You're listening to the Autism Weekly Podcast. Each week, we share community voices and bring light to stories that increase awareness, acceptance, equity, access, and inclusion. If you haven't already, subscribe to join the Autism Weekly family. I'm your host, Jeff Skibitsky. This week, we welcome back Matthew Wappet. He's the Executive Director of Utah State University's Institute for Disability Research.
Renowned in special education, Dr. Wappet explores inclusive environments and the impact impact of laughter in the classroom. Today, we're diving into inclusion efforts in schools for individuals with disabilities, focusing on their impact on the autistic population. Dr. Wapit, welcome back to the podcast. Thank you, Jeff. I am glad to be here again.
Well, I mean, I guess it's glad to be here, but when I reached out to you, it was about something that my daughters brought to my attention and where I live. And if you don't mind, I'll give a little bit of that story because I think that it resonated with me, but I'm sure that it resonates with you based off your work.
But my daughter had returned home from school and was kind of upset, visibly upset, because she watched for a week straight where the special ed classroom would go and just clean the lunchroom every single day after their neurotypical peers ate. And the neurotypical peers did not help in this process. us. It was not an inclusive environment in the fact that they were working together as a pure set. And when she asked her friends, do you guys see anything wrong with this?
Every single one of them said, no, they need to learn that skill. That's something that they need to learn. And so it hit home for me as far as, wow, this is being normalized. This is something that we we probably need to talk about more. So that's why I reached out to you. And before we get going on that topic, can you just give me a little bit more of a background for our listeners again, about what your role is.
And what you do within the special ed and within the research around that as the executive director at the Utah State University's Institute for Disability Research? Yeah, well, so my background on this topic goes way back. To the 1990s when I was in grad school. And it's been kind of a theme throughout my entire career is this focus on inclusion and how do we create inclusive environments and environments where people feel like they belong.
In fact, my doctoral dissertation, which I started in 1998, was on inclusive teacher prep programs at universities and how do we train teachers teachers to go into the schools and to facilitate more inclusive settings. And so that's been a theme that's gone throughout. So actually when I was there in Idaho, I worked at the University of Idaho for 11 years.
One of the first things I did there was work with some state partners and do an inclusion survey of the whole state to look at trends and issues around inclusion there They're in Idaho, and I've done similar work all over the West, really kind of looking at school districts, state school systems, working with parent groups and others to kind of figure out what is it that makes inclusion work.
And the interesting thing is that we've seen over the last 10 years a growth, a change in how people understand or expect inclusion. So, kind of going back to the 1980s and the late 80s. So, we had IDEA in the 70s, right, which set up special education. And then there was the reauthorization of IDEA in the late 70s, which added the least restrictive environment and everything else to it.
And then we had the regular education initiative, which was Because Madeline Will, when she was over special education and the U.S. Department of Education really pushed the regular education initiative and trying to get more and more students with disabilities out of special ed and into the regular ed classroom. And so it felt like even through the 90s and early 2000s, we were making progress and that everybody was trying to work on this.
And for some reason, I think there's a lot of reasons for this, but for some reason, those attitudes, those trends have slowly tapered off and reversed. And we see less and less inclusion. We see fewer and fewer teacher programs that are preparing teachers to teach in inclusive settings. And we see a lot of parents who say, I don't want my kid to be in a regular ed classroom. I want them to be in a special school or a segregated setting.
And then we also see parents of typically developing kids also saying, well, I don't want these kids in my children's classroom. And so I don't, it's just, it's been very interesting to watch because I felt if you would have asked me this like 15 years ago, I would have said, yes, we're making progress within the next 10 years. We're actually going to be somewhere where we don't have special ed. We're going to actually have a more inclusive school system. But yeah, something has shifted.
Expectations have lowered and people are no longer really, they haven't bought in to that idea. But I think it's kind of this multi-tiered sort of thought process that's trickling down is that you have the whole concept of what inclusion should be. And I think that's being defined so differently. Across districts, across education plans, across states, across areas within a state. And then you also have, you know, are the resources there to do inclusion appropriately?
