Look Both Ways: Exploring Disability with Brooke Ellison ~ 1104

Tim Villegas
Hi friends. I’m Tim Villegas from the Maryland Coalition for Inclusive Education and you are listening to Think Inclusive, our podcast that brings you conversations about inclusive education and what inclusion looks like in the real world. If you are listening to this episode on the day that it publishes, my wife and I are celebrating 20 years of marriage today. On September 28, 2003, we were married in front of our friends and family at Descanso Gardens in La Cañada Flintridge, California. So thanks so much for sharing this moment with me and to my beautiful bride, Brianna. Love you so much, darling. Here is to the next 20.

We have another fantastic guest with us today. Brooke Ellison is a disability rights advocate, author, and professor at Stony Brook University. She became quadriplegic at the age of 11 after being hit by a car, and Brooke has gone on to do some fascinating things. She graduated from Harvard University and even ran for the New York State Senate. Brooke is passionate about promoting inclusivity and changing societal perceptions of disability.

For this episode, Brooke discusses her book Look Both Ways and shares her personal journey of living with quadriplegia and how it shaped her understanding of disability. She discusses the importance of shifting the narrative around disability from one of pity and shame to one of strength and empowerment. Brooke emphasizes the need for inclusive policies that consider disability as a cross-cutting issue in all aspects of public policy. She also highlights the significance of universal design and the benefits of inclusion for all individuals.

Thank you so much to our incredible sponsor for this week’s episode, Changing Perspectives, an international nonprofit that partners with schools and districts to create inclusive and equitable learning communities for all students. They offer customizable teacher trainings, family workshops, and curriculum resources. They’ve already helped over 300,000 students, 12,000 teachers, and 500 schools. Visit their website at changingperspectivesnow.org to learn more and schedule a free meeting.

We’ve got a great conversation for you today that will help all of us to think inclusive. Stick around till the very end for the mystery question. And for free time, I address some comments from social media about getting into the nuts and bolts of how we implement inclusive education. We’ll be back after a quick break.

Tim Villegas
Brooke Ellison, welcome to the Think Inclusive podcast.

Brooke Ellison
Oh, thank you so much, Tim. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Tim Villegas
Brooke, your book Look Both Ways is fantastic. Thank you so much for writing it and for sharing your life and story. There’s so many things I learned about you—like you ran for the New York State Senate, that you graduated from Harvard. But why don’t we just start with: Why did you want to tell your story? And why do you feel it’s relevant?

Brooke Ellison
First, Tim, thank you so much for welcoming me to your show and for your thoughts on my book. As I’m sure you could tell, Look Both Ways is a deeply personal and important work for me. I view it as one of the most important things that I’ve done. I’ve done a lot of interesting things in my life, but I was deeply committed to writing this book.

I first wrote a book just after I graduated from Harvard in 2000. My graduation generated quite a bit of attention and interest, and so I wrote a book thereafter. At that point, it was 10 years after my accident. Even though I had lived 10 years with quadriplegia, I didn’t really fully understand what it meant to be disabled. I think there’s a distinction between being disabled and living with a disability.

For all those years after I wrote that book, I knew that I wanted to write another one. I knew there was a part of myself that I wanted to share—I just didn’t really know what it was going to look like. It was actually around my 40th birthday when I became pretty sick. I was battling a persistent infection—a pressure ulcer—that wasn’t going away. If you’re not familiar with pressure ulcers, they can be quite catastrophic to people who use wheelchairs.

I said to myself, if I don’t write this book now, I might not ever have the opportunity to write it again. I didn’t want to be frivolous about my life or not understand the severity of what I could experience. So that summer after my 40th birthday, I boxed myself in my bedroom and said, “Brooke, think about the things that you actually want to share with people. What are the most important parts of who you are, things you’ve learned, and things you may never have had the self-confidence to talk about before?”

So that’s what I did that entire summer. I closed myself off and poured my heart out into my laptop—talking about things I never thought I had the capacity to talk about before. Whether that was instances of love and what that means, some of the hardships and feelings of questioning myself because of how people have perceived me or how I think people perceive me, being the disabled member of my family and what that meant, and how I needed to shift those thoughts to the virtues that have come into my life—the kinds of understandings I’ve come to because of the disabilities I live with.

That was quite powerful and meaningful for me. That’s really where the title of the book came from. Look Both Ways is obviously the instruction we’re taught when crossing the street—I was hit by a car, so it’s kind of a guidepost. But at the same time, it’s really about how we need to understand our lives—looking at our lives in terms of instances of difficulty and struggle, but also the lessons we learn from that.

To touch on the second part of your question, when I set out to write Look Both Ways, I wasn’t trying to write a book about disability. That was not my goal. But in so doing, in putting words to paper, I came to understand very clearly that disability is just one representation of the many different kinds of challenges that we all experience. It’s a very obvious one. But getting through life with disability requires the same skill set that we all need to draw upon when dealing with any challenges in our lives—learning to understand our lives differently, no less valuably, but differently. That was really the centerpiece of Look Both Ways, and I think what unites many of us, irrespective of what our experiences might be.

Tim Villegas
There’s a lot to unpack there, but I wanted to focus on—you said you weren’t sure how to be a disabled person in your early 20s. I guess thinking back, I’m not sure if we really know how to be people in our early 20s. But I wonder, because of your experience of becoming disabled—even if it was at 10 years old—of seeing life through a couple of different ways, if that has informed how you think about disability.

This book really resonates with me because I have three children, and my youngest is 10. She’s very interested in my work. Not that my other kids don’t care, but Imogen asks me questions all the time. “Daddy, who are you interviewing today? What are you writing? What are you doing?”

I mentioned, “Oh, I’m interviewing Brooke Ellison. She wrote a book, and she was hit by a car at 10 and became disabled.” She asked a lot of questions—like, “Are you disabled?” and “What’s the difference between becoming disabled later and being born with a disability?” She’s learning about inherited traits in school, so she asked, “Is that an inherited trait or not?”

I think the reason I bring that up is because there’s a lot of questions around disability and how to think about it. As a person who became disabled later in life—even if it was at 10—how has that informed how you talk about it and how you think about yourself?

Brooke Ellison
That’s a really powerful question. I’ve heard so many questions, and that’s not one I’ve ever been asked before. I lived 10 years of my life without disability. In those 10 years, I was able to do things that I’m not able to do now, at least not in the same way.

I was a dancer—that was a huge part of my life since I was two years old. I sang in a church choir, played Little League Baseball, studied karate. Had I been born with a congenital disability, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to take part in those things. My life would have been lesser as a result of not being able to enjoy those experiences that have since become very much a part of who I am.

I was very young at the time of my accident. It left me paralyzed from the neck down. The Americans with Disabilities Act had just been passed two months before my accident—July 1990, and my accident happened in September 1990. At that point in social history, society hadn’t come to any great understanding of what disability meant or how to include people with disabilities.

Even today, people with disabilities are often not valued or appreciated. I was very much a product of that social thinking. I thought disability was something to be ashamed of. I thought people with disabilities were people you should pity—people living a lesser, less valuable, less worthy life.

I remember being discharged from rehabilitation after nine months—six weeks in intensive care and seven and a half months in rehab. In that setting, I was taught to accommodate my life to disability, to make modifications to get by—not to feel proud of who I was, but just to exist in a world that wasn’t going to be welcoming to me.

That was the mindset I had. I evaluated my life as a person with a disability in comparison to some “better” life. That was unfortunate and clouded my thinking for a long time. It wasn’t until years later—probably after college, heading into graduate school—that I could understand myself differently.

Not as a weaker or lesser person, not as a manifestation of negative stereotypes, but as someone with strength, empowerment, resilience, creativity, and problem-solving skills. These are virtues that clearly come from living with disability—living life differently, in a world not designed for me.

Those things helped me understand disability differently, but also humanity differently. They allowed me to see how people can thrive irrespective of what they’re told they can do, irrespective of whether the world is welcoming to that level of thriving.

Challenges that seem too much to bear—more than any one person can handle—are actually manageable. We can move forward with our lives nonetheless, or even sometimes because of those challenges.

Tim Villegas
I feel like, as a society, we’re getting better. We’re certainly not where I think either of us want us to be. I wonder—because you talk about experiences of people saying to you, “What you’re going through, it’s too much,” and “I’m not sure if I could do it. I’m not strong enough.” What kinds of things do you say to people who think that way? And what do we need to do as a society to move people beyond that type of thinking?

Brooke Ellison
Right, so there’s a multifaceted way of approaching that question. In some ways, it’s kind of demeaning. It’s like, “Oh, your life is so terrible. How could you possibly survive that kind of awful life?” Which I think is, at minimum, a bit dismissive and shows a lack of understanding of what my life is all about.

My life is full of beauty. Of course, it’s full of pain and difficulty, but at the same time, full of love and beauty and all these things that make it so valuable. So there’s that. Then there’s this whole notion of what many people in the disability community call “inspiration porn”—the idea that people benchmark their own lives against someone they perceive to be less fortunate. “I’m going to make myself feel better based on somebody else’s life.”

I have mixed feelings about that. I think we gain a lot of insight and encouragement from how we inspire one another, so I don’t reject that idea entirely. But I think we undervalue our own capacity to move through instances of challenge. We fail to appreciate—and as a result, underestimate—our ability to move forward in times of greatest difficulty.

That certainly applies to me as well. If someone had said to me the day before my accident, “You’re going to encounter a devastating, life-changing accident and live the rest of your life unable to move your body and breathing through a ventilator,” I don’t know if I would have said, “Okay, yeah, that sounds great.” Those pieces don’t fit together. They don’t meld with any kind of social picture of what disability is all about.

I talk about this in the book. One of the classes I teach as a professor at Stony Brook University is medical ethics. Many of the questions around medical ethics revolve around people who have undergone life-changing or very difficult circumstances—whether or not they ought to live their lives, whether they think their lives are worth living.

Whenever we get into that conversation, I ask my students what, for them, would constitute a life not worth living. I want them to think proactively about this, especially if they’re going into healthcare fields. Many of them say things like, “If I were dependent on machines to live, I wouldn’t want to live anymore,” or “If I was confined to a wheelchair,” or “If I couldn’t do all the things I used to be able to do,” or “If I was dependent on family members.”

Tim Villegas
I’m just like, oh my gosh.

Brooke Ellison
Yeah, I have to swallow hard and say, “Hey.” I could be offended by that. In some ways, it’s kind of funny and a little bit liberating. But as we go through the course of the semester and talk about things more deeply, they come to realize, “Wait a sec. Many of the things I had typically understood about disability or life struggles are not necessarily how they ought to be understood.”

I’m a firm believer that we’ve been taught to understand disability in terms of the physical components—parts of our bodies that are impaired—without understanding that disability is much more than that. It’s a socio-cultural construct that includes the policies we enact, the environments we build, the social services we put in place, the technologies we innovate—all of which can either enable or further disable someone.

Those are all equally part of disability. To just focus on physicality misses the role we play in helping to either empower or disempower someone. My students ultimately understand that they have a role to play in that conversation as well.

When those kinds of things are put into place, they address the fears people have about disability. If I were to do a thought experiment asking people what they’d be most concerned about if they were told they’d be disabled tomorrow, it would be things like, “I wouldn’t be able to work,” or “I wouldn’t be able to have a relationship.”

All of these things are socially based. We have the capacity to make a difference if we actually invest our time that way. You can get through the physical part of disability, but it’s all those other social things we don’t pay as much attention to—and almost abdicate our responsibility in trying to fix.

There are many pieces to that question. They’re all relevant and important to have. We all have a role to play in this.

Tim Villegas
You mentioned public policy, and I know that’s something you worked really hard on when you were running for the New York State Senate. I’m assuming that’s something that’s still on your mind. What are some of the policies that are top of mind right now—ones you feel we really need to work on?

Brooke Ellison
Right. Just a couple of weeks ago, I was part of a panel discussion at the Harvard Kennedy School talking about disability and disability policy—how people with disabilities are often left out of policy conversations.

What we’ve typically done over the years is look at policies related to people with disabilities as “disability policy”—its own category, siloed. As a result, it almost becomes an afterthought. It’s like, “Oh, this is a population we could conceivably think about—or not.” It’s this othering of people with disabilities, rather than looking at disability as a cross-cutting, intersectional issue that touches every aspect of public policy.

Whether it’s employment, education, transportation, healthcare—even immigration. Last year, I was part of a panel conversation on immigration and how immigrants with disabilities have regularly been denied access to the country. There’s this idea that they’re going to be a “social charge,” that they’ll exact resources rather than contribute to the population. I think all of those ideas are totally wrongheaded and unfortunate.

There are many policy questions that need to be tackled much more forthrightly and proactively. Within the disability community, especially for people with significant disabilities, one of the biggest fears is whether they’ll have the capacity to live at home—in the community.

As we saw during the pandemic, people with disabilities who live in medical institutions were very much at risk—not just from COVID-19, but from isolation. The Surgeon General just mentioned how harmful isolation can be to a person’s health—equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day or not exercising at all. That has a tremendous effect on people’s lives.

People with disabilities experience tremendous loneliness. Their fear of living in a medical institution is real. We’re experiencing a healthcare shortage, and without people who can provide care in the community, they’re at risk of having to move away from their families and friends—living in institutions that are unsafe or detrimental to their lives.

During the pandemic, fortunately, many people with disabilities were able to be employed in ways they hadn’t before—through remote work opportunities. We need to make sure that paradigm shift stays in place so people with disabilities can be part of their communities and society.

We need to look at access differently. One of the courses I teach at Stony Brook is called Inclusion and Innovation. I’m training future engineers to be inclusive of people with disabilities in their innovations.

My students talk about great technological advancements, but ultimately focus on accessibility—how to make sure our future cities and towns are accessible. They want to structure this not around compliance or mandates, like the Americans with Disabilities Act does now, but around opportunity.

What are the opportunities we all gain by including people with disabilities in business, in the workplace? Changing the conversation from token gestures to how we all benefit from inclusion—that’s a really important shift.

All of this is to say that the way disability has been understood—and legislated—is almost a result of an unfortunate framing. Disability is often seen as a medical issue rather than a societal one.

It’s viewed as a medical failure, and as a result, people are seen as contagious, or as people to shy away from, or as representations of human vulnerability. Instead, we should see disability as a strength-based experience.

Living all these years with disability, I understand it very differently than I used to. These understandings need to shape our public policies—not as an afterthought, not wedging disability into existing policy, but thinking about it from the start.

Whether it’s infrastructure bills or Build Back Better agendas, disability needs to be a central component. Not only for people with disabilities now, but for those who will become disabled—those living with long COVID, for example.

Also, the modifications we make to the world because of people with disabilities often end up benefiting many others. Universal design grows from that. The changes we make end up benefiting just about everybody.

Having that level of inclusion from the start ultimately creates a better world for everyone.

Tim Villegas
I’m glad you brought up universal design, because that is something in the educational space—it’s a word and a concept that’s gaining traction. In the book, you talk about coming back to school after your accident, and I know that would have been in the 90s. What kinds of supports were available then? And I wonder, if you were 10 years old and had your accident and had to come back to school now, what kind of differences would you see? Is that even something you think about?

Brooke Ellison
I think about that all the time. After my accident, I was in a coma for 36 hours. For a day and a half, it was highly questionable whether I was going to survive. The EEG readings on my brain were extremely abnormal—flat, essentially. The expectation was that I would not survive, or if I did, I’d likely be severely cognitively impaired.

When I awoke from the coma, I was able to make eye contact with my parents and recognize their faces. The first thing I communicated to them was, “Am I going to be left back in school?” That was the first thing I cared about—the first thing I wanted to make sure of.

My parents were younger than I am now, but they made a promise to me that I would get back to school and be able to return with my friends. I didn’t fully understand at that point what that path would look like from my hospital bed.

Fortunately, one year to the day after my accident—September 4, 1991—I was able to return to school. We had no idea what kind of battle that was going to be. I was discharged from the hospital in May 1991, having missed the entire academic year from September 1990 to May 1991.

I was gung-ho and excited to get back into the classroom and start learning. My teachers, who would have been my seventh-grade teachers, came to my home and worked with me that entire summer. I made sure I was as fully prepared as possible to start eighth grade with my class.

That said, there was a great deal of resistance from the local school board and administrators about what my presence in the classroom was going to look like. They feared it would be disruptive or traumatizing to my classmates, or make them feel uncomfortable. They didn’t really know what they were envisioning, but they were absolutely not comfortable with it.

My family and I said, “This is an important battle. We need to help change this—not only for me, but for other kids coming behind me.” We fought and pushed back.

The only way we could make it work was because I’m on a ventilator. At any point, I could become detached from it, which would immediately put my life at risk. If someone wasn’t there to reattach a tube, I wouldn’t be able to breathe. I also had other medical needs throughout the day.

Initially, we had a nurse lined up to go with me to school, but she canceled the day before. My parents realized that wasn’t sustainable. If my ability to go to school was contingent on someone else, it could fall apart any day.

So the only reliable system was for my mother to go to school with me. The day of my accident was actually her first day as a special education teacher—and also her last. She took a leave of absence, not knowing it would become permanent. She left her position, which was consequential—not just for her, but for our entire family.

She was with me every single day throughout junior high, high school, college, and graduate school. That’s one extreme example of how families have to modify how they operate to accommodate the needs of children who require additional supports to attend school.

Fortunately, legislation has changed since then. Now, school districts have to pay for nurses for kids who need them to return to school. Classrooms are much more accessible. We’re thinking in terms of universal design—creating the least restrictive environment so kids of all abilities can learn together.

Since I was a student at Harvard, other students with quadriplegia or other disabilities have not only traversed the same halls I did, but stayed in the very same dorm rooms that were modified for me. I feel very proud of that.

The supports I had were considerable, and many other students with fewer needs can benefit from what was put in place for me. That’s fantastic. If my experience and the path I forged can be transformative for others, I can’t think of a better way to have lived my life.

There has been progress, but certainly not enough. We need to do a lot more to make sure many more kids with disabilities are fully integrated into classrooms.

I have two nephews who live down the street. One of them, the older one, has been a presence in my house since he was born. He used to stay here as a baby when my sister went back to work. He’s here all the time.

He doesn’t use a wheelchair, but he wants to know when he can get a ventilator. There’s a boy in his class who uses a wheelchair, and he pushes him around and helps him get in and out of doors. He has such a deep understanding of diversity and experience. That is a true gift.

The more exposure kids have to similar experiences, the more everyone benefits. That creates the kind of world many of us want to see—where people aren’t marginalized for some unrelated part of who they are.

We’ve made progress, but there’s still much more distance to go.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, I love your example of Carter. Just because he knows you and is open to that experience—having someone in his class who is different, who uses a wheelchair—it’s no big deal, right? That was actually my experience as a teacher, specifically for kids who used wheelchairs and maybe other adaptive mobility devices.

I found the biggest hurdle was when the disability wasn’t physical—when it was intellectual, or maybe there were sensory needs. I had many staff members say, “Well, that student has Down syndrome and an intellectual disability. They don’t belong in that fourth-grade classroom learning with everyone else. They need to be in a separate room, working at their own pace with kids like them.”

I know that resonates with a lot of our audience, because most of our audience are educators looking to make their schools more inclusive for all learners. I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about how we push educators, schools, and school leaders toward being more inclusive of those with intellectual disabilities, autism, and other disabilities that aren’t so obvious or physical.

Brooke Ellison
This goes back to the mandate around accessibility—what is the bare minimum we need to do to make our public spaces, schools, and workplaces accessible? What do we need to do to not be held liable, or to offer some level of inclusion, without understanding that inclusion benefits everyone?

A truly inclusive classroom understands the diverse ways kids learn and the diverse ways they contribute. Of course, learning is important, but kids learn in very different ways—whether or not they’ve been diagnosed or classified as having a disability. They all add something valuable and meaningful to the classroom.

There’s a synchrony that parents want their kids to learn, but not everyone learns at the same pace. That’s a lesson that should be taught as early as possible. What happens later in life is an extension of what happens in the classroom. You want kids and adults to be fully cognizant of how different people influence conversations and contribute in ways that might not be obvious.

That’s a really important level of understanding that you don’t get unless you have exposure to people from different backgrounds.

Tim Villegas
Coming up next, the mystery question.

So we have a few minutes, and I’ve made a couple of new—not really New Year’s resolutions—but resolutions for the new season. I got these interview decks a couple of years ago, and they’re random questions. Are you game to answer one of these random questions?

Brooke Ellison
Sure.

Tim Villegas
All right. I’m not sure what I’m going to call it—if it’s going to be a segment or if I’m just going to, you know, I don’t know. So it’s a bit. It’s a bit. Here we go. I’m going to take a random question. Hopefully it’s a good one.

So here we go. What do you think is not fair in today’s society? We’ve kind of been talking about it, but whatever you want—it doesn’t have to be disability-related.

Brooke Ellison
Not fair in society. Oh my gosh, all right. What is not fair in society? Well, maybe that you can’t get good bagels outside of New York. That’s not fair to the rest of the world. That’s fundamentally unfair.

I think what is unfair is that we are not taught to understand people irrespective of where their lives begin, before we place them in some kind of socially constructed idea of who they are.

We don’t afford ourselves enough opportunity to get to know somebody before making a judgment about what their life is like. That’s unfair—not only for the person being evaluated, but also for the person doing the evaluating.

We deny ourselves the opportunity to have our lives enriched and changed by our own reluctance, which is almost always completely born out of societal structures—things baked into the social cake that teach us to think one thing instead of another about someone.

That’s unfair to everybody. If I can be a part of shifting that—not only for disability, but for everybody—I’d be proud. We do ourselves a disservice and the world an injustice by not understanding people before placing value on them, sometimes even making decisions or behaving in a certain way as a result.

Tim Villegas
Brooke Ellison, thank you so much for this conversation and for writing your book Look Both Ways. We appreciate your time.

Brooke Ellison
Thank you so much, Tim. It was a pleasure.

Tim Villegas
That chime means free time. This week, I wanted to discuss some questions that came up on social media after our episode with Dr. Schillingmore dropped at the beginning of September. They were great questions.

The first one comes from a friend and former colleague. Hi, Deanna. Here’s what she says:

“There’s so much discussion about how inclusive settings are needed, or how LRE or continuum of services does not take into account the family or supports needed for children with disabilities to be educated with their typical peers. What I want to know and hear more about is how can full inclusion be successfully implemented?

We all know the why, but there’s not enough talk about the how. How specifically can we as educators meet the challenging academic needs of students who do not know the alphabet, how to read or write, when the curriculum requires writing multiple paragraph essays or reading novels?

How do we meet the challenging academic needs of students who cannot count beyond 20 when the curriculum requires students to multiply? What kind or level of supports specifically could be used in those scenarios I mentioned to adequately support the inclusive classroom?

Does the curriculum need to be changed? How many more personnel would we need in an inclusive classroom to meet all the individual needs of the students? I feel like there is no roadmap leading toward inclusion.”

Deanna, thank you so much for the question.

Tim Villegas
When MCIE goes around and supports schools and districts in Maryland and across the country, these are the exact questions we get. Part of the difficulty in answering them is that there’s no quick answer—the answers really depend on the learners in the classroom and the educators.

At the heart of your questions, you’re talking about what kinds of modifications need to happen for the learner to feel like a member of the classroom community, have a sense of belonging, participate in classroom life, and learn grade-level standards.

Let’s take your first question: How specifically can we as educators meet the needs of students who do not know the alphabet or how to read or write when the curriculum requires reading multiple paragraphs or novels?

In that specific instance—beyond the systemic and school-wide changes that need to be made—it comes down to planning for the individual learner. What kinds of modifications will be done for the learner to make progress toward grade-level standards in reading?

We have a number of learning planning tools that guide a team through asking these questions. The idea is not to modify the activity into something completely different, but to look at what everyone else is learning and find a way for the learner to access it.

Let’s say we have a third-grade student reading at a kindergarten level or needing visual supports to read and comprehend text. If the third-grade class is reading something written at a third-grade level, how can that be modified so the student can access and read it at their level and still participate in the lesson?

There are lots of ways to modify text. In one of our bonus episodes, we talked about using AI to help level text and address the time-intensive work it takes to do that manually.

The same goes for your math example. We can modify the assignment so the student can participate in the lesson and work toward grade-level standards, even if they’re at a very entry-level point.

The law says that if a learner needs curriculum modifications, that is not a reason to remove them from general education.

Let’s talk about how it’s even possible to modify. That’s the other part of your question. It sounds great to modify for one learner or a group of learners in general education, but how do you get the time to do that?

That’s where systemic, school-wide, and district-wide implementation comes in. When MCIE works with school districts, we typically start with a self-assessment of inclusive practices. We have a long list of indicators of inclusive education practices on our website called the Quality Indicators of Inclusive Schools.

This self-assessment tool is based on our framework for effective and inclusive education. Once a school district team goes through these indicators, they know what they need to work on.

Eventually, a school team might decide, “We need to support general and special education teachers to work together and collaborate for learners who need modifications.”

If it’s only one learner and the expectation in that grade level or school is not to have that practice, it’s easier for the school or program—like an intellectual disability or autism program—to say, “See, they don’t belong in general education. Nobody else is getting this kind of modification. They belong in a self-contained classroom.”

While I wish I could snap my fingers and make a school inclusive, a lot of things need to happen before we get to authentic inclusive education.

For families advocating for a learner to be included, you can see why it’s so difficult for a school team to understand what inclusion means.

To get down to the rest of your questions—what kind or level of supports, does the curriculum need to be changed—those are questions for the team planning for that individual learner.

As for personnel, what we’ve found is that when learners are consolidated into a school because of a regional program—like an intellectual disability or autism program—if those learners went to their home school and were supported in natural proportions across the grade level, there wouldn’t be an overrepresentation of learners with a particular disability.

Hypothetically, imagine a school where if you have a particular disability, like intellectual disability or autism, and you live in that neighborhood, you go to that school and that grade. You’re served by educators in that school.

That means there aren’t any “inclusion classrooms.” There are just classrooms. There aren’t any “inclusion teachers.” There are just general education teachers and special education teachers.

Their roles are to serve all learners, and the expectation is that everyone works together to support all learners.

This is really a topic for a full episode, but I do want to say there are roadmaps available. While MCIE can partner with a school or district and provide our roadmap, there are plenty of written resources.

Let me give you a few off the top of my head:

• The Way to Inclusion: How Leaders Create Schools Where Every Student Belongs by Julie Causton and others.
• Building Inclusive Schools: Tools and Strategies for Success by Anne Halvorsen and Thomas Neary—an older book that helped me understand how schools could change from non-inclusive to inclusive.
• Leading for All: How to Create Truly Inclusive and Excellent Schools by Jennifer Spencer-Iiams and Josh Flosi.

I’m sure, Deanna, you and others have more questions. I look forward to talking more about this.

Tim Villegas
The second comment is from Erica, and she says:

“These are my questions too. And to them, which the internet has not yet been able to provide me: What is the roadmap to meaningful inclusion for students with violent behaviors that also keeps everyone else in the room safe?”

This is also a complex issue. One thing the law does provide is that if a student is causing harm to themselves or others, that is a reason for removal.

But I want us to think about it through a certain lens. If a school or district already has an inclusive lens—that all learners are general education students, that they don’t have to earn their way into a general education class—even if a learner needs specific interventions to help with challenging behavior and is removed from the general education setting, the intent is that it is only temporary.

One of the misunderstandings about full inclusion is that it means all students together in the same area and classroom all day, every day, no matter what. We are not in the business of trying to make the lives of learners or teachers harder.

We also can’t expect to do the same things we’ve been doing, put everyone together, and expect it to be okay. We have to change our practices.

So in the instance Erica is talking about—when a learner is in crisis—we have to figure something out for that learner so they are safe and everyone else is safe. But the expectation is not that they go to a program where they can now stay.

The expectation is that an intervention is designed for that learner for a short time so we know they will be welcomed back into the classroom—because that is where they belong.

Thanks again to Deanna and Erica for your questions. I look forward to answering more of them and hopefully developing a shared understanding of what inclusive education really means as we go through Season 11.

For more information about inclusive education or to learn how you can partner with MCIE on school transformation or professional learning opportunities, visit MCIE.org.

Thanks again to our incredible sponsor, Changing Perspectives.

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This week, I have a bonus clip of my conversation with Brooke Ellison and her perspective on whether it is okay, as a disabled person, to be pro-cure. It’s an interesting conversation, and it’s all included if you’re a patron.

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Think Inclusive is written, edited, designed, mixed, and mastered by me, Tim Villegas.
Original music by Miles Kredich.
Additional music from Melody.

Thanks for your time and attention. And remember, inclusion always works.

Brooke Ellison
Like I mentioned, my nephew—when I talk to my friends, often they convey to me that they would not understand disability in the same way were it not for my friendship with them and how that has made them deeper and richer people.

If that is not an important understanding and lesson in life, that to me is in no way less significant than how you add two numbers together. It’s a fundamental part of humanity.

That is all part of the childhood experience or the growth process that you might not get if you don’t have the richness of diversity in the classroom.

Tim Villegas
Yeah, that’s a great point. I wanted to—I bookmarked a bunch of things, and as you can see, right here. Thank you. I appreciate. From MCIE.