Inclusive Education and its implications for the teaching practice Essay

Inclusive Education and its implications for the teaching practice - Essay Example This paper will focus on the topic of inclusive education with an aim of creating an understanding on the subject and to build on the existing body of knowledge on the same. The discussion will further delve into the topic by trying to establish the reasons why some groups of students experience unequal outcomes when participating in education and training. In addition to that, the discussion will also highlight how an understanding of inclusive education can shape teaching practices for excluded groups of students. Inclusive education is the educational approach or philosophy that entails provision of education and training to all students, irrespective of the socially constructed biases or perceived differences, to facilitate equal achievement of educational outcomes (Nvpie, n.d). Inclusive education aims at catering for all the needs and interests of the different types of learners found in the classrooms. In this regard, inclusive education takes care of individual learner differ ences of the learners in order to encourage participation in education and to enhance educational outcomes for all the groups involved. Learners need to feel that their unique needs and learning styles are attended to and valued by all the stakeholders involved in the planning and provision of education and training. ... Studies have indeed shown that many students register higher educational outcomes when exposed to the richness and diversity of the general education curriculum following appropriate strategies and inclusion. In this respect, inclusion leads to enhanced learning within the classroom for all the groups of students including those with special needs and those without special needs. There are several approaches to understanding inclusion and exclusion and these have been expressed in a number of related terms such as mainstreaming, integration and full inclusion, among others. Mainstreaming refers to the actual physical placement of learners with disabilities with their peers without disability (SEDL, n.d); the assumption is that their disabilities can be accommodated within the regular classroom with minimal modifications. However, the special educator bears the primary responsibility for education of the disabled students in the regular mainstream classes; the disabled student must ea rn his or her opportunity to be mainstreamed through performance by keeping up with the pace of the entire regular class. In this regard, only students with mild disabilities can be allowed to interact with the non-disabled ones in the regular education classroom and to participate in the normal core curriculum content areas; the rest of the disabled students’ interactions with the non-disabled students are limited to recess times and meal times. Integration on the other hand is a legal term that has its foundations in the civil rights or racial desegregation legislation of the 1960s (SEDL, n.d); it refers to the actual assimilation of different