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The landscape of inclusion:
How teachers in British Columbia
navigate inclusive education policy and practice
Andrée Gacoin | January 2020
Over the past ten years,
the landscape of inclusive education
in British Columbia, Canada,
has shifted in complex and often
contradictory ways.
Changes include: revisions to the Ministry’s Special Education
Manual (BC Ministry of Education, 2016b); the ongoing development of a
re-designed curriculum (BC Ministry of Education, 2015); the privatization of
special education services (e.g. BCTF,
2017); the promotion of
inclusive education delivery models such as Response to Intervention (e.g. Cavendish, Menda, Espinosa, & Mahotiere, 2016); the development of a new Individualized Education Plan template (BC Ministry of
Education, 2016a); and a review of
the provincial education funding
model (BC Ministry
of Education, 2018). Layered over
these changes are ongoing challenges in restoring Collective Agreement
provisions related to class size and composition and acute shortages of both
teachers and educational assistants (CBC News, 2018).
This paper
invites us to think across these changes by focusing on where they come
together: the classroom. It is in the classroom where teachers, who support the
principle of inclusion, all too often find themselves caught between the needs
of their students and the realities of educational conditions. By exploring the
possibilities for and challenges to inclusive education in BC, this paper
presents teacher perspectives that invite us into a conversation about how to advocate for teaching and learning conditions that support all students
with diverse learning needs.
Methodology, methods and
data sources
This paper is part of a three-year research project
on inclusive education in BC that is guided by a social
justice lens. Following Denzin (2017), critical qualitative inquiry, based on “an ethical framework that is rights and social justice based,”
mobilizes research for “public education, social policy making, and community
transformation” (p. 8). This is
underpinned by a view of teachers as policy actors (Ball, Maguire, Braun, &
Hoskins, 2011). Here, the focus is
on how teachers actively navigate policy,
taking on multiple and potentially contradictory roles, within the dynamic
context of the school. Focusing on the classroom, in turn, disrupts the
“black-box” of educational practice by explicitly engaging factors both inside
and outside the classroom that shape policy implementation (Cuban,
2013).
The paper draws
on two sources of data. The first is a report on the Meaningful Inclusion Summit
that was organized
by the British Columbia Teachers’ Federation in October 2018. Teachers
applied to the summit from across the province, and the 24 selected
participants reflected a range of
specialist teaching positions.1 As participants
were part of an organized event aimed
at shaping policy and practice, there was a reasonable expectation that views
would be shared publicly. At the same time, to
mitigate any potential risks to participants, the resulting Summit report
focused on broad themes and recommendations and does not include identifying
details of participants.2 The data
analysis software MAXQDA was used to identify themes for the report based on
notes from the focus groups discussions held during the event.
The second source
of data are semi-structured interviews that took place between November 2018 and February 2019. Here, interviews are understood as “accounts” of sense-making within particular moments and
contexts (Talmy, 2010). 15
participants were recruited from 5 districts in the province,
representing urban and rural teaching locations. An email was sent to potential participants through the local union office. Interested
participants contacted the BCTF researcher directly and were provided
with an informed consent form prior
to the interview. The interview invited participants to share their
perspectives on the key conditions necessary for inclusive education
in
BC, and the opportunities for, as well as challenges to, achieving these conditions. This paper uses pseudonyms for all
participants and any identifying
information has been changed or removed. All interviews were transcribed, and
participants had an opportunity to review their transcripts. Transcripts were coded using MAXQDA for key themes in an iterative process
of data analysis
(Srivastava & Hopwood,
2009).
Challenges for teachers
navigating inclusive education
policy and practice
In BC, the
Ministry of Education’s special
education policy manual outlines a “continuous
and flexible” process for identifying students with special needs and
then providing the necessary supports (BC Ministry of Education, 2016b). Broadly,
a student with observed exceptionalities in learning and/or behaviour should be referred to a
school-based team. This is a team of teachers and other professionals (e.g., counsellors, psychologists, speech
and language psychologists) who come together to discuss and problem-solve how
to support specific students and the classroom teacher (Shields, 2018). Teams
may request further
assessments (e.g., psycho-educational)
and these assessments are used to assign students to Ministry-defined special
needs categories.3
Unsurprisingly, what this looks like in
practice can vary widely. At the
district level, the 69 locals that make up the BCTF have different collective agreement language
related to school-based teams, class size, and class composition. This language was stripped in 2002, and
then restored by the Supreme
Court of Canada in November
2016. Teachers celebrated the
restoration of this language, recognizing the language’s
importance for establishing the necessary conditions to better meet the
needs of all students. However, as
stressed by one interviewee, many districts
don’t have “language around their
class- size and composition” and for many specialist teachers, “caseload gets changed every year, with no rhyme or reason” (interview
with ‘Jenny’). This view echoed the perspectives shared
by many specialist teachers: the day to day reality of
inclusive education in BC continues to be in a state of crisis.
The reasons for
this are complex. Across the
province, only about a third of locals have class composition in their collective agreements
that provides
guaranteed service levels for class composition. This language is key for driving services into schools for
students and addressing teacher workload. The other two-thirds of the
collective agreements are either silent on the topic, or don’t guarantee service levels. This language varies
widely because all of the composition language was originally negotiated from 1988 and 1993
between individual union locals and individual school districts. Because
of the unconstitutional stripping
of teachers’ collective agreements in 2002, there have not been opportunities, until the
current round of provincial negotiations, to meaningfully address the gaps in
the existing language. This has led to an ongoing situation for specialist
teachers where, as Jenny explained, “I’m really doing the bare—not even the
bare minimum, of what my position should entail. And my kids just aren’t getting
the service that they deserve.
So, it’s really, really disheartening and it’s really frustrating.”
Working with the reality
that the restored
language alone cannot fix a system in crisis, the rest of this paper
identifies three themes that are shaping the experiences of specialist teachers
in BC. These are: (1) “putting out
fires” (2) the stress of “so much to be put on the shoulders of one person,”
and (3) the need for a school culture that enables “having those hard
conversations.”
“Putting
out fires”
Across the
interviews, participants spoke to an inclusive education system where, amidst
15 years of chronic underfunding of public education, working and learning
conditions have deteriorated. Lacking systematic and adequate supports for all
children, inclusive education teachers can feel like they are constantly
“putting out fires” (interview with ‘James’). Betty, a specialist teacher who
also previously worked as an educational assistant (EA), described this as
“running spot to spot where people are calling for help, because, you know,
kids are having very very challenging moments.” Many of these challenging
moments relate to the social emotional needs of students, and the behaviours that may result when these needs are not met. For instance,
Helena described being called to address “any sort of behavior” in her role as
a support teacher at an elementary school. Furthermore, Helena described how
“sometimes people bring kids down to me because they’re not just coping well in
the classroom. They need a neutral space. A space to work, a space to calm
down, whatever it is.” As summarized by Wanda, who is now an elementary
classroom teacher after leaving a specialist role because she was “burnt out,”
“I can differentiate all I want, but if somebody’s having a meltdown, they need
help.”
Specialists also find themselves called on when the supports that are supposed
to be in place are inadequate or not working.
Jenny is a relatively new teacher of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing.
While technology can be very helpful to the students she works with, she
can also be called away from supporting students when technology fails. As she
explained, “with the group of students that I work with, a huge barrier in the
classroom is access. And most often there’s technology that not working that
has to be troubleshooted, or that has to be dropped off. Those are the biggest
reasons that I get called away.” Another potential reason that teachers can be
called away is to cover a classroom when there are no teachers teaching on call
available. Betty explained that, “with the teacher shortage, we are the ones
who end up covering classes,” adding that in these cases, “our kids will just
get put on hold.”
Constantly being
pulled to put out fires can lead teachers to feel like “we’re just simply
trying to get by” (interview with ‘Louisa’) and burning out when “we are
constantly being asked to do more with less”
(interview with ‘Wanda’).
Molly described this as “support
teachers are in this awful position where their colleagues are kind of
expecting them to do the impossible.” She
continued on to say that the district needs to take some leadership in that
area instead of “expecting their support teachers to step in and fill those
gaps” caused by inadequate funding and a lack of support services
for inclusive education.
Participants at
the Meaningful Inclusion Summit echoed
the views shared in the interviews, speaking to what one participant described
as a daily reality in which “we triage the system.” This includes trying
to fit supports in through creative scheduling, “piggy-backing” support
targeted at one student to multiple students and cobbling multiple small
supports together. Speaking about
the challenges in their work, one participant reflected the views of many when they said, “I believe in
inclusion but…” This leads to a
situation where many participants
feel that they are working
in a system that fails kids every single day.
The stress
of “so much to be put on the shoulders of one person”
The physical and
emotional impacts of working daily in a system in crisis can lead to high
levels of stress for specialist teachers. Multiple interviewees spoke
about potentially leaving
their role as a specialist teacher, and several
had left a specialist role for a classroom position. Key reasons for either leaving or having left the role were
increasing caseloads coupled with decreasing staffing. For example, Kristen
was on an educational leave at the time of the interview and had taken
that leave
partly due the stress of her previous teaching position. For Kristen, that stress came from how “it’s so much to be put on the shoulders of one person.
And the expectations are very high.
But the support—the support
isn’t there.”
While many interviewees and participants at the Meaningful Inclusion Summit spoke
passionately about working directly with students, this can be a very small
part of the role of a specialist teacher in an under- funded education system. For instance, participants
discussed how the Individual Education Plan (IEP)
has become more of an administrative burden than a tool for teaching
and learning: jumping
through Ministry hoops,
getting bogged down in paperwork, becoming a “cookie cutter” approach rather
than a living document for the student and teacher.
A key concern for participants
was how the ability to meet the needs of students decreases because so much
time is spent “pushing paper.” This was echoed by James, who
explained that he has seen an
increase in caseload, large amounts of paperwork, meetings that “tend to be
outside of school time,” and an expectation that “as a learning support
teacher, you’re expected to be available after and before school frequently.”
For Louisa, these pressures lead to a feeling that “there’s not enough time”
which can then become “there’s no work-life balance.” Louisa said she “tried to
make it a point of finding, like, exciting things or joyful things in the work
day or something. But if you’re not finding those, then it’s just really—it
becomes negative. It’s too much, you know.”
The often
extremely high individual workloads of specialist teachers is in tension with
what drew many of them to the role:
relationships. For many specialist
teachers, this is the relationships that they form with their students, as
Molly described when she described inclusion as “people know you. They know who
you are. They know, what you like, what you don’t like, what you need to succeed and how to
help you thrive and flourish.” This can also be relationships with colleagues and
the broader school community. For instance, Susie said that “the piece that
attracts me most to the job is probably the relationship pieces” that are “not only with the student and their parents”
but also “the relationship that I get to build
with lots of district staff
and people who support the
kids.” However, the time and space to
build these relationships necessitate supportive school conditions.
The need for school conditions that enable “having those
hard conversations”
For the interview participants who did feel supported in their role as a specialist teacher, having time and space for meaningful collaboration was key. This included collaboration with multiple stakeholders
including parents, classroom teachers, other specialist teachers, and EAs. For
this to occur, most interview
participants described how “strong leadership” by administrative staff is
crucial to creating an inclusive school environment. Having this leadership can
be a key support to specialist
teachers, such as Jenny who felt that she “can
have an honest conversation” with the administrator about student needs
and how best to meet them. In contrast, participants described how having
ineffective administrative support, or constant change in administrators at a
school level, can undermine the relationships that are crucial to an inclusive school culture.
Another key factor is time. As Molly explained, “obviously
you need time to collaborate. I think that’s what it really comes down to. It’s not a lack of willingness, and it’s not even a lack of training, because
there are people that can tell us how to do this, it’s how do we get the
time to sit down and plan together and make it work for the kids? And I think that, that’s what we’re really missing,
is time.” For Molly, this time
needs to be provided not only at a school level, but also to create “broader conversations” at a
district level about inclusion. As Annette said, time “makes everybody relax a little and think a little deeper.”
Trying to build relationships without time
and support can contribute to making the role of a specialist teacher
incredibly complex. As more experienced specialist teachers
retire, or move out of the role, teachers with less experience move into a
role that is “really hard to step
into because it’s so multifaceted and it’s so complex, and there’s so many, kind of, moving parts
going all the time” (interview with ‘Susie’). Participants
suggested potential ways to foster collaboration, from taking on a “mentorship role” with colleagues (interview with ‘Lauren’) and including dedicated time
for IEP meetings in the school schedule (interview with ‘James’). However, participants
also recognized that these individual strategies fail to address the systemic
lack of funding and supports. As Jenny said,
“we don’t have the collaboration time.
We don’t have the funding to do it. We don’t have
the time to do it. And I think that becomes
really frustrating.”
Crucially, collaboration and relationship building is seen by specialist teachers as central for meeting the needs of the students
in their
classrooms and
schools. Lauren was one of the few interviewees who described her current
situation as her “ideal job.” Resonating
with research literature that positions inclusion within the entire school
environment, Lauren described the school where she is a specialist teacher as having an “inclusive culture”
that plays out in collaboration, shared responsibility and
a strong sense of community. Lauren explained
that
there will be
moments when you can group [students with special needs] in large group. And
there will be some really effective strategies, and brilliant teaching modules,
but, in the end, there will also be a massive
number of moments that are about someone having the time to work
directly with the child. Or a colleague having time to work directly with a
colleague to have them understand how to adapt
and–in a mentorship role to move forward with things, and to have time collaborate and talk about things.
A state of crisis
While teachers
across the province have different
perspectives and experiences, they broadly
share the view that inclusive education in BC is in a state of crisis. Almost 30
years after the philosophy of inclusion was introduced in the province
(O’Neill, 2018), and despite a
landmark court ruling in 2016, the
complexity of student needs has increased at the same time as supports to
meaningfully address these needs have decreased.
This paper
illustrates some of the effects of an under-funded public education system,
one in which it is estimated that the funds allocated
for special education services cover just
over half of what school districts
ultimately spend on these services (Rozworski, 2018). Amidst current changes to education funding in the
province that will further alter what inclusive
education looks like in BC, it is crucial to learn
from teachers’ experiences and perspectives in order to advocate for teaching
and learning conditions that support all students with diverse needs. As Wanda
cautioned, specialist teachers “can’t keep accommodating because we are being
asked to do more with less. We have to do what’s best for the kids in our
schools and classrooms and there is not a one size fits all solution.”
References
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1 For the purposes of this
paper, “specialist” position refers to teachers who work specifically in roles
related to inclusive education. These roles have different names in different
districts, and can also vary in terms of whether they are enrolling or
non-enrolling positions.
2 The report from the Summit is currently not publicly
available. However, a participant did summarize key themes in an article for
the Federations’ teacher newsmagazine. See: bctf.ca/publications/NewsmagArticle.aspx?id=52405.
3 As of December 2019, these categories are:
Intellectual disabilities; Learning disabilities; Gifted; Behavioural needs or
Mental illness; Physically dependent; DeafBlind; Physical disabilities or
chronic health impairments; Visual impairment; Deaf or hard of hearing; Autism
spectrum disorder.