Inclusiveness in the Classroom

Getting an education is a fundamental right of every person. The Constitution of Nepal lists education among the fundamental rights. This means that going to school is not a favour that someone may grant or refuse. It is something every citizen is entitled to by law. No one can stop any child from receiving an education, whether that child is a boy or a girl, from a rich family or a poor one, from a city or from a remote village.

A right written on paper is not yet a right in practice. Imagine a boy who uses a wheelchair and is admitted to a school, but his class is on the upper floor and the only way up is a staircase. Imagine a girl in another class who tries to ask questions, but others always speak first and her turn never comes. Both children are enrolled, yet neither is fully receiving the right to education. For the right to become real, the classroom itself has to be fully inclusive.

Making a classroom inclusive means working on three areas at the same time:

• In classroom management: arranging seating, rules, materials and opportunities for everyone.
• In teaching and learning: teaching so that every child gets an equal chance to learn.
• In student evaluation: making tests and assessment fair and suitable for everyone.

Education is the foundation of a nation's development. Every citizen has the right to be educated according to their own ability, without barriers in the way. So the classroom must be arranged so that children of every class, region, religion, gender and community can study on an equal footing. Children who come from different castes and ethnic groups, religions, economic classes or other backgrounds must be treated equally and without discrimination, and the teaching itself must be free of discrimination.

This is not a job that is done once and then finished. The school and the class teacher have to keep asking whether their classroom has really become fully inclusive. They also have to check whether children from every group and class in the surrounding society are able to fit into the classroom comfortably.

The key word in this definition is belonging: the feeling that “this class is mine too”. A child who feels like an outsider in class sits quietly and fearfully, stops asking questions and may slowly stop coming to school at all. In a class where everyone feels they belong, children speak up, play together and learn.

To make its classrooms more inclusive, a school should pay attention to the following:

• Make the classroom fully child-friendly, shaped around the feelings of all the children.
• Arrange the room so every child can sit, write, move about and take part in learning activities easily.
• Make sure everyone has an equal chance to take part in the programmes held in the class.
• Keep the rules and policies of the classroom the same for everyone and apply them consistently.
• Prepare and use teaching materials that suit the interests, abilities and needs of all children.
• Arrange seating according to the number of students so that everyone can sit comfortably.
• Make sure every child can use all the opportunities the school offers on equal terms.
• When writing the classroom code of conduct and rules, include representatives of all the children.

Here is how these points look in a real class. A Grade 8 class has 42 students. One of them cannot read writing from far away, one walks with crutches, and several speak a mother tongue other than Nepali at home. The class teacher seats the student with weak eyesight near the front and keeps a clear path and an easy seat near the door for the student on crutches. While teaching, the teacher shows pictures and real objects along with words, which helps those still learning the language. When the class rules are drawn up, one representative from each group joins the discussion. Slowly, every student starts to call it “our class”.

A school is the shared home of its society and community. It is a place where every child of the community gets the chance to learn, play and enjoy freely. The teaching and facilitation that happen inside a classroom need to be inclusive just as much as the room itself. A class with a well arranged room, where only a few children actually take part in the lessons, is not an inclusive class. So while teaching, a teacher must stay aware of whether every child in the room is learning equally.

To do this, a teacher puts weight on these activities in class:

• Give every child the chance to be curious and ask questions.
• Listen carefully to the answers and reactions children give.
• Let everyone take part in discussion.
• Move the learning forward while keeping each child's individual ability in mind.

To make learning activities fully inclusive, a teacher uses both individual teaching and group teaching. In individual teaching, the teacher understands one student's difficulty and helps with it directly. In group teaching, students work in small groups and learn from one another, and a child who hardly speaks in front of the whole class often finds it easy to speak in a group of four. When setting classwork, homework or any other task, the teacher gives high respect to each student's ability, interests and nature.

The learning activities in a classroom should build the following qualities equally in every student:

• Self-confidence
• Bringing out abilities that lie hidden inside
• A spirit of cooperation
• Perseverance
• Honesty
• Accountability
• Discipline
• Full responsibility

If these qualities grow in only a few students, the learning has not been inclusive. The learning activities carried out in the classroom must therefore be fully inclusive. For example, if in a science lesson the same four or five students who raise their hands first answer every question, the rest of the class has been left out of the learning. The teacher can split the class into groups and give every member of each group a turn to speak. Shy students gain confidence this way, and the groups learn to cooperate.

Student evaluation is one important part of effective, quality education. Every school prepares its yearly timetable within the framework set by the curriculum and carries out evaluation continuously according to it. Alongside teaching, the school also keeps running formative evaluations to find out how much the students have actually learned.

Such evaluation can be held weekly, at the end of a unit, at the end of a month, monthly, half-yearly and yearly. Whenever it happens, it must be fully inclusive. Every exam should be arranged so that students of all kinds can take part in it comfortably, and the questions asked should be suitable for every student.

The way students are treated during an exam, the way marks are given, and the feedback and suggestions offered must be the same for everyone. Exams are not the only thing to check. Observation, inspection, case studies and the study of records kept by the school must also be fully inclusive. If a school's evaluation is not inclusive, the school cannot maintain its quality, because some students' learning goes unseen and the help they need never reaches them.

To make evaluation fully inclusive, a school pays attention to these points:

• Prepare question papers based on students' individual differences and on inclusiveness.
• Prepare an evaluation timetable that is convenient for all students.
• Carry out evaluation in a way that can find every student's weaknesses.
• Encourage all children when it comes to exams.
• Give marks fairly, without discrimination.
• Encourage outstanding students and give courage to weaker students.
• Give every student the feedback they need in the same fair way.

Here is an example. One school mixed easy, medium and a few difficult questions in its unit test paper, so students at every level could show what they knew. For a student who is blind, a helper was arranged to read the questions aloud and write down the answers. When the results came out, the teacher wrote on every answer sheet what had gone well and what needed to improve. This pushed the outstanding students to go further and gave the weaker ones the courage not to give up.

These three areas do not work separately. If the seating is good but the teaching reaches only a few students, or the teaching is good but the exam is impossible for some, the class is still not inclusive. Only when all three are inclusive together does education become a real right for every child.