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Inclusion: theory and practice
Since February 2000, three important cities of Romania - Bucharest, Ploiesti and Pitesti- have opened some of their schools to the inclusive education concepts and practices. Within each city, some very crowded and complex districts have been selected, and the schools there started a carefully planned development process, involving some other partners from the local communities. Even if the barriers are very strong ones (eg this project demanded a hard unpaid work for the teachers, and also there were some negative attitudes from the families of the students at the same time with a lack of support from any local social and cultural organizations and so on), the people involved are working intensively for the aims they really believe in: developing more welcoming and supporting schools for every child, increasing school participation (in terms of school attendance, but also pupils' full participation in school activities), decreasing the risk of exclusion for some particular groups of children (poor children, disabled children and also small groups of rroma children and of children aged over 11 who abandoned school during their first grades). Here is the story of an intensive effort that starts to pay off.
In February 2000 in Ploiesti and Pitesti different representatives of the local communities attended "focus groups" hence it was possible to make preliminary characterizations of the two development areas. The discussions were framed on four issues: local policies to encourage the participation of the pupils in schools; school attendance for all the children; the organization of schools to respond to the diversity of pupils; and cooperation between the organizations to support the development of more inclusive practices.
While approaching each issue together with its sub-issues, there was a constant interest in mentioning examples of adequate and interesting practice; areas of the policy and practices, which need further investigations; and priority development areas at the local level. The county coordinating groups were then set up and a research assistant was appointed for each area.
In April - May 2000, the two research assistants achieved the collection of some quantitative data at the level of development areas on the basis of some common schedules, and also made up lists of children with special educational needs experiencing the danger of being excluded. The sources of data were: the schools' archives, the schools' staff, the School Inspectorates (i.e., school authorities at county level), the medical staff from the dispensaries et al.
In the same period a series of preliminary qualitative data was collected through class observation achieved in the schools included in the project. The class observation was done by the research assistants on the basis of observation sheets focusing on verbal interaction and co-operation in class.
In May 2000, representatives of all the schools included in the project and of the two county School Inspectorates attended a seminar in Busteni, Romania. On this occasion the participants were handed out the guide "Developing Inclusive Practices in Schools", and everybody was introduced to the problems of inclusive education and the planning of change in schools, and workshops were organized. The conclusions of these activities focused on the characterization of the development areas - Ploiesti (West District), Pitesti and Bucharest (Ferentari-Rahova districts), following three parameters: main features of the district; main problems of school attendance; and strong starting points.
There has also been elaborated an offer of support from the School Inspectorates for the schools included in the project, having in view three basic aspects: supportive strategies at the county level; the role of the co-ordinating group at the county level; and community involvement. Further on, there have been set the objectives to be achieved by each school from June to August 2000 and also the role of each partner within and along this process has been clarified.
In August 2000 another seminar was organized in Busteni. The participants at this seminar have got a summary of the activities and results described above. They analyzed their work and attended workshops which prepared them to organize training activities with their colleagues, back in their schools, using the "Teacher Education Resource Pack: Special Needs In The Classroom" (UNESCO, 1993). The abilities they developed within this workshop have motivated them for organizing an international meeting; they invited the participants to the sub-regional UNESCO seminar " Human Resources Development for Inclusive Education" to visit their schools, to attend classroom activities and to share the experiences concerning inclusive education (September 2000).
During the past two months, there was an intensive activity within the schools in the project; the coordination group organized workshops for the teachers and the parents, they invited some teachers from other schools of the county to discuss the progress they made, they initiated a system of peer teaching. The action plans they drew up will be re-analyzed monthly, within some large meetings of all the schools in the project, at county or even at national level. The regular publishing of a newsletter on inclusive education improves the communication between the different groups. Each month, the representatives of all the institutions involved in the project (schools, educational authorities, university, NGOs, other agents of local communities) get together and discuss their progress and the barriers they experienced within their work.
Those are the stages we already run through with the support of UNICEF, of the University of Bucharest, the University of Manchester, RENINCO and the Romanian Ministry for Education. It is too early to evaluate the results, which are long-term ones. There is a lot more work to do to achieve some sustainable development in the schools. But people in the schools are very enthusiastic and they are trying not to become too self-content and superficial in approaching the schools' problems. We discovered once again that the teachers are sometimes forgetting or minimizing the problems in the school's life, so they have to allow the children to speak free in order to reveal what is really happening in the school and in its neighborhood.
January 2001
The coordination groups of the schools and the research assistants can be contacted at e-mail: alis.oancea@usa.net. They are looking forward to sharing their experience and to learning from the experience of other schools and countries. Any comments, questions and advice will be very useful for them.
Inclusion: theory and practice
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30/05/2001