17795076 Josef Niedermayer Inclusive Education: Principles and Practices

Assignment 1 – Formal Position Paper

It is the position of this paper that school curricula need to be flexible enough for teachers to be able to
design education and learning programs that are able to meet the learning needs of all people but
especially people with disability. People with disability, like everyone else, have the right to participate
in community life and have access to education at all levels and ages. Hindering this prevents the full
potential and development of students, most particularly from young people, from participating fully in
and contributing to society [ CITATION Dis06 \l 1033 ]. Making changes to the curriculum that would
allow teachers to have a greater flexibility with it, gives the power to teachers to more easily include
people with disability into the mainstream education environment so that they can reap the full benefits
of having an schooling experience like their peers while fulfilling their educational needs.

One point that needs to be distinguished is that this paper is not arguing for mere differentiation in the
classroom; which is something that has been shown to be effective and rightly has a lot of emphasis put
on its use in educational structures (Anthony & Walshaw, 2009; Centre for Education Statistics and
Evaluation, 2001). Differentiation is the ability to change the amount or mode of delivery of content to
students in accordance with their ability and preferences, and as crucial as that is for effective learning,
it has severe limitations since it the range in which the curriculum can currently be altered is very
narrow. Differentiation provides little help to the minority groups that require large changes in delivery;
for example, for people with speech disabilities, severe physical disabilities or sensory disabilities.
People with these kinds of disabilities often require either a different kind of content altogether or
alternate mode of delivery which some schools cannot afford to do due to resource or time constraints.
Additional funding is one of the alternative options that has been mentioned as a means of ameliorating
exclusive behaviours and bringing an inclusive education to schools nation-wide, however this has been
shown not to work in the past [ CITATION Lan17 \l 1033 ]. Hence, we arrive at the solution of changing

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17795076 Josef Niedermayer Inclusive Education: Principles and Practices

the curriculum so that it considers all students, and especially those that are marginalised, before they
step foot in a school.

The first recommendation proposed for the problem outlined is a Universal Design for Learning (UDL). A
(UDL) is an educational framework that takes care of the aforementioned pitfalls in the current
education system. It is derived from architectural principles and aims to achieve a design for learning to
cater for all people—an education system of total inclusion—and not simply for most people. A
curriculum of this nature would consider a complete range of students and their differing abilities and
needs before the class even begins and not simply as an afterthought (Foreman & Arthur-Kelly, 2017, p.
140). Through the incorporation of the principle of UDL into a flexible, plannable curriculum, delivering
content and assessing this content is made easier for teachers due to their increased ability to customise
the learning so that it meets the needs of all learners[ CITATION Mao08 \l 1033 ]. Not only would this
take a weight off teachers’ shoulders, but it would also be a ground-level approach towards inclusive
education instead of just a policy or legislative one. According to the USA’s Higher Education
Opportunity Act (2008), a UDL refers to any “scientifically valid framework for guiding educational
practice” and when implemented should “reduce barriers in instruction, provides appropriate
accommodations, supports, and challenges, and maintains high achievement expectations for all
students, including students with disabilities and students who are limited English proficient’’ (p. 3088).
This kind of program could be implemented here in Australia and would be especially fitting due to our
largely multicultural and diverse population.

The second recommendation for this paper is the wide-spread implementation of ‘least restrictive
environments’ within the schooling context. This recommended change does not directly address an
inflexible curriculum, instead it is something that goes hand-in-hand with a change to the curriculum
such as the UDL aforementioned. Foreman & Arthur-Kelly (2017) define least restrictive environment as,
“the opportunity for people with a disability to live in environments that give them the greatest range of
choices; that is, the fewest restrictions” and then go on argue the various types of restrictions that hold
back students with disability. Given this, a curriculum that works for a student with a disability may be of
no use if the environment prevents the student from learning in some manner. Hence, a least restrictive
environment approach to schools will act as the removal of all physical barriers to a student’s access to

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17795076 Josef Niedermayer Inclusive Education: Principles and Practices

education and allow the curriculum to be of full benefit. For example, all schools should have wheelchair
access to all parts of the school. Of course, this is a difficult ask for schools that must retrofit their
schools if it was built without such design plans, meaning that additional funding must be given to some
schools so that they can meet this end. However, for any school that is to be planned for and built in the
future, we can and should ensure that they are able to cater for people of various disabilities so that
inclusive curriculum changes can be more meaningful and impactful.

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17795076 Josef Niedermayer Inclusive Education: Principles and Practices

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