‘Including Samuel’: An intimate view of full inclusion
November 20th, 2007
From NPR.org, a thought-provoking interview about the benefits and challenges of including children with disabilities in school. The hook is the Washington premiere of the documentary Including Samuel, which chronicles the efforts of one family to include their son with cerebral palsy in all aspects of daily life, including education.
Filmmaker and journalist Dan Habib, Samuel’s dad, acknowledges that school inclusion is complicated and can be difficult for teachers to do well — especially when they may not have access to training. As a result, he says, quality varies widely “state to state, town to town, school to school and classroom to classroom.” Still, he says, “As a matter of civil rights and human rights, and for the benefit of our society, it’s the right choice.”
Asked by interviewer Michelle Norris how we can assure that teachers get the resources they need to include students successfully, he says:
“I don’t know that you can ensure it. I think that is something for our country to decide. Is this worth investing in? Is it worth making sure the schools have the resources, the time and training? I think it is, but I think we have a long way to go.”
Among Habib’s other comments:
We had to get to the point where we weren’t just trying to fix Samuel. It’s so hard to avoid thinking, “I just want to get him to walk, I just want to get him to talk.” We finally got to the point where we just said, “Sam is our son, he is who he is, and we love him for who he is. We don’t need to fix him.” Of course we want to support his health, we want to make sure he stays healthy, but if he uses a wheelchair for the rest of his life, that’s fine. We just want to make sure he has a happy and fulfilling life.
In a lot of families, inclusion is not an issue. You don’t have have dinner together but have one child with a disability sit off at a different table, which is kind of parallel to what happens in a lot of schools. I think our family has always accepted Samuel as Samuel. He’s a big part of our lives in every way.
Related interview with Joseph Shapiro: Inclusion the latest trend in educating the disabled, also on NPR. Shapiro makes the point that only half of students with all kinds of disabilities are fully included in school, a term that refers to students spending 80 percent of their class day with nondisabled peers. Among students with intellectual disabilities, only 11 percent are in inclusive settings, a number which has been declining for the past decade.
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December 3rd, 2007 at 9:11 pm
I have only heard positive things about inclusion and how it allows children like Samuel to open up and reach their full potential. It’s great that his family has made a conscious effort to move past the “medical model,” which seeks to pathologize and “fix” disability. This reminds me of Nancy Mairs, who wrote that her disability is part of herself, impossible to separate from her person. Samuel is lucky to have such insightful parents.