of teaching and to the success in the academic learning are still partially accepted and have a strong impact on the conservatism of the educational systems, which insist on eliminating those differences to improve the quality of the teaching in the schools. The limits of the diversity are questioned; limits beyond which the students are ineligible to the school programs. The tendency is to encourage the students to ignore their own differences and the others' differences as well.
Not to deal with the differences is not to see the diversity around us, and the many aspects in which we are different from each other and to convey implicit or explicitly that the differences must be hidden and treated apart. Such behaviour, among other forms of discrimination, forwards us to the need of separating out students who have difficulties into special schools and classes, in the search for the 'pseudo' homogeneity in the classrooms so that the teaching can be successful; in fact, it reveals the difficulty we have in dealing with those people who deviate a little bit more from the average of the differences, which bring them into isolation and exclusion inside and outside the schools.
The schools open to diversity are those in which all the students feel respected and recognised in their differences, that is, the schools which are not indifferent to the differences. When we refer to such schools, we are talking about educational settings which are characterised by quality teaching, which does not exclude, does not categorise the students arbitrarily into groups defined by profiles of school performance and by standard evaluations, but rather those are schools which do not accept the dichotomy between regular and special education. The schools for all are inclusive schools, where all students study together, in regular classrooms. Such educational settings challenge the learning possibilities of all students and the strategies of pedagogical work are adjusted to the abilities and the needs of all .
All students at some point in their school trajectory face some kind of problem, an obstacle, or difficulty in their academic learning. The reasons why the students fail in some school situations are complex and shouldn't fall exclusively and entirely upon the learner. A great part of such difficulties and incapacities are due to the school itself. In that sense we can say that the number of students with learning problems in a school is related to the quality of the education offered in that school.
Likewise, all students should benefit from the support of the school and from individualised support offered by the school, when they are going through situations which keep them from achieving success in the school activities.
In the inclusive schools there is mutual support among all, and the students' specific needs are met by their peers, who may be classmates, the school or professionals from related areas. The aim of those schools is to overcome all obstacles that keep them from advancing towards quality teaching, concerned with developing the talents, the natural tendencies, the abilities of every student for a certain specialty. In each class the talents mix up with the life history of the students, with their individual and group experiences. It is in this kind of setting that the academic contents take up nuances of understanding, versions, and conflicts necessary to the interdisciplinary elaboration of ideas, to the understanding of the world. The intention is to have the students see the importance of adding up such talents and recognise the complementary features of their abilities and experiences, in order to explore themes of study and to better understand the academic notions.
We have to refuse and accuse all the deviations of the education for all from its true goals. The rhetoric of the public speeches is involving and deceiving and it hides interests that are not those of the inclusive practices in the schools. To increase the number of enrolment of children with disability in the regular school system does not mean to move towards inclusion, much less to move towards quality school for all. The same can be said of the decrease in the percentages of failure and of the cases which are miraculously rehabilitated in the acceleration classes and in remedial programs so common in our schools.
The obstacles to the access of all to quality education vary from one school to another, according to the type and degree of the school deficiencies; the projects to remove such barriers are always locational.
The proposals for quality teaching for all students need to be made explicit based on a real review of theoretical and practical concepts and views which lay the foundation of the traditional teaching at the schools.
To reconstruct the foundations and the organisational structure of the schools with a view to quality education for all, also forwards us to specific issues related to the object being taught and to the subject who learns it. It is one more challenge which implies the consideration of the specifics of academic contents and of the learner's subjectivity, that is, in a double interpretation system of the act of educating, countersigned by conjectures of epistemological and psychological nature and by the realisation of innovative proposals, which do revert what is traditionally practiced in the classrooms.
It is yet to be considered that educating assumes intentions, representations that we have of the role of the school, of the teacher, of notions, of the learning style, of the student and his/her learning and these concepts do vary according to paradigms, to ideologies and to the scientific background that supports them.
All pedagogical action takes place at a time, at a given setting and these do influence the way we do and understand things, defining the contours of our pedagogical acts, from the most elementary ones up to the most expressive and complex. Not always do the general education goals and the goals that each student sets for his/her education integrate, thus bringing about disruptions in the movement of educational actions and in the way through which teaching takes place in order to achieve its goals.
The teacher's mediation is another basic point which encompasses the topics we have highlighted so far in this discussion. We know that left to his/her own discoveries, that is, to the mercy of his/her individual resources, the student makes little progress, or progresses slowly and can't update and explore all his/her cognoscitive possibilities.
School exclusion will only be fought when the schools become ready to include, unconditionally, all their students into a single school system.
Several systems have become inclusive because they have sought the constant improvement of their teachers' education and the success of their students' learning. This search demands continuous efforts as we will see later on. The fight for the inclusion of all the students into the regular classrooms has been disseminated in the countries and in private and public schools. Our experience is centered on the municipal school systems and the considerations that we'll make throughout this text will be intertwined with the work carried out at these municipal schools, involving their students, parents and teachers.
Values, principles and attitudes
The identification of schools that move towards eliminating the obstacles to the education for all is possible and observable, provided that one is not looking for a pre-determined and closed model that can be adopted universally.
There are, however, basic principles and trends in those schools which are the basis of all the processes which they go through in order to achieve their goals. Among those principles and trends we can identify aspects that have to do with the school organisation, the syllabus, the teaching and learning processes, supporting services, initial and continued education of teachers, change of attitudes, values, and community development.
A remarkable characteristic of these schools is the effort made towards changing attitudes related to the differences amongst students. These attitudes take place within and outside the school environment, reaching the families and the communities.
The obstacles to be overcome in this sense are subjective in nature and, as we see it, the strongest ones, as they are related to the most deeply rooted questions in our education and personal experiences, in a society which is not used to recognising and valuing these differences.
Equality amongst people is the fundamental value, when we talk about schools for all. We can face it from different angles, but in all of them the sense of equality does not end with the individual, rather expanding to aspects which are political, social and economical in nature.
Equality is not opposing to the respect for the differences among people, but rather it reinforces them as this value unfolds into three specific principles (Baker and Garden, 1992; Wolfensberger, 1972). These authors refer initially to the respect for people, in the sense that "each human being has the right to dignity, regardless of his / her capacities or realisations..."(p.13). They also point out the right to satisfying basic needs and the principle of equal opportunities, and establish a distinction between equal and fair opportunity for all and equal and egalitarian opportunity for all. The first formulation prescribes that the social advances... "should be based solely on the individual's talent: that way no one will be at disadvantage due to his/her sex, race, religion, social antecedents or due to any other consideration" (p.13). the second formulation assumes that... " each person should have a real opportunity to develop his/her specific capacities satisfactorily and that a substantial amount of personal realisation should be available for every individual, regardless of his/her abilities ( same, p.14) Doré (1996) points out that this principle is adopted by the schools when the discussion is about choosing a regular or special classroom to meet the individual needs of the students. In addition to the mentioned principles, he talks about the "positive discrimination", which guarantees to the students and the people in general the human and material resources needed for their development and social adjustment. At the school, this principle does not disappear with inclusion, but should be available to all students who are experiencing any kind of disadvantage, compared to the others, while performing their activities.
When it comes to giving equal and fair opportunities to all, there is still a lot to be done at the schools so that we can correspond to the principle that states that the human beings have the right to dignity, no matter what their capacities or realisations are.
Attitude barriers are a predisposition that makes people respond unfavourably to certain situations or to other people, with a certain value in mind. In the case of the inequality among people, the barriers become real when people refuse to recognise and defend this value through behaviours, reactions, emotions and words. The existence of such barriers confirms the markedly discriminatory, elitist and segregating culture of our schools, which influences all the procedures and the discourse of its members, affecting even the students and their parents. In a word, the inequality among people is a forgotten value in the concepts and standards of the traditional school.
Many school directors, teachers and parents are still reluctant to accept the fact that the students profile has changed, and that today's children and youngsters are not like the ones who went to school in the past, and they complain about the social background of these students, and claim the influence of the student's origin in the success or failure at school. The prejudice is confirmed when it comes to students who have learning difficulties because they are either permanently or temporarily disabled from the intellectual, social, affective, emotional, physical or cultural point of view. The prejudice also exists when it comes to students who are of black origin, families of popular religions, the so-called "bible babblers", children of broken families, single mothers and absent fathers, drug addicts, and the socially excluded.
Our experience in private schools has shown how difficult it is to work on the attitude of teachers, parents, co-ordinators, directors and / or owners and also some students to make them understand how much they are still affected by ideas and feelings that keep them from accepting the fact that a student can be different from the ones they believe to be the representatives of a determined social class, of a given group of people who are socially, culturally and intellectually gifted. The parents of children with disabilities are the first to admit the prejudice and discrimination since they do not enrol their other children in the same school! They believe that the schools which welcome all the children only do it because they are less committed to the quality of their teaching and the learning of their students. Besides, they also believe that the students with disability are harmed by the presence of colleagues with deficits of understanding and performance, which put at risk the school expectation, lowering it for all.
For many other authors who are involved with inclusion projects, in the sense of quality education for all, (Forest, 1984,1985,1987; Richler, 1993; Steinback, 1990; Forest and Pearpoint, 1992; Kunc, 1992), the development of the sense of community is a condition so that the value and the principles of equality can become real. Definitely the high level of the sense of community, developed by differentiated societies, is the basis of egalitarianism. Belonging to a society is a fundamental need of every person, and it is a right that must be guaranteed to all.
In the last two centuries, the formal education has been characterised for having excluded the students with disability, more than for having included them in the schools. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the public education was extended to all children and that was paralleled by the creation of special education. The growth of this segregating educational system reflected the centralisation, the specialisation of functions, the administrative hierarchy from the organisational models of the industrial corporations. This moment influenced the enlargement of special teaching as being a system apart. More and more people were enrolled in the special schools and special classes and were "included by the disability"(Bunch, 1994) . Unfortunately, the special education did not live up to the expectations of so many people. The society could never have thought that the special classes would fail its aims of doing better than the regular classes as far as the students with disabilities were concerned, despite the teachers' specialisation and the reduced number of students (Macmillan and Hendrick,1993).
Everywhere, most children who enter these special classes never leave them. The exit door is a lot narrower than the entrance door and the " needle hole" is formed, so typical of the special education systems.
From 1990 on, the movement in favour of Education for All, advocated in the conference organised by the United Nations in Jomtien, in Thailand, started to be discussed and to influence the changes in the schools and communities more sensitive to this innovation. In 1993 the Uniform Standards were adopted for the people with disabilities. The standards were approved by the General Assembly of the United Nations and their fundamental principles establish that the term "equal opportunities" refers to the process by which the several systems of the society, the physical surroundings, the services, the activities, the information and the documentation are made available to all, specially to the people with disabilities. The same document specifies that the people with disabilities should receive the necessary support in the regular structures of education, health care, employment and services. Education was considered a critical area and it was linked to the principle of inclusion. It would be up to the countries to recognise the principle of equal opportunities in education at the various levels, elementary, high school and university level for the children, youngsters and adults with disabilities and they should also make sure that these equal opportunities became an integral part of the school system. It was from the late 80s on that the movement towards inclusion of students with disabilities into the regular classrooms started to grow all over the world. In 1994, in Salamanca, Spain, it was signed the Declaration which called together all the governments to urgently adopt the principle of inclusive education, as a legal or political issue. In item 2 the above mentioned document by UNESCO states that " regular schools which are inclusive oriented are the most effective means to fight discriminatory attitudes, to create open communities, to build an integrated society and to obtain education for all."
Other manifestations took place after the Declaration of Salamanca: in 1995, in Copenhagen, at the World Meeting about the Human Development, the commitment 6 of the final document of that meeting reaffirmed the need to guarantee equal educational opportunities at all levels of schooling, in integrated settings. In that same year the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) published a guide about the participation of people with disability in the sustainable human development which assures that "the people with disability should not be excluded(...). Considerable changes and efforts are needed so that those people can be successfully integrated in the regular programs..." (Preliminary Guide, p. 5).
As one can see, the movement for a school open to diversity started from the exclusion of people with disabilities: exclusion from the society, from the schools, from the workforce, from the community services. Everybody agrees in highlighting the importance of education in the global process which leads to the full participation of the people with disabilities. In Brazil, these ideas started after the document of Salamanca and since then a lot of debate and discussion has been created around the topic, specially among the ones who direct the institutions for the disabled, and also among the parents, the professionals of special education and the professionals of health care. The debate is heating up and it is very little assimilated by the school community and by the society in general. The special education leads the discussion on inclusion at the schools, and it has definitely contributed to limit and empty the broad sense of inclusive education, that is, not to exclude anybody from the schools, not just the ones with disabilities, and to strive for improving the educational system, so that it can offer quality education to all children, as we have already mentioned. The leadership of the special education in this discussion is, in our opinion, greatly harming the movement in favour of the schools open to diversity and it is still resistant to inclusion, when it comes to more severe cases, that is, cases of students with severe disabilities being assisted in the special classes as well as in the classes of the regular school. The clarifying of this to the public is being crossed by other interests, including those of corporate nature, involving groups of professionals who feel threatened by the possible interference of the movement in the work that they are presently developing in their specific areas. The community debate about the topic is notable for deviating the attention of those who are interested, including the media, to issues which are not central to the school inclusion debate - the quality school for all. In other words, the debate concentrates primarily on the schools deficiency, when it should concentrate on the schools efficiency in order to satisfy the needs, interests and unique characteristics of all their students. Very few are the voices that speak out, nowadays, to change the direction of the discussions and to relate the inclusion movement to the reforms of the regular school system. As a consequence, the idea of school inclusion is being misinterpreted and is taking directions other than those of its main route. No matter what the intentions of the representatives of special education are, in the area of research, administration and educational and therapeutic operational services right now, the fact is that the reaction of those who are fighting for the inclusion of all in the regular schools will have to be intensified.
The school communities and the society as a whole should be informed through the the refuting of the misinterpreted ideas being conveyed; without this, the issue will be lessened into pessimism, uncertainties, and disbelief of a group that, certainly does not share the objectives of this innovation, no matter what the reasons are.
We do not want to deny that the inclusion in education was initiated by those directly interested in the promotion and warranty of the rights to full participation and equal opportunities to the people with disability; however, not only those people have their rights denied or forgotten, inside or outside the schools.
The inclusion of the people with disabilities at the school is understood as part of a broader context of social claims, which encompasses the exclusion of all minorities. At the schools, the education for all builds this context, which will also include the students with disabilities once it is ready to offer quality teaching to all its students. The way through which we should evaluate our needs and look for educational answers to solve the problems of the students' performance at school and of the development of the education professionals is more than a review of the limits which separate the two school modalities: the regular and the special school system. It involves new personal and professional values and attitudes which clash with the traditional culture of the schools, including our way of understanding the excluded people. When a regular school system is not in conditions to meet the needs of all its students, it cannot propose to include the excluded, because these are the very students that it has not been able to educate!
The inclusion in education is a challenge that affects not only the schools, once the school is part of the community and it has its life affected by the advances and limitations of several kinds: physical, intellectual, cultural, and social. The guarantee of the right to education at schools which do not exclude people under no circumstances is a sign of development of the community and of advancement of its values and attitudes, principles and ideals.
On Teaching
The quality school for all offers the students a friendly and welcoming environment. This fact alone should be enough to justify all efforts to make it a reality in our society. In order to make it welcoming, some organisational and educational aspects of this institution need to be revised, improved or even eliminated so that the necessary reforms are possible. These aspects imply legal and political commitments which are inherent to the right of all to education; they function as a background which will be present in all actions taken.
Another crucial point in the changes is the recognition of the wide variety in the paces of development and in the interest of the children in the elementary and junior high school. This fact implies adjustments and flexibility in the educational process. The openness depends on having the child, that is, the learning at the centre of the elementary school, what calls for an evolutionary and progressive approach of the teaching process.
The ideology that permeates the proposal of a progressive school for all comes from a functional epistemology, which does not reduce the psychological experience of knowledge to observable answers or responses to stimuli or observable situations. The truth does not come from the introspective or immediate experience of the cognoscent subject, but it appears out of the functional co-ordination between the external significance of the experience and the subject's mental structures. The epistemological perspective of these schools is constructivist and, in this sense, the diversity of levels of the intellectual performance and of the knowledge among the students in the same class favours the ideal setting so that knowledge can be built up. The constant unbalance in the exchanges amongst the students and the permanent reorganisation of knowledge constitute the ideal medium so that the students can advance in the construction of ideas, feelings, values.
These exchanges naturally make possible for the students to surpass the challenges of the environment, through the confrontation of the different opinions, the arguments, the solutions to problems of a school day. Thus, the school setting opens up to all possibilities, that is, to all the students' answers in relation to describing, expliciting or recreating the knowledge.
Substantial changes in the planning and implementation of educational projects open to diversity are rooted in interactive methodologies which develop the person as a whole, and in which the students' dignity is always preserved and respected. These methods should emphasise the right of all to free expression of ideas and feelings; and the pedagogical work proposals are markedly democratic, changing the students' and teachers' roles and the relationships between and the teaching and learning process. The quality schools free the learners from the adult's tutorship and at the intellectual and social level, autonomy is opposed to heteronomy; the free investigation negates the dogmatism and the instruction does not dominate the pedagogical practices, as what prevails is what each student is capable of doing, saying and understanding at a given moment of his/her school trajectory. In the classrooms where the teaching is for all, knowledge is not arranged by the teacher's discourse and is not transmitted as pouring out the contents of one vessel into another. Neither does the result of the sensorial impressions and verbal stimuli come from objects, or the teacher, as prescribed by Empiricism. On the other hand, knowledge can't be perceived as being innate, but rather as the outcome of a successive progression of stage that move towards systematising the concepts.
Teaching at schools has been conceived and ministered so as to focus on the school subjects, regarding both the teaching methods, structure and operation of the schools, as well as evaluation criteria and students' promotion to other grades.
We know that most schools are still concerned with the acquisition of scientific knowledge, sequentially organised and compartmentalised assuming that the learner is an ideal being who adapts to universal pedagogical procedures and who grows in time and space common to all, just by the mere fact that they are together in the same classroom. This way of understanding and distributing the subjects contrasts with the learners' uniqueness, thus generating numerous difficulties of articulation between teaching and learning.
The academic contents also undergo changes, when we are aiming at a school whose spirit is clearly community oriented. The everyday life situation of the students is the material where the study themes stem from. It is a school that teaches vital abilities, but also global themes, as well as values and attitudes and, as we have already pointed out, and explores physical and mental talents and revises all our usual versions of what should be learnt in the schools on a priority basis, that is, the subject contents.
The specificities of the subject that learns are not restricted to the psychological aspect of learning, understood as processes of mental functioning, but rather have to do with values, interests, experiences, culture, choices, rejections, aims which internally direct his/her physical and/or mental actions, stimulating him/her to know, to develop self awareness and awareness of his/her surrounding.
This scenario suggests that the particularities and the school disciplines of the learner be considered, as well as the ways to act in the school, in such a manner as to respect the most appropriate conditions so that teaching and learning mutually integrate, thus generating quality education.
The social-affective environment of the classrooms is kept on the basis of co-operation, so that the students feel confident and can share their learning experiences and can complement them with their knowledge.
The improvement of the teaching conditions are a consequence of an initial and continued education of teachers and education specialists which aim at a global understanding of the student and at an interdisicipline oriented performance.
The fact of being immersed in a given physical, social and cultural environment does not ensure the developing subject the advances he/she needs so that he/she can autonomously develop in the future, from the intellectual, social, physical and emotional point of view. This subject, whether a student, a young man/woman or a child, needs a relatively long time and an intermediary person who teaches him/her, someone who can show him/her what there is to be learned, who can instigate him/her towards getting deeper in matters already known, who can stimulate him/her to see new situations and facts which are further away from his/her own reality, who can question him/her and make him/her decide, opt and defend his/her ideas, who can unbalance his/her thought and reveal his/her inquisitive and creative capacity.
The participation of the community is of special relevance to the management and indirect support to all school initiatives for planning and administering of courses and to ensure that the curricula reflect the cultural and social identity.
On Learning
Learning is a psychological activity which reveals the uniqueness of each learner by adapting to the diversity of the object of knowledge.
Piaget(1959) makes a distinction between learning in general and in particular. In the limited sense, learning is knowing about isolated facts, specific and fragmented information, such as the name of a city, an object, an important date, a character in a story... Learning, in a broad sense, is what allows the subject to understand these pieces of information. We understand new ideas, facts, objects through a frame of the knowledge we build throughout life, according to the challenges imposed by the environment, that is, through everything which is external to us --- material things, living creatures in general, symbolic objects, feelings, facts and personal experiences.
The child develops from a cognitive viewpoint when he/she structures the knowledge, by actively organising his/her experiences, by interacting with whatever is external to him/her. This structuring does not take place by putting side by side one knowledge with the other, but by a reciprocal assimilation. For a subject to incorporate a new item to his/her knowledge, cognitively adapting it to his/her peculiarities, changes in what was already known do take place; there is an accommodation of what already existed.
Since this adaptation not always happens in such a way as to balance out the two basic mechanisms, the assimilation(incorporating what's new) and accommodation (modification of the old into the new), deformities take place in the ideas and set of the resulting actions. For example, for a child who has not yet distinguished well the characteristics of a little lamb, may take it as a breed of dogs --- poodles for instance. It also happens to adults to think they can't entirely assimilate a concept and thus state it with deformities, such as is the case with the frequent distortions when interpreting Constructivism as well as other theories of knowledge...
In order to appropriate the academic knowledge, each student decides individually for a route which is assisted by the teacher and/or colleagues. The milestones along this journey have rhythms which are necessarily different, as it is not anticipated that all learn everything and at the same time, by imitation, repetition and intellectual acquiescence on principle. Such conditions facilitate the intellectual adaptation of the students to the school disciplines, by respecting the limitations of each learner, his/her personal aptitudes, needs and interests.
Learning, seen as an assimilative process, has implications also from the point of view of the student's evaluation in school, as the mistake, under these lights, is considered and integral part of knowledge under construction. In this sense, to distort the knowledge for not having reached its real form is not a moment that reveals the learner's intellectual incompetence. It has to do with a stage of the active construction process to which this subject is dedicated, in order to evolve cognitively and to arrive at more objective levels of knowledge. Therefore, it is not appropriate to have a lower grade, a reprimand, or not to consider the efforts made by the student nor even the activation(in the sense of insisting on accelerating the emergence rhythm) of a latent competence.
When we strive to change the school setting into cozy and welcoming environment, we are referring to situations in which we respect the paths to discoveries and, therefore, to the answers that the student is capable of giving in order to solve a problem-situation or in order to carry out a task. We try to understand his/her procedures and make him/her perceive the contradictions, the inconsistency of his/her hypothesis, the drawbacks to his/her arguments, in an educational dialectics which does not hurry, but gives to all the time needed for learning.
At the end of this century and in the years ahead, it will be increasingly more difficult for the school curricula to keep pace with the exponential growth of information, and scientific and technological discoveries. There are always more and more innovations than the knowledge and information we consider basic and essential. The trend is for us to become forever learners, in order to acquire individual and social competencies of communication and to interact with what is new.
The school is welcoming when it practices the assimilation of the new, because to practice it is to accept diversity, in what is different and peculiar in the way children speak at a given area, at another, in their values, in what they bring from their origins to the classroom, in a word, in the way they see the world.
To accept the most diverse and unique interpretations of the same knowledge decreases our chances of deforming our assimilation and of reducing our learning. When we ignore the natural abilities of our students, forcing them to acquire competencies which are selected and valued arbitrarily by the school, we are excluding those who have other talents, through which they could develop as much as or more in learning, or better said, in the construction of knowledge.
This exclusion hinders the autonomy of the students to choose which direction to follow to arrive at whatever they want to learn. The natural competencies unfold into others, which do require the habit of thinking, of learning to research, of having doubts and of analysing the knowledge objects, whether they are information or relations established between what is known and what is new. In a word, the recommendation is in the sense that schools allow the student to participate actively in the process of learning, enabling him/her to "digest" the information, based on a review of the available data, enabling him/her to question the ideas before buying into them, to autonomously look for the solutions to his/her problems and to the explanations for the experienced facts and for the observed phenomena.
Moreover, the quality school shall stimulate the students to horizontally expand the range of their interests and vertically their knowledge and to build an ethics for community action, through experiences in real life and through the analysis of these experiences in the classrooms.
One of the greatest acts of violence against freedom of expression is to insist that the students learn contents which cannot be inscribed in their "maps of understanding" and which do not bear any significance or sufficient relevance to disturb the dynamic equilibrium state of the present knowledge. To demand that this knowledge be surpassed by someone who has not felt challenged to do so happens quite frequently. This is a school procedure that embarrasses the students and confirms one more school abuse of the rights of all students to an education which abides by the principle of equal and just opportunities for all. In general, it is blamed on the students for the failure of not learning, but in reality the learning conditions are the ones that are out of pace.
A lot more could be added to these considerations about learning, both in its broad and strict senses. However, what we want to do next is to articulate a set of data that allows us to talk about the conditions to eliminate the largest number possible of situations that hinders the access of all and any student to the schools. We want to talk about which are the conditions for unconditional inclusion or more than that, how to make sure that the differences are prescribed and not proscribed at schools.
Schools open to quality
Our school system still has a lot to improve and everybody agrees with that. But, how can we do it? Certain solutions seem to be evident, but difficult to come true in the classroom. Certainly, all of a sudden --- and without having to carry out long researches ---the school all over the world could become more welcoming and open to all if the children were well nourished, if they all lived in good houses, if their parents had a job and if they themselves and their families were respected at school as well as on the streets. By that we mean that the elimination of barriers that keep children from being welcomed at the schools just the way they are, is more than a pedagogical, social and cultural problem. We are here referring to a broader issue, a conjectural issue which makes us realise that certain solutions, despite being known, still escape us.
As a teacher and a teacher educator at the university and as a researcher of the educational field, we still dedicate ourselves to better understanding how children develop and learn and how we can help them in these processes, especially those who face learning difficulties due to slight or severe intellectual deficiency.
Our solutions have clearly been of a practical nature, as we want to contribute to improve the teacher's performance in the classroom in all schools --- in the cities, in the rural area and in the inner-cities. These contributions are not found through a trial and error process, but systematically trying all possibilities for applying the theories that seem valid to us, that have been empirically tested in our investigations and that have facilitated our understanding of children's development from the intellectual, affective and social point of view. As a teacher at the Faculty of Education, we are constantly informed about what goes on in public schools and as an educational consultant for various schools, we know first hand what happens at the several stages in which teaching is planned and carried out.
On facing the challenge of supporting those schools, so that they can be changed into systems open to quality teaching and prepared to welcome all of its students, we can see that the obstacles are innumerous and of different dimensions varying from one school to another, from one classroom to another or from one student, teacher, director to another; in a word, the situations we face are always new, unique, despite being sometimes similar. Because of that we have difficulty in establishing a remedial plan or any kind of intervention established a priori in order to implement school inclusion based on barrier elimination, except for those which have theoretically been presented in the previous topics of this text.
However, a necessary pre-condition(though not enough) for the school inclusion to take place, no matter which educational system we are working with is, in our opinion, a fusion of the special education with the regular one. We have been expressing ourselves about this issue for some time now(Mantoan, 96/97) and we have suggested a reciprocal assimilation of both teaching modalities, from which a third one would emerge; one that would be completely distinct from the other two and which would be specialised in all students. The objectives of this teaching modality would be centred on eliminating all school situations of exclusion.
We know that the teachers of the regular school system "count on" the special schools and special classes as well as on their specialised colleagues to solve problems that disrupt the classrooms, even if these problems do not necessarily involve cases of real disability. The fact is widely known and does not deserve any further comments here. The professionals from the special schools, on the other hand, have got so much used to the school exclusion that by proposing strategies and resources to facilitate the inclusion of students with disabilities, they end up reproducing the very excluding situations of the regular schools.
The impasse is then created and the exclusion is maintained. It is always maintained on account of the existence of the special education and its modes of intervention, even when these are carried out inside the regular classrooms, through the intervention of itinerant teachers, the adoption of curricula adapted to some students, facilitated activities, resource classrooms, subjects taken at special classes and recreation, games, meals, music and arts in the regular classrooms...
The development of a system specialised in all students has removed most of the obstacles to inclusion because those who were or would be previously excluded became an integral part of a single teaching modality. Initially, the situation is uncomfortable to all, but on the other hand it shows that welcoming all, from the viewpoint of a school open to diversity, does not depend on the students capacity to meet the expectations of some schools, teachers, and directors; it proposes a system as a whole, which will have to find the best solutions so as not to exclude anyone by principle, since the very beginning .
The discussion of this principle among teachers and directors generates polemics, although it always takes place under a remote discourse perspective, a theoretical perspective, detached from what happens in the everyday school life.
When the student shows his/her lack of adaptation to the teaching in the classroom and the habit of excluding him/her is repeated, we then start to intervene in order to eliminate the situations that hinder inclusion. The alternatives we use in such occasions are local - applying to one specific situation - and individualised, although the tendency is to try to always use a single formula to solve such situations.
The students whose school performance is, by any chance, below the average and / or who present social behaviour disapproved by the teacher, are revealing symptoms of a kind of teaching that is not going well, not only for him/her, but for all his/her classmates.
The analysis that we make of cases like this is not appropriate for us to write a special prescription to one or another student, but it examines the teacher's "prescription book", that is, his/her methods, resources, the teaching practice as a whole that he/she is adopting to teach all students. If there is anything that must be changed, it will not change for one student only, but it will affect all the others and it must favour the whole class. This way, we offer a gradual and circumstantial review of the teaching that a certain teacher is giving his/her class and we try to make him/her understand that it is not just the students that count, because teaching and learning are complementary and inseparable acts.
With such procedure we are keeping the student from being always guilty and penalised, the one to be blamed or to be put aside, even when his/her special needs are being met.
Moreover, as those analyses take place in meetings in which other teachers, the director and specialists of the school participate, the mentioned procedure contributes to the reflection upon and the understanding of a teaching problem, so that it can be extended to all interested, who can, therefore, benefit from the exchange of ideas, feelings and suggestions given by those who make up the school staff. After all, the student is studying in a certain grade, with a teacher and classmates, but he/she is a student at a school and therefore it is the school's and its educators' responsibility to educate the students. One student's needs give his/her teachers the opportunity to create new alternatives for the development of a school curriculum and they require changes of attitudes, which have been obstacles to the understanding of certain reactions of the students in general and to the adoption of new ways to conceive and provide all with quality education.
To be able to perceive his/her own behaviour and to be critical about his/her own work are attitudes which favour the improvement of the teacher's education process; this is more effective than the courses and other indirect strategies that aim at the improvement of the teaching in the classrooms. This gradual perception can slowly transform the schools and take them away from their static position in the students' eye, from its objectives and answers to the requests of a surrounding which transforms itself - the learner, the knowledge, the applications of the conceptual development to teaching and learning, the community in which the school is locate. We can give testimony about schools which expand, which become more dynamic, and which are constantly learning from their own experience and are becoming more and more receptive to the differences and to quality in teaching; they are also facing more easily the obstacles which in the past were considered insuperable, such as the presence of students with severe physical, intellectual and sensorial disabilities in the regular classrooms.
It is amazing to see how time and the collective reflection on specific points that have to do with problems of students whose progress was a reason for concern, are the antidotes to cure what used to poison the school, that is, being intolerant with those who do not learn at the same pace of the class, those who disrupt the classroom discipline established from the outside, those who do not have the characteristics determined by the school to define the ideal student, from the social, cultural and intellectual point of view...
The barriers of the incapacity and of the prejudice against those who are different due to their colour, origin, religion, customs, family life, and social class, start to fall naturally and the differences begin to be of interest to all, creating a richer and more enlightening learning environment. In a word, instead of being seen as problems to be overcome, the students begin to be seen as those who contribute to the improvement of the conditions under which teaching and learning take place in the classroom for all of them. Their behaviours are rich sources of information and guidance to their teachers, to the school, and to the educational system in which they have been enrolled.
We do have to consider the challenges that these students pose to us in order to sharpen our senses, to refine our capacity to respond to their needs. It is important to recognise that we need to "feel" certain cases more than to understand them rationally, because there are barriers that can only be overcome in an affective way, through means that escape our linear understanding of the facts and which are always the most intricate and challenging to our professional competence. We do not mean to say, however, that we resort to solutions which get away from the professionalism of our pedagogical interventions and move about at random, the paternalistic solution.
To act in that way is to dive into the deepest of these problems and it is exactly this immersion in areas that are not the ones we are usually familiar with that enable us to better understand the student and to remove many barriers that separate us from the person, the student as a whole and complex being, who does not end in what we think we know to educate him/her.
Because the traditional schools are rigid and highly compartmentalised, they fail to see the student as a whole. The special services that give support to the students with problems and / or disabilities intensify the isolation in which those students are helped instead of looking for the insertion - even in the most severe and difficult cases - in the natural conditions of the classrooms.
How can we then help the schools to organise themselves so that they can become open to the differences, ready for the inclusion of all students who in the past were excluded from their regular settings? How can we influence the schools to restructure their practices, to reorganise their teaching programs and support services, so that they can move towards inclusion in education? What kind of education should we offer our teachers to help them improve what they have learned in courses and from the in-service experiences? And what about the interactions with the social and cultural environment which are the axis of the concept and development of our academic curricula? Whom and what are we counting on to make this educational revolution?
In general we have had great difficulty to convince the schools to face these changes; however, as we are working with public school systems we feel more backed up to act and advise in these processes. In all schools we deal with, we observe a kind of initial tension between the old habits, attitudes, school practices and the innovations introduced by inclusion. The greatest tension occurs when all of a sudden the schools find themselves without the possibility of "pushing" their problems to the special school, and having to face the difficulties, not realising, however, those difficulties are the school's and not exclusively of some students.
How to create new organisational structures, so as to solve a threatening problem, and, at the same time, keep what already exists, not ruin the work, or jeopardise it entirely, since it needs to go on functioning despite the crisis?
If the disabling condition is very extreme, since we are speaking here of unconditional inclusion, it involves equally extreme modifications in the pre-existing structure. However, to modify does not mean to negate or to eliminate. The process of incorporating the new, in this case, is produced by mechanisms of adaptation where the assimilation is very slow, causing many distortions of the idea and a disproportionate balance between the structures that are kept the same and the ones which develop. In other words, we do not get a real long-lasting change, if we do not experience this "purgatory" of exclusion, which is a period when we need a great deal of patience and belief in our revolutionary proposals, in order to achieve the desired goal, that is, to break the resistance that hinder the creation of conditions for inclusion in education.
Conditions to change the schools
If today we can already count on an Education Act that suggests and makes viable new proposals for the enhancement of the teaching at schools, they are still far from becoming open to the differences and to quality.
The major excuse to justify the present state of most of our schools is the teacher's lack of preparation. We already know that this is a reason that has a great impact, but it is not enough to account for what really happens with teaching at both, public and private schools, which are still distant from what is expected from a modern educational institution. There are also those who do not believe in the benefits that the students with disability will be able to get from inclusive teaching, specially those with the most severe cases of disability, since they wouldn't be able to follow the achievements of the colleagues and would, therefore, be put aside and discriminated even more than in the special schools and classrooms.
In both circumstances, one does not envisage the gains of a school open to diversity in a broad sense of the word; therefore, one does not propose a school open to quality, but qualified to help some students who are different, the ones with disabilities, that is, a school specialised in this kind of service only. As a consequence, the regular school system continues to be closed to the differences and of low quality.
To change the school is to face a task that demands work on several fronts. We will emphasise the ones we consider essential to transform the school, to have it move towards quality teaching and, therefore, be inclusive.
We have to act urgently by:
To improve the conditions under which the teaching is carried out in the schools, and aiming at universalising the access, unconditionally implementing the inclusion of all in the regular classes, and democratising education, we suggest something that, fortunately, is already happening in many Brazilian schools which can be presented as "showcases" that display the success of inclusion in education.
Such suggestions refer to changes in the school organisation, in the teachers' education, and the removal of attitude barriers to the inclusion of all in the regular classrooms, not only of the ones with disabilities or with special educational needs .
Organisational aspects
The first condition to move towards education open to quality is to encourage schools to develop their political- pedagogical project in an autonomous and participative way, by diagnosing the demand, that is, by checking how many students there are, where they are and why some are out of school.
Without knowing its students and the ones who are outside the school, it is not possible for the school to plan a curriculum that reflects the social and cultural setting in which it is located. The integration among the different areas of knowledge and the concept of cross-curricular themes of the new proposals for curriculum organisation consider the academic subjects as a means and not an end in themselves, and start from the students' reality, their everyday life experiences to get to the systematising of knowledge.
As such life experience varies among the students, even when they are members of the same community, the implementation of educational cycles is a fair solution, although not well understood by teachers and parents, for being something new and for not having been so spread out or used by the schools yet. In fact, if we with these cycles we give more time for the students to learn, and if we eliminate the system based on grades where the student may "flunk" one grade and not be able to attend the next grade, we will be adjusting the learning process to the pace and the conditions of the learners' development - one of the principles of quality schools for all.
On the other hand, as we have already mentioned, inclusion does not mean developing individualised teaching to students with intellectual deficits, learning problems or any other problems related to school performance. In the inclusive view, the services are not segregated, neither inside nor outside the classrooms; therefore, no student is sent to remedial classes, nor do any students learn from adapted curricula . The teachers do not determine beforehand the extension and depth of the contents to be constructed by the students, nor does he or she facilitate the activities for some students based on the fact that he or she can predict the difficulty they will have to do them. It is the student who adapts him/herself to the new knowledge and only he or she is capable of regulating his/her process of intellectual construction.
The evaluation constitutes another hindrance to the implementation of inclusion. It is urgent to eliminate the classificatory feature from the school evaluation which is based on grades and tests; a diagnostic view of the evaluation process, which must be continuous and qualitative, should be adopted, aiming at refining the teaching and making it more efficient and suitable to all students' learning. Adopting such a measure would largely decrease the number of students who are unduly evaluated and classified as "disabled " in the regular schools.
Having the learning as the centre of the school activities and the success of the students as the objective of the school, regardless of the level of performance which each student can reach, are the basic conditions to move towards welcoming schools. The meaning of such welcome is not that of passively accepting the possibilities of each student, but it means that the schools must be receptive to all children because the schools exist to educate the new generations, and not only some of its future members, the most privileged.
Inclusion does not foresee the use of specific teaching methods and techniques for this or that deficiency. The students will learn up to the limit they are able to reach if there is quality teaching, that is, if the teacher considers the levels of development possibilities of each student and explores such possibilities, through open activities in which each student fits in on his/her own, according to his/her needs and interests, be it to construct an idea, to solve a problem or to complete a task. Here we have a big challenge to be faced by the regular traditional schools, whose paradigm is based on the transmission of knowledge.
The diversified group work in the classes and in the school as a whole is compatible with the vocation of the school to educate the generations. It is at the school that we learn how to get along with our peers, to share responsibilities, and to share the tasks. By exercising such actions one develops co-operation, the sense of working and producing in group, the acknowledgement of the diversity of human talents, and the importance of everyone's work in order to accomplish common goals within the same group.
Tutoring in the classrooms has been a natural solution that can help the students a lot, by developing in them the habit of sharing knowledge. Helping a colleague with difficulty is an extremely useful and humanistic attitude, which has been very little developed at the schools; actually, the schools are often quite competitive and are not concerned with building up moral values and attitudes.
Besides those suggestions related to the teaching at our schools, quality education for all and inclusion imply changes of other conditions regarding administration and the role of the members of the school organisation.
In that sense, it is essential to review the directors and co-ordinators' role, so that it can go beyond its controlling, inspecting and bureaucratic functions through supportive work, orientation to the teacher and to the entire school community.
The decentralisation of the administrative management, on the other hand, promotes a greater pedagogical, administrative and economical independence in terms of material and human resources of the schools; this is possible through councils, collegiate, parents and students assemblies.
By changing the course of the school administration, the pedagogical aspect of the directors, co-ordinators and supervisors work will emerge. The reasons why these professionals stay confined to their offices, limited to the bureaucratic issues, without time to know and participate in what happens in the classrooms, will disappear.
The continued teachers education
We know that, in general, the teachers are very resistant to educational innovations. They try to hide behind the idea of the impossible; they consider the proposal of quality education for all valid but utopic, impossible to become a reality with many students in the classrooms and under the circumstances one works nowadays at the schools, specially at the public schools.
Most teachers have a functional view of teaching and everything that threatens to break the practical work plan that they have learned to use in the classrooms is rejected. We also know that the educational innovations shake the professional identity, and the position conquered by the teachers in a given school system or structure; they are an affront to the experience, the knowledge and the effort the teachers have made to achieve them.
The teachers, as any other human being, tend to adapt a new situation to the previous ones. What is common in the initial training courses and in the continued education is the separation between theory and practice. This dichotomy of teaching makes our action difficult as educators. The teachers react initially to our methodology because they are used to learning in an incomplete, fragmented and essentially instructional way. They expect to learn an inclusive practice, that is, an education that allows them to apply predetermined work plans in their classrooms, something that will guarantee them the solution to problems that they assume they will encounter in the inclusive schools.
In one word, the teachers believe that the in-service training will guarantee them the preparation they need to specialise in all the students, but they see this training as being just one more extension course, some specialisation with a certificate which attests their capacity to put inclusion into effect. The teachers have incorporated the role of practitioners and expect the teacher educators to teach them what is necessary to be done to work with different levels of school performance; they expect the new knowledge to be passed on to them, and they also expect to be guided in the same way as they usually do with their own students. They believe that the knowledge they lack in order to teach the children with disabilities or learning difficulties due to uncountable reasons, refer basically to conceptualisation, etiology, prognostic of the deficiencies; they feel they need to know and learn how to apply methods and techniques specific to such students learning. The directors of public and private schools also have the same expectations, initially, when they ask for our collaboration.
If, on one hand it is necessary to continue investing massively to prepare qualified professionals, we cannot overlook the realisation of such education and we must be alert to the way the teachers learn in order to become professionals and to improve their pedagogical knowledge, as well as to how they react to new possibilities in education. In order to achieve our goal of educating teachers to a quality school for all, we have designed a teachers education project that has been adopted by the Brazilian public and private schools, since 1991.
We work with the teachers, pedagogical co-ordinators, directors, teaching supervisors, technical personnel from the Education Secretariat and professionals from the health care area: psychologists, speech therapists, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, social workers, and occasionally with groups of parents. These people are located at the public schools in Valinhos, SP, Sorocaba, SP, Santo André, SP, Caraguatatuba, SP and Ribeirão Preto, SP. (SP stands for São Paulo state) With the staff from Valinhos and Sorocaba, we have been working since 1992, and at Jean Piaget School, in São Paulo, SP, which is a private school in São Paulo, SP, the teachers and directors have been with us for almost ten years now. We also give indirect assistance to some other cities and states, with whom we keep some projects exchange, such as the states of Rio Grande do Norte, with the SESI School( SESI - Serviço Social da Indústria - Social Service for the Industry)/ Fiesp of Rio Grande do Norte, with the AFAD - Associação de Familiares e Amigos dos DOWN ( Association of family and friends of children with Down Syndrome) in Cachoeira do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul and with the Down's Syndrome Foundation of Campinas, of which we have the honour to be members of the Curator council.
At the Laboratory of Studies and Researches in Teaching and Rehabilitation of people with Disabilities - (LEPED - Laboratório de Estudos e Pesquisas em Ensino e Reabilitação de Pessoas com Deficiência, which we have co-ordinated since l996 at the Faculty of Education of the State University of Campinas - UNICAMP, there are several projects under our supervision such as master's thesis, master's dissertations, and scientific initiation, some of them concluded and some ongoing. Each one of these projects is one more connection that we can establish between the theory and the practice at schools, to better understand how these poles of educational development are interrelated in the inclusive perspective.
Our proposal of teacher education is based on constructivist educational principles, because we understand that co-operation, intellectual and social independence, and active learning are conditions which favour the integral development of all the students, as well as the education and professional improvement of the teachers.
In such a context, the teacher serves as a reference to the student; he is not just simply an instructor, since we emphasise the importance of his/her role not only in the construction of knowledge but also in the construction of attitudes and values of the future citizen. Thus, the continued education goes beyond the instrumental aspects of teaching.
The methodology we adopt assumes that the teacher, as well as his/her student, do not learn in the void. So we start from the "know- how- to- do" of these professionals, who already have knowledge, experiences, beliefs, work plans when they come in contact with inclusion or any other innovation.
In our projects of teacher improvement and updating, we consider fundamental the constant practice of reflection and the of sharing ideas, feelings, actions among the teachers, directors, and school co-ordinators. We are interested in the concrete experiences, the real problems, the everyday situations that unbalance the work in the classrooms. They are the raw-material for the changes. By questioning one's own practice, comparing, analysing the circumstances and the facts that cause disruptions and / or account for the success, the pedagogical theories become little by little better defined to the teachers. We want the teachers to be able to explain what they previously only knew how to reproduce from what they had learned exclusively in courses, workshops, or lectures. We stimulate our teachers to regularly interact with their colleagues, study together with and without our technical support and to be open to collaborating with their peers, in a search for pedagogical paths of inclusion.
The fact that the teachers base their practices and pedagogical arguments on common sense, makes it difficult to explicit the learning problems. This difficulty can change the school route for the students, whom in several occasions are unduly taken to the special teaching modes and to other segregation prone options of educational services.
Hence the need to form study groups at the schools for discussing and understanding the educational problems in the light of scientific knowledge and, if possible, across disciplines. The groups are organised spontaneously by the teachers themselves, at the time when they are at the schools and are followed up initially by the public school system team in charge of the co-ordination of the teachers' education. The meetings starting point is the common needs and interests of some teachers in clarifying situations and improving the way they work in the classrooms. The focus of the studies is in the resolution of the learning problems, which takes us back to the analysis of how the teaching is being conducted, since the process of knowledge construction is interactive and both sides must be analysed, whenever we want to clarify it. Besides the teachers, the school director and co-ordinators participate in the groups; however, there are groups that are formed among members of several schools which are discussing the same study theme, such as: indiscipline, sexuality, ethics, violence, evaluation and other related themes. The team responsible for the co-ordination of the education is made up by teachers, co-ordinators, that are from the school itself and by partners from other related government secretariats: health care, sports, culture. We work directly with these professionals but we also participate in the work at the schools, by occasionally assisting them, whenever we are requested --- my team of students and myself.
The Centres for Teacher Development
Some public school systems have created what we call Centres for Teacher Development which represent some progress towards the continued teachers' education that we propose; these centres hold most of the events --- small, medium or large --- such as workshops, seminars, interviews with specialists, forums and other activities, all of which contribute to the improvement of the schools. These centres help teachers, parents and the community individually, or in small or large groups, besides dedicating themselves to ____ and help students who need clinical treatment in areas that are not necessarily educational.
In all schools where we work, we have encouraged the creation of those centres, because, the way we see it, they sum up all we aim at when we refer to continued education - a place where the teacher and the entire school community go to recycle the pedagogical knowledge, besides equally serving the students and all interested in education, in the city where the school is. At the Public Education Secretariat of Valinhos, SP, we have the Centre of Pedagogical Improvement For The Inclusive School ( Centro de Aprimoramento Pedagógico para a Escola Inclusiva - CAPI ), which is the school public agency responsible for the teachers education, and for taking care of all students needs, their families and the community. CAPI, through its actions, make real our aspirations for a teaching that moves towards overcoming its own limits; it is a welcoming and democratic educational place, which works in an intense co-operation based dynamics with the schools; it reaches out the teachers and students without any intermediates, and it is open to innovative proposals. We have encouraged other public schools with which we have a relationship, to create spaces similar to CAPI. In Caraguatatuba, SP it is about to be created the Centre of Educational Improvement and Development ( Centro de Aprimoramento e Desenvolvimento Educacional - CADE), and the same should happen in Sorocaba, SP. In Santo André, SP, there is a Reference Centre whose aim is to offer conditions so that the education of its teachers can be improved within the inclusive concept.
In our opinion, the courses and the other activities of in-service education usually offered to the teachers, are not paying off the investment. We have insisted on the creation of these centres because their services give a new direction to what is already usual in the public school systems, that is, the support to the teacher, through the itinerant teachers. We do not agree with giving support to students and teachers with difficulties because it is just like just "putting out fires", by offering specific, locational solutions, without going deeper into the problem an its causes. The itinerant support services do not ask the teacher to reflect upon his/her own practice. It does not encourage the teacher to take responsibility for his / her students' learning, since there is a specialist to help in the most difficult cases, which are exactly the ones which can make the teacher grow in the way he/she deals with the whole class. If a student with or without disabilities is not doing well, the problem needs to be analysed not only in terms of the reaction of one child or another, but also in terms of the group as a whole, of what is being taught, so that the students in that group can learn.
The support work of the itinerant teachers does not help the practices or the teacher's pedagogical knowledge to develop. It is, in our opinion, another variation of special education that contributes to the accommodation of the regular school teacher, and it takes away from him/her the opportunity to grow, to feel the need to look for solutions and not to wait until someone from outside comes regularly to solve his/her problems. This kind of service also reinforces the idea that the learning problems are always the students' and that only the specialist can take up responsibility for solving them appropriately and efficiently.
The kind of teachers' education that we are implementing to make inclusion possible means establishing partnerships among teachers, students, schools, professionals of other related areas, universities, so that it can be maintained active and able to respond to the innumerous requests that this kind of work provokes in the people who are interested in it. On the other hand, those partnerships give opportunity to the development of other actions, among which we can mention the investigation in education as well as in other fields of knowledge. It is based on this kind of teachers' education and our work with the public schools that we are conducting our research and guiding our students' work at the undergraduate and graduate courses at the Faculty of Education, UNICAMP ( State University of Campinas), as well as observing the results of our work in the schools.
We do not disregard the courses, workshops and other events to promote the teachers' updating and improvement, when they are requested by the teachers, and in that sense the partnership with other groups has been highly effective. Some courses that we offer teachers, are taught by their own colleagues from the public schools when they are willing to give them or when they are invited by us because we know the value of their contribution to the other teachers.
The schools and teachers with whom we work have already shown some symptoms that indicate that they are growing everyday and moving towards quality education for all. These symptoms can be summarised as follows:
It is important to consider, however, that the evaluation of the effects of our projects is not centred on the performance of some students, the ones with disabilities in the regular classrooms. Although these cases deserve our attention, we want above all to know whether the teachers have made any progress in the way they make learning take place in their classrooms; whether the schools have changed, whether the children are being respected in their possibilities to advance, independently, in the construction of academic knowledge; whether the relationships between children, parents, teachers, and the school community have become closer through the co-operation and dialogue which are the result of a daily exercise of sharing their duties, problems and successes.
To expand these partnerships, we are also proposing the use of distance communication nets for exchanges of experiences between students and education professionals, parents and the community. Although still incipient, the "Caleidoscópio" - A Project of Education For All is our site on the Internet and through this hypertext we have been working in order to provoke the virtual and personal interactivity among the schools as one more alternative for teachers continued education, which involves the students, the schools and the public school system as a whole. The "Caleidoscópio" has been an object of study for our students and for other departments at UNICAMP related to computer science; it is growing as a new proposal and it is also opening participation channels with the community and with other institutions that want to participate in the inclusion movement, inside and outside the schools.
If we want to have changes in the classroom practices, we cannot continue educating and preparing our teachers as though the innovations were related only to the students in the elementary school, junior high school, and high school...
The attitude barriers
To respond to the wide variety of differences among the students, the schools should know how to deal with the issue not only in the classroom, but also with the parents and the community. We can learn a lot with the differences provided that we know how to treat them with respect and to explore the diversity as a quality that makes human beings unique.
The attitude barriers to the racial, cultural, genre, religion, family, and social background differences as well as to certain talents and abilities, to aspects regarding the physical and other stereotypes, can be removed, gradually, as we focus on each discriminatory and / or biased situation with the proper care, without rendering the feelings banal or trivialising the customs involved .
The curricula of the schools open to diversity are necessarily multicultural and as a consequence sensible to what each student can contribute to the academic knowledge that the school teaches, through traditions, ways of life of the students' parents and foreparents, their family life history. The parents should participate, as well as other members of the community where the child lives. To notice these differences means including in the curriculum not only what is typical of the education and development of the students, but also making the social and cultural identity the basis of the school curriculum. Going a little bit further, to have the conditions to develop such curricula is to overcome obstacles that keep teachers, students, parents and administrators in general from having attitudes which do not respect equality among people, such as the respect to the uniqueness in each one of us as human beings and world citizens.
A program to ban biased attitudes is not the solution, because we would be taking the risk of reinforcing some of them even more. However, we cannot leave the problem in the air, kept at bay or hidden, which is more common, in-between the lines, in half-words, and in the paternalistic actions.
We have been trying to revert such attitudes which awaken the teachers and activate their reflection and feelings and reflection starting from experiences and sharing of sociodramatic sessions conducted by psychodramatists with experience in the area. So far, the removal of such barriers is limited to certain people, that is, teachers, directors, and co-ordinators of schools who we are working with in order to implement inclusion in education. The idea is for them to become facilitators of these new ideas, agents of change in their schools . We hope their actions can show their colleagues, the students and their parents what needs to be changed . If we want to change the society, by teaching the students to take action regarding the inequalities of any sort, since they are little, education and teaching must begin with a change of attitude by the educators in general, and it cannot simply be a "celebration of the diversity", as Sleeter and Grant (1988) show us.
When talking about the curricula based on the differences, Sapon-Chevin (1990) lists objectives towards teaching, which highlight multicultural aspects and the differences in general, defined by Ramsey (l987)
To reduce the competitiveness, which is a strong attitude barrier, when we are looking for new directions for quality teaching at the schools, the students need to be more and more aware of their talents, of the aspects at which they are in fact and naturally successful in their school work; they also need to be aware of their difficulties, as well as to be able to recognise the same reactions in the others, because no one is so capable that he/she will not need the support of a colleague, a friend, or the teacher. The children learn with us to compete and to cooperage and that is why it is a great responsibility for us to foster attitudes which can help students to be understanding with themselves and aware of their own limits in the different learning situations at school.
To overcome this barrier, as well as the others which are created due to competitiveness and other behaviours which have already solidified in the relationships between the students and the school practices, involves an awareness process which affects all and which must be the main goal of those who are trying to implement at the schools, the value and acknowledgement of the differences as a basic principle of inclusion. Competitiveness, in our opinion, is the attitude which reinforces the disability the most, by seeing it as something that belittles people, as something that leaves people outside the group that produces according to the demands of the school and work market. We are not arguing for eliminating competition to guarantee inclusion, but we are talking about making the concept clear and of establishing its limitations and possibilities regarding all people, including those with more severe disabling conditions.
The institutions that help people with disability influence people to deal with disabilities in such a way that generates exclusion, because such institutions are based on the incapacities of those they are trying to help.
Such an influence affects the families, the schools and the public opinion. What should be a regular, normal attitude of all with regards to the disabilities and to the differences, had to be approved by a law against prejudice. The Act 7.852, of October 24, 1989, states in Article 8th. the crimination of prejudice and one can be sentenced to one to 4 years in prison and fined for that crime ( Public Prosecution Service from the state of Rio Grande do Norte - Public Prosecutor's Office Of The Person With Disability). The person with disability who was or is a victim of prejudice should go to the above mentioned Public Prosecutor's Office, which has the authority to take the legal actions against the transgressors. The crimination of prejudice is defined as follows: Article 8 - It constitutes crime that can be punished with one to four years in prison, with fine:
If on one hand it is comforting to know that we can punish those who segregate people, it is, on the other hand, a shame to recognise that we need the act of law to face prejudices against the disabled.
This unfortunate situation will go on, if we do not take urgent actions to eliminate barriers like that in the schools and in the families. Both feel very much protected by the institutions dedicated to the deficiencies and because of that they nourish the prejudice, the segregation, and the stereotypes of the ideal and successful people, and those institutions end up reinforcing attitudes that mislead the generations and the public opinion, instead of fighting the prejudice. Inclusive teaching is a strong appeal to ban prejudice from the people's feelings and actions, because we teach the children not to treat their colleagues with disabilities differently by accepting them the way they are as well as accepting ourselves within our limitations and possibilities.
Genre related problems are also very frequent at schools and reflect what the society favours as typical of girls, boys, men, and women. If the families are still reluctant to change their position when it comes to issues like that, the school cannot wait, once the school no longer makes these differences be noticed as a means of categorising values and specialising functions in such a distinct way as it used to be in the past. Men and women are making up the company's staff and competing with their specialisations so that the entrepreneurial success can become a reality. The women's situation at work and in other areas which used to be predominantly male, has been changing every day, and has debunked the sexist arguments of incompatibility of functions, inferior performance; all of those arguments rooted in the education of generations at schools, in the families and in the communities.
We will not be able to open the schools to diversity and to quality teaching if we are not open to re-think our values, customs, adjusting them to the demands of a more egalitarian ad fairer society. We need to be alert not to fall prey to the traps of our own education, which is what we want to avoid in the future generations, by preparing them for a more humanistic and realistic relationship with others, which will certainly give them a less complicated and more successful existence among their peers, in all ages and areas of activity.
Future Perspectives
The school, for most Brazilian children, is the only place for them to have access to universal and systematised knowledge, that is, the place that will offer them conditions to develop and become a citizen - someone with a cultural and social identity. To improve the school conditions means to educate generations who are better prepared to live life in full, freely, without prejudices, without barriers. We cannot contradict ourselves, nor temporise solutions, even if we have to pay a high price for that, because that price will never be as high as the rescue of a marginal school life, a drop-out, a stigmatised child, for no reasons.
The schools prepares for the future and if the children learn to live with and value diversity in the classroom, they will certainly be quite different adults from us who have to strive so much to defend the indefensible. School inclusion forwards the school to structure and functioning related issues which overturn their paradigms and imply re-scaling its role in a world that is developing by "bytes".
The inclusion movement in the school, despite being contested due to the threatening feature that exists in all and every change, specially in education, is irreversible and it convinces everybody because of its logic, because of the ethics of its social standing.
Inclusion has been denouncing the abyss between the old and the new in the Brazilian School Institution. Inclusion is revealing this gap that needs to be filled in with the actions that we have previously mentioned.
Thus, the future of inclusive education, in our opinion, depends on a quick expansion of the projects truly committed to changing the school so that it can fit in the new times.
School cannot be changed as if by magic!
The implementation of a school open to diversity and to quality education, which is egalitarian, fair and welcoming to all, is a possible dream.
The apparent fragility of the small initiatives, that is, the local experiments that we have been conducting have been enough to face, with confidence and tranquillity, the power of the educational machine which is old and rusty.
The perspectives for inclusive teaching are then very encouraging and invigorating to our education. The school belongs to the people, to all children, to their families, to the community where it is located.
Bibliography
Baker, J. (1987) and Gaden, G.(l992). Integration and Equality. In: G.Fairbain and S. Fairbain (org.) Integrating Special Children: Some ethical Issues (p. 12-25). Hants, United Kingdom: Avebury.
Brasil, (1989). Promotoria d Justiça da Pessoa Protadora de Deficiência. Lei no.7.853/89. Ministério Público do Rio Grande do Norte.
Bunch G. (l994). From there to here: the passage to inclusive education. Exceptionality Education Canada, Vol. 4, Nos. 3 and 4.
Doré, R. (l996) Réussir líntégration scolaire: la deficience intellectuelle. Montreal (Quebec); Les Éditions Logiques.
Forest, M. (l985). Éducation/Intégration. A collection of readings on the integration of children with mental handicaps into the regular school system. Downsview, Ontário : Institut Alain Rooeher.
Forest, M. (1985). Éducation/Intégration. Deuxième série d'articles et d'éssais sur l'intégration d'enfants qui présentent des besoins spéciaux en milieu scolaire régulier. Downsview, Ontario: Institut Alain Roeher.
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