Supporting meaningful inclusion: key factors for middle school inclusive education teams
Subject
Abstract
Supporting meaningful inclusion for all students is an area of focus today in educational contexts around the world. Inclusive education teams are teams within a school that can be made up of support teachers, counsellors, and administration and play an important role in supporting this shift to inclusive practices. There has been much research in the field looking at strategies to support inclusion, however, studies in the BC middle school context are missing. It has also been difficult to find literature that puts strategies together in a cohesive way that shows how they can be supported by inclusive education teams in collaboration with staff within a school. The aim of this qualitative study was to look at my own middle school context and discover ways in which our inclusive education team has been successful in supporting meaningful inclusion through semi-structured interviews with school staff from various roles. Finding out what we are doing well gives our team a good starting point for moving forward with meaningful inclusion at our school and reveals areas we need to work on. As context is so important in setting up for meaningful inclusion my hope is this study will add another example to build on the current body of research.