Are we failing at inclusion because we're not resourcing it right? And then we're saying, well, it doesn't work. Instead of saying, you know, this is a resource problem, not a problem of should it be done? It's a matter of are we doing it to the best of our abilities? What would you say when you look at states that have invested in inclusion?
And I mean, I look at some areas like in California where I've worked, where, you know, they'll make sure that the child has the resources in the classroom to be a part of all the environments that the family and that the team have said, yeah, let's try and make sure that we are empowering the child to experience school in this way. Right. What states have done it relatively well that we should be looking at right now? And what does their inclusion model look like?
Well, this is the hard part with the way that special education is set up. Although there are general principles that cut across, you know, states have a lot of leeway in how they set up expectations around this. And I mean, I think a great example is on the milder and like learning disability end of the spectrum, right?
You could be classified as having a learning disability here in Utah, and you could go to Nevada and not meet their criteria for having a learning disability and not get any services there. So, I mean, even the very definition of who qualifies for these services varies by state. But with that said, I think you're exactly right. I think there are states who have invested a lot of resources into making this work. So, I mean, I think, like you said, California has done a great job.
Washington State has some really solid evidence. We actually, one of our technical assistance groups here at Utah State took a whole group of parents and teachers to Washington State last year to tour inclusive schools and to look at, you know, what does a real inclusive environment look like? But, you know, we also see, you know, Massachusetts has historically also been pretty progressive. Minnesota, I mean, and these are states that have really invested and who have
believed in, right, the power of integrating our classrooms. rooms. But going back to your concept about the funding and the resources, inclusion isn't all about funding.
There's a huge attitudinal part of it. And one of the things we see in the inclusion research is that for inclusion to be successful, it doesn't matter whether the teachers buy into it or the paraprofessionals or whoever, the most important person is the administrators and the folks who are making the decisions about money and expectations and. Teaching assignments and everything else, right? If they value it and they're willing to make those shifts within the system, it tends to happen.
But I do think, again, going back to funding, I do think lack of funding for special education has left state and local school systems somewhat disillusioned with this idea of inclusion. Inclusion doesn't have to be more expensive, offensive, but in order to get people trained and to make some of the shifts that you need to within a school system to make it work, it does take some resources. And, you know, I think most people who are in special education know it's never
been fully funded, right? The federal government said, we will fund this. I mean, really right now they funded it 36% of what their proposed contribution should be. And so states and localities have had to make that up. And I think I think as economic times have gotten tight, as inflationary pressures have weighed on them, I think schools are like, well, you know, we have to make decisions here. And inclusion isn't always on the top of what they want to do.
And so I do think that lack of sort of federal support for it, it's kind of disappeared or it was never there to begin with. And I think that has left schools and states feeling like, well, if they're not willing to invest in it, why should we? I don't know. And hopefully that makes sense. But that's that's kind of something that we see when we talk to folks and kind of hear concerns from state and district administrators.
Administrators now and i mean so when i when i go back to that original story that triggered me to say you know what let's start this conversation i look at the kind of the situation that we're looking at and within this within this parameters of the child is in an individualized education plan at a high school yet the decision was made that the entire special ed population population would be utilizing their adaptive skills classes and adaptive living
classes and voc classes to learn the skill of cleaning up after their peers. And I guess from the just breaking down where this might have gone wrong or where the concepts might be skewed and people are looking at this through the wrong lens, I'd love to just kind of start tearing down this argument piece by piece, starting with the fact that let's discuss what an IEP should be doing and whose voices should be heard in the IEP.
Because I guarantee every special ed student didn't raise their hand and say, empower me to clean up after my peers. Where does that start? Well, again, it starts with the school or the parents.
I mean, we see it two sides, you know right the school can say we're going to do this or a lot of times that burden falls on the parents and the parents really have to push the schools that's something unique in special education special education started with lawsuits brought by parents and it's continued to be defined by lawsuits and complaints brought by parents and so parents have a huge role in.
What their kids get at schools. Even to the extent, I was just talking to somebody yesterday here who's working on a legal complaint in another state, a Western state, I won't share which one, but these parents felt like their kid was not getting the services they need. They sued the district. And now this kid has a Cadillac model of education. He's got all these individualized services. He gets to be included in the classroom every month.
There's an independent third party observer who goes down and makes sure that it's being implemented correctly. I mean, so parents have a lot of power in defining that. But, you know, a lot of times parents don't understand, I think, what their rights and responsibilities are.
And a lot of times parents just don't have have the energy or the time to fight the school district in a situation like that matt where where a parent went and did the battle yeah and they probably went through due process and it probably didn't get to changing the system yep is that does every parent right now have to fight this individual battle every time in most places is this something where it's or are we getting to the point
where it's like hey you know what people have fought won this battle it should apply to to everybody. It should. And that's where it gets really complicated. These rulings, especially if they're in a circuit court, a federal court, should apply across the nation. But a lot of times. With that. Just don't keep up with that. And I do think in the case of maybe the situation that you were talking about.
If all students with disabilities are being treated the same, I mean, there's potentially the option for a class action lawsuit, right? Because the interesting thing with students with disabilities is students with disabilities are the only population here in in the United States who are legally entitled to a free public education. For everybody else, it's, you know, it's a service. It's a, you know, it's sort of a complimentary good, but you're not entitled to it.
But as a result of IDEA, students with disabilities are entitled to it. And they're entitled to have that individualized education plan. Whereas, you know, typically developing students kind of get what they get and they can't throw a fit. I mean, so there's a lot of teeth there, but, you know, again, fighting the bureaucracy and stuff can be exhausting.
And a lot of parents say, well, I would rather not do that and just pull my kid out and educate them at home or go to a private school or a charter school or something just because of how incredibly traumatic, expensive, just emotionally exhausting fighting these fights can be.
But you know kind of but i did want to go back to what you were saying about this example that your daughter had you know when i hear it it goes back to what we were working against in the 80s and early 90s there was sort of the stereotype right when we were talking about employment and training specifically in high school of students with disabilities there was they were called the three F's, right? When we were training people, it was food, flowers, or filth.
And that was kind of like what we saw across the US, right? If you had a disability and you were in high school and you're getting trained for a vocational skill, it was either in food, flowers, or filth, cleaning up. And we seem to just be slipping back to that. I mean, it's not like this hasn't happened before. This has happened before, and people really fought against it. It's almost like people forgot. You know, we shouldn't be doing this. How do you fall back into that trap?
Because even with the industry, the field that I'm in, where it's ABA, and the whole goal is how do I empower the individual to be able to collaborate, to contribute in the way that they want to, that's going to fulfill their life. And I don't know how schools have moved away from that same vision of how do I empower the individual to be able to get the skills that they want to continue to work in their job, that they want to be able to continue with their adult living.
We do that with individuals who are neurotypical. We say, OK, explore the field that you want to go. Like, we're going to give you the skill set and then you're going to make your choice and you can choose your electives. You can choose this. And why is it that we have forgotten that those same rights might exist for people with disabilities? That's that's also, I think, a picture that most people are just maybe starting to put together.
I think one big reason is that we don't teach and we see less and less focus on disability history. Where did these policies come from? Why were these policies important? You know, I'm in a department of special ed here and I often go teach, right? I work with students who are studying special ed or rehabilitation counseling. And I ask a lot of these students, how many of you have had a course on disability history? Right.
Do you know where special ed came from? Do you know Park versus Pennsylvania, which is one of the foundational lawsuits? Do you know Mills versus Board of Education, both those Park and Mills? The IDEA law came out of the settlement language in both of those lawsuits. But nobody knows the history anymore. They don't teach special ed policy much anymore. I think a bigger reason, and this is where I'm going to get people worked up.
I think a bigger reason is just the general personnel crisis that we're facing in special education. Teachers who go through traditional teacher training programs are getting a lot of content and generally kind of know what to do.
But as it's become more and more difficult to get people to go into special education or public education in general, states have developed more alternative routes to licensure where people who maybe were not trained in these fields can get an emergency licensure or a quicker license to teach in these settings. And we see this all across the U.S.
That there's people who are teaching special ed who've maybe had one or two courses in special ed. And they're thrown into a classroom and they're like, okay, work with with these students that they do not have the training, the background, the understanding to do a really good job. Now, with that said, I understand alternative routes to licensure is really important for schools to survive because it is harder and harder to get teachers to teach in our public schools.
But I do think when we're talking about special education, where there are some very important skills and some important knowledge for these folks to have, Not getting that is actually starting to reflect within our systems. And I think that's a big part of the problem. Not the only part of the problem, but a big part of it. That makes sense. Logically, it's that if you're not given all the tools to be able to fill out your tool bell, is that you're going to default to what's easiest.
What's easiest is creating one plan of attack, where within that plan of attack, it's very very routine, very systematic, very easy to apply so that I have control over the environment. I have control over those individuals versus trying to get some more assent and collaboration from the individuals and input from the individuals. Now I can just dictate what we're doing.
And I see that. I see that across a lot of fields right now and behavioral health and probably is what you're describing as the staffing crisis. But that doesn't mean that there shouldn't be.
A way for us to be able to really focus on those skills that are necessary and to still require them but maybe incentivize them i mean there's got to be ways to be able to do it when you were talking about the parent role and one of the biggest things for inclusion to work is that you have to advocate for it and you have to be able to be a part of the creation of that plan parents don't often know the value of inclusion and what that can bring about so when you're when you're talking
and when you have these discussions and when parents are involved with it, how do you help them to understand, you know, what inclusion could bring to their child's experience? I think, so there's a lot of ways to do that. The most powerful way is to have parents whose children have been included who can come and say, this is how it's benefited my kid. I mean, As an academic, yes, I can walk in and I can lay out the research case and the academic case.
That's often not quite as powerful as the emotional case that another parent can really bring to the table. And so I think it's really important for parents, and this is where parent support groups for students in special education can be really, really powerful. Because it does take so much time and effort, that collaboration, that social support, that peer network can become so, so important to getting your students what they need.
But I do think, you know, it's a combination. So other parents coming in and saying, this is how inclusion helped my kid. This is what my kid is doing now. This is how, you know, what I got in school has led to these outcomes. But I mean, I can do the same with data. I mean, we can show data all across the board that students who are included tend to be more socially adjusted. They tend to have better earning, better employment outcomes, fewer mental health issues.
I mean, there's a lot of social factors there and research that we can share with folks. But again, this is where it's hard because I think we're starting to see also not just, although there are a lot of parents who want their kids to be included, we are starting to see a move in some areas for parents who don't want their kids to be included, who want segregated schools and classrooms. And that's become especially true, I think, for parents of kids with autism.
And a lot of parents, regardless of what you say, say, well, we fought the system. The system has been too hard. We're going to go do our own thing. And so parents can, I guess, play a two-pronged role here, right? They can push for inclusion in the public school system, or they can just remove themselves and say, no, we're going to do it. We're going to segregate. And that was one of the big things when I was there in Idaho was there was a huge uproar.
Boy, this would have been around 2007 about setting up a separate autism academy, right? Just for students with autism because their needs were not being met in the public schools. And as much as I felt like, well. That's not ideal because, well, it just deprives, I think, folks, it waters down public education. I'll just leave it at that. I'm a huge public education advocate, so I'll just put that out there on the table.
And I think anytime you remove a portion of a population from public education, it really is detrimental to the entire group. group. But when you talk to these parents, I totally understand why they don't want to do it, because it's hard and it takes effort. And if you have teachers and administrators who have said, no, we're not going to do that, why would you keep banging your head on that wall? I mean, it's hard. So I don't think I quite answered your question.
No, but I think what you're describing there, where the failure of the system shaped the behaviors of those who should be recipients of the care. It's sad that that occurs. But at the same time is that we do have to really try and work with families to help them advocate, to be able to give them that platform.
I mean, you mentioned 2007, but I mean, just even in the last six, seven years, when you're looking at behavioral health treatment, is that that the settings rules have been applied to medical necessity and insurance companies should be helping somebody with the behavioral health care needs in the school system to be able to access an inclusion environment.
I don't know that all families understand that benefit is there or that schools are even accepting it because they don't understand what's occurring there. And that would help. I mean, you'd have instead of saying, hey, you know what, because it's easy, I'm going going to have everybody go and clean up and that'll be our adaptive skills class.
You get to a system where similar to one of my very first podcast guests, they really love basketball and they were able to empower him in the school to be able to be a part of the coaching staff, to be a part of the equipment management. And he was learning the job, learning the skills to do that as part of his adaptive skills. If you have supports, you can now individualize some of those plans.
So I think that some of it's just lack of education and lack of understanding what's available out there as resources, both on the school and on the advocate side. But you mentioned one other thing that I don't want to miss out on this, because you mentioned that the entire school misses out by not having inclusive environments.
And I want to just give you a chance to tell us why, because I don't know that all of all of the families that are listening and everybody who maybe who doesn't have an autistic child or a child with a disability understands the benefit that their own child receives by being in an inclusive environment. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can start that by just laying the premise that we are social creatures.
And we, although, yes, there's biology and sort of our genetic makeup is a big part of who we are, we are also shaped by our environment, right? And the people and the patterns and the behaviors that we come in contact with. And when you limit that set of folks that you are exposed to and those behaviors and those languages and everything else, it limits your worldview, especially when you're young, right? And then all of a sudden, you feel comfortable in certain environments.
And then when you end up in an environment where people are different, behaving differently, speaking differently, whatever, you feel uncomfortable. You feel like you don't belong. long. And so we see this in research on corporate settings. We see this in research on school settings. The more diverse that you can create these settings, the more beneficial. I mean, the business case, this is where I think DEI is really pretty incredible.
The research has shown over and over and over again that diverse businesses, right, that not only serve diverse populations, but also have diverse workforce, tend to be more effective, more successful, successful, higher returns on investment, all of these things. We see the same thing in schools, right? Schools that do a good job of addressing diversity tend to be more successful. Students are happier, parents are happier and more engaged.
I mean, they cultivate the sense of belonging, right? And when you remove a whole segment of that population, we go back to, I mean, Jim Crow era, right? With segregated schooling and everything else. Of course, people aren't going to be comfortable white people aren't going to be comfortable interacting with black people because they never have a chance when they're young to be exposed right and to work one with another and recognize oh.
These are people just like me. I mean, it's really interesting in my class. I'm teaching a disability studies class right now, and I was in class yesterday, and I asked my students, I said, how many of you had students with disabilities in your classroom? And I was shocked that only about a third had students with disabilities in their high school classrooms. And these are kids from California, Utah, Idaho. I mean, we're here. So kind of these surrounding surrounding states.
It used to be 10 years ago, 10, 15 years ago, that almost every student would have said, yes, I had students with disabilities in my classroom, but we've seen that get less and less and less. And as a result, these students, when we're trying to start the semester and talk about what is your understanding of disability, students are uncomfortable. They're like, oh, I've never interacted with people like that. I, you know, I'm not sure that people can do this or that.
And the stories that they tell are really incredible. There was a student yesterday who said, her junior year, she signed up to be a peer mentor. And although she hadn't had students with disabilities ever in her classroom, she decided she was going to get credit as a peer mentor. And she went and worked with a student with Down syndrome in her school. And she said after a few weeks, she realized, oh, this girl's just like me.
She wants to be social. She wants to have a boyfriend. She wants to work. She wants to graduate. And she's like, I had this huge huge realization at the age of 17 that people with disabilities are just like me. But, you know, she'd never had an opportunity up to that point to really interact with a student with a disability and come to that understanding that, oh, yeah, these folks aren't that much different. Yes, maybe behaviors and the way they talk or whatever may be a little bit different.
But in general, as humans, we all want the same thing. And unless we're exposed to that. We we have a really hard time and the older we get, the more set in our ways and the more uncomfortable we get with things that are different. So anyway, that's the long argument for why. But that argument actually fits well into the initial narrative again, because one of the things that was most appalling to me was the response. The peer said that, no, that's that's what they should be learning.
That's what they are capable of. That's what their class should be focusing on. And I think that by exposing, by being able to have more inclusivity in the schools, is that you start to not see somebody for a perceived inadequacy, but instead start to value them for that person is as wonderful, they're super kind, that person always looks at others first, that person is social, they have so much ability to bring the classroom together. That person is extremely talented in this particular area.
They see the things that somebody is capable of rather than just seeing this blanket disability and having this perception that then culturally goes with them post-high school, post-early, and that's what we become.
And it scares me. And that's part of what was like, oh man, we should start bringing up this conversation a little bit more because it's not at the high high school level, it's probably in the elementary ed level that this needs to be the priority from day one and just continues through the process. Is this something that's a problem in the early education and kind of that primary ed world as well?
It's a little bit less so. Elementary schools, when we look across the board, tend to be a little more inclusive, primarily because right everybody's usually staying in the same class it's easier to integrate somebody and not when they're not moving around period to period like we do in middle school or high school and so but we have seen. More and more a move away from inclusive settings, even in the elementary and even in the elementary grades.
If we look at it now and we look at, I would have to send you some of this research, but you know, you see quite a bit of inclusion in like kindergarten through grade three. But once there's that shift to grade four, where there's more focus on content, reading, higher level math, things like that, we start to see more and more segregation start to occur.
And it's almost like this assumption that well this is as far as they can go now they've got to be pulled out and we're not figuring out ways where our peers can support right students with disabilities in the classroom and can figure out ways to help folks you know learn in other diverse methods than our traditional sort of teaching models but so anyway yes so yeah we are starting to see more and more exclusion even in
elementary which is again that's where it's important for attitudinal sort of change that's where attitudes get set is in those very early years and and by doing that yeah we're i think putting our our kids at a disadvantage for living in a diverse society when they get out of school, Well, putting it into perspective for the, I think you said a young woman with Down syndrome that had impacted one of the teachers that are one of the students that you had.
Putting it in their perspective as far as what are the possible downstream ramifications if from primary education all the way through high school, somebody has only focused on limiting what this person's exposed to, limiting the environments that they're possibly going to be able to engage in and telling them that ultimately you're not capable. You don't have the same social network that the rest of your peers have, even though you have sought this for such a long time.
You don't have the same skill development opportunities because we have determined you shouldn't have this social environment. What happens to somebody like that? I mean, it results in a phenomenon called learned helplessness where, you know, we believe what we're told, especially when we're young. And if you're told over and over, you can't do this, you don't fit in here, you don't belong. You internalize those messages. And we see this frequently with adults with disabilities.
They come out and they're like, well, I can't do that because I was never given a chance. Well, they don't say this, but it's because they were never given a chance to take a risk, to fail, to succeed, whatever the case may be. We actually, there's a movement now that we're working on here in Utah called the dignity of risk, right? And allowing people to, especially people with disabilities, to take risks and to learn. We all learn by taking risks, by failing, learning through that process.
But there is a general tendency to shelter people with disabilities from failure, from risk, those sorts of things. And as a result, it limits their development, you know, just like muscles right need resistance in order to grow as human beings, just psychologically, we also need that resistance and we need that challenge to grow. But if you're never given that opportunity, uh. Yeah, you internalize that, and it really becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
I think another great example, I'm really glad we're having this conversation because I had a good conversation in my class yesterday. There's a girl in my class who was diagnosed with autism, and we were talking about this self-fulfilling prophecy and sort of this learned helplessness. And she's like, that's exactly what my experience was. I came out of high school, and I was told I couldn't do this, and all they focused on was what I couldn't do because of my autism.
And I believed that I couldn't be social and that I couldn't go to college and that I couldn't do these things. And she said it took me years of therapy. And thankfully, she found a therapist who would work with her of talking through that and taking risks and really learning that, yes, I could do those things and I could be successful. And now she's a junior in college. She's going to graduate with a degree. I think she's in psychology.
And she's going to be successful, you know, whereas she came out of high school believing that she wasn't capable of doing anything, you know? Yeah. And it's unfortunate. It took her many years after high school to recognize that and then say, okay, I can do this and to go back and figure it out. But I mean, she's the exception, not the rule. That's what I was thinking as you're telling this story is that, I mean, She's resilient.
She's got a she's got a skill that a lot of us probably wouldn't have been able to match through that process is that if I'm told something again and again and again, eventually I lose my resilience. I lose my ability to counteract that. And so, I mean, she probably has more power than a lot of us might have had in that same situation. When you're talking about inclusion, though, just because I don't want to spark
the conversation of, you know, it's either all or nothing. And I think that's where we live as a society at some times, is that there's this polar kind of component. But even with inclusion, there's a scale to it. There are some children and young adults out there that need more support. And the supports that they're receiving might require more intensive or more one-to-one support systems. systems, not that inclusion can't happen during that, but it looks slightly different.
So the definition of inclusion, is that something that sometimes morphs and changes depending on the individual you're talking about? Yeah, I think it absolutely does. And I mean, if you go to the law, the law doesn't say full inclusion all the time. The law says the least restrictive environment.
For that particular person. So even at that legal level, right, what you have to do is look at a person's abilities, their skills, and say, okay, this is where they can succeed, and this is where maybe we need to have things look a little bit differently. I think a great example of that is accommodations here at the University for Students with Disabilities. But this also also happens in schools as well.
Kids can be in the class and learn, but when it comes to testing, right, for some kids with attention deficit disorder, things like that, being in a separate, quiet space can be really beneficial for them to focus and to do well on that test. And so, we see that as a frequent accommodation. So, yes, you're included in the classroom and you learn with everybody else, but when you have to do certain tasks, right, we individualize that to what you need in order to be successful.
And so, yeah, it does look different. And it's important that I think, and I think that's where schools struggle because schools are built on a factory model, right? We're just going to like educate everybody the same way. And this idea that you're going to meet the individual needs of each person is never something that our schools have been very good at, but yet that's what the law is with special education. And so, again, I think that's why it's important for parents.
And students to be involved in that IEP process. So, the students can speak up and say, this is where I need help. It's helpful for me to do my math in a separate quiet space, but I'd love to do reading and everything else in the classroom with everybody else. This helps the student, right, succeed academically. It also helps them learn how to advocate for themselves. It helps them learn, you know, this is what I need to be successful.
I mean, I think all of our kids, whether they have disabilities or not, would benefit from understanding how to articulate their individual needs. Because I think a lot of times, a lot of the problems that we face are folks who are trying to conform to systems and expectations that don't meet their individual learning style or behaviors or whatever the case may be.
Anyway, I could ramble about that a long time, too. I appreciate that, because a lot of what I learn on the podcast is that the things that we're talking about for people who might be neurodiverse are the same conversations that we should be having for all of our children, for all of our young adults, for ourselves. They're just slightly different in maybe some of the examples that we're trying to provide or some of the accommodations that we're discussing.
But all these skills, they overlap. lap and yeah when you're when you're talking with families or when you're when you're kind of working with school districts to help them to better inform their staffs reading of laws for being able to look at all the research challenging where do you have them turn so they can learn about some of these innovative approaches or some of the programs that are out there so that maybe they're not reinventing
the boat but they're just applying some of the really good stuff that we're seeing. Yeah. The way that I've started approaching it is using, I'm changing the language a bit. Inclusion is a term that has a lot of baggage over the years. And inclusion, especially within schools, has become more about a place and less about a set of behaviors. So a lot of times, I mean, this started happening 15 years ago where I'd go into classrooms to observe.
And they'd say, yes, we're an inclusive school. And I'd go into a classroom and the students with disabilities would be in that classroom, but they would be in the back or off in the corner with their aides. They wouldn't be interacting with other students. They were in the place, but they were not actually interacting. Included, they didn't belong in the classroom. And so inclusion, the easy answer for a lot of places is, well, we're just going to make sure they have access to that classroom.
And inclusion is more than that. And so I've really, as I work with teachers and schools and other organizations, I've started trying to remove the baggage around inclusion and the politics around that. And I've started talking about belonging and really trying to make it personal for people. And I start off a lot of my presentations by saying, have you ever been in a situation where you felt like you didn't belong?
And everybody within a couple of minutes can think of multiple examples of situations where they were in a group or in a setting or whatever where they didn't belong. And we talk about, well, how did you feel? Well, I felt uncomfortable. I didn't know how to behave. I didn't know what to expect. I didn't know where to go, right? That uncertainty and that anxiety that comes with not fitting in. As humans, we want to fit in.
We don't like to stand out. As much as Americans, we think we're these mavericks who are independent and everything. We still want to be like everybody else. This is why you don't see one single goth kid walking through the hallways of your school. It's usually a whole herd of them, them, right? They're all unique together. And we want that. We want to be together. And so I start these trainings by trying to help people see how this is very parallel with what they experience as an individual.
Say, you know, everybody wants to belong. And we have control over how we create settings, environments to help people feel like they belong. So it's become less, you know, it used to be 20 years ago, we were talking about settings essentially, right? We got to get students from special ed into the general ed classroom. And yes, we've kind of done that here and there. But, you know, again, that's not really inclusion. Belonging and this notion of belonging is much, much more important.
And so, again, personalizing it. And then the other thing over the last 20 years, there's a lot of research on belonging. There's actually a great book that just came out by Jeffrey Cohen from Stanford on belonging. And there's a lot of biology. Behind belonging. When we don't feel like we belong, we are stressed out, we're anxious, our body's releasing stress hormones and other things that make it difficult for us to focus, to pay attention, to learn.
And when we feel like we belong, right, we can relax and fit in, and then we learn better and we behave more appropriately and all these things.
And so really trying to, again, personalize it and then show how it's a biological imperative imperative that we fit in and that we feel like we belong to a group has been really important to helping people understand oh yeah that's why we should be working towards this absolutely i'm gonna have to steal that from you matt the next time i'm talking about the family and helping them to advocate and some of these ideas that i think sometimes when you just get down to the
the emotional component and help people to tie into a specific feeling, it changes perspective pretty quickly. And it changes the dialogue. It isn't this me versus you. It's a, whoa, that's your experience right now. I have felt that before. Now I can relate. And I think it's an important step that we should all be looking at and kind of using as a framework. Well, I appreciate the time that you've spent with us today.
And once again, I feel like I learned every single time I sit down and chat with you. And if there is any other eventual research or kind of progress that you're seeing on this subject, I'd love to be able to have you come back and be able to share again. I would love to. And I also learn from you. I mean, you're kind of the eyes and ears on the ground to a certain extent. And I appreciate you just reaching out and sharing your experiences as well, Jeff. So thank you.
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