CHENNAI: For years now educators, experts, specialists, doctors, teachers have all discussed and debated the concept of inclusive education. And now, the students are doing it and rightly so, since they are the ones who can succeed in making a special child feel inclusive in the classroom.
Vidhya Sagar, a school for the differently-abled joined hands with the AMM Matriculation school, Chennai High School and others to organise a two-day discussion among children on inclusive education. But besides bringing the children together, the schools and teachers had no hand in organisation of the event. Every bit of the event was solely planned by the students.
“From the inauguration to choosing the chief guest to the scheduling of the events to even the lunch menu, the students have done it all. For the chief guest they wanted someone who was differently-abled and had achieved something so we just gave them a list and they picked Rajiv Raja, “ said Rajul Padmanabhan, director of Vidhya Sagar.
Rajiv Raja is the Director of Disability Rights Initiative. Human Law Network (HRLN) “This could probably be one of the first times that we are letting students become a part of the debate. We want students to discuss what it would mean to have a student with a disability become part of their classroom,” said Padmanabhan. The students have been planning the two-day discussion for over two months; initially starting with three schools, eight schools later turned up at the discussion.
The students themselves chose a topic of discussion for the day on whether the students should be "cool” with their disabled peers or should they show pity. After an hour-long discussion, the students unanimously agreed that the disabled do not need any pity but simply need to be accepted into the mainstream classrooms. From discussing how the children would involve differently-abled students in their classroom and their study activities, they were all also asked how they would include them in the playgrounds as well.
When one of the children said that they should avoid getting angry with the differently-abled students and not fight with them, a differently-abled student from Vidhya Sagar said he wouldn’t mind at all if his friends fought with him, “That’s what friends do, right? We play, fight and patch up. I don’t want any of my friends to feel like they can’t get angry with me, we can always sort it out,” he said.
When asked what they were taking back from the event and if they would urge their schools to also become inclusive, the students nodded vigorously, “Before I felt like I couldn’t interact with them but now I understand and realise that we are all the same, so I want our school to welcome all kinds of children,” said Sivakumar S, a seventh standard student in AMM school.
Satyaselvi S, also another seventh grader from the Panchayat Union School, Choolaimedu, said that she had learned to always stand up for the rights of the differently-abled and would do her best to make her special friends feel comfortable in their midst. The school children also had a drawing competition, where they had to represent how future schools would look like, where differently-abled children would be a part of mainstream schools and study, learn and play together.