Self-advocacy and inclusion

These last two points - communication and democracy - combine to form the need for self-advocacy, and it is this important facet of inclusion which is discussed next. 

Children with disabilities have been (and still are) particularly susceptible to benevolent, but often misguided, attempts to plan for them, as noted by Newman and Roberts (19%, discussed above). But in an education system which aspires to be inclusive, it is important that discourse does not exclude the perspectives and interpretations of children, particularly the perspectives of those children with disabilities. If planning is informed by stereotypical images of disabihty or outdated models of childhood the risk is that marginalisