Thursday, February 24, 2011

dis//able

I recently had the good fortune of getting to visit a few centres on the business of disability. I was primarily an observer – and I'm a bloody good observer – but I also got to talk with the experts and get the inside story...

To be honest I'm really disappointed at the piss-poor effort to include children with disabilities. In fact some centres were like the dark ages with teachers (yes qualified and under the dictate of Te Whāriki) refusing to work alongside these children. What the fuck?

Ignored, left sitting alone for long periods, denied resources (“She just spills paint so we've stopped giving her any”), or subtly placed into an 'island of inclusion' where they are of course welcome, but we'll get in an expert to look after them and essentially they'll have their own 'special' curriculum and have sweet fuck-all to do with the centre community... (as long as they're quiet eh?).

Too often 'inclusion' came across as a product rather than a process with responsibility abdicated to support workers and specialists. Part of the problem is the curriculum, Te Whāriki, loaded as it is with deficit discourses concerning disability, it essentially provides an opt-out clause to establish a separate, adult-controlled curriculum for disabled learners. It also uses that fatal word “assumes”.

“The curriculum assumes that their care and education will be encompassed within the principles, strands blah blah...” It talks of “activities” (read: teacher controlled, not self-initiated), IEP's with “realistic objectives” and finally puts the boot in with the term 'special needs' just in case those personal discourses weren't already peaking about how some freak is going to totally fuck with your morning session...

Back to school you lot, or back into your closet.

Oh, it's not all doom and gloom. I witnessed some beautiful relationships, some joyous friendships and heaps of laughs... what inclusion is all about.


Friday, February 11, 2011

And so the babies go out with the bath water....

After an interesting week spent visiting several centres on work-related stuff it's become very clear that parents haven't sucked up the results of funding cuts but are simply pulling their kids out of hours above their 20-hour-free allocation. Some centres in the middle-class 'burbs are retaining a good percentage of their 'extras', but in the poorer areas they are reporting to be losing over half of the children who attended longer than 20 hours.

So obviously not many parents are able or prepared to pay fees. Centres do not collect and so look forward to experiencing a budget shortfall. How long will they suffer before staff are fired and the bastard State wins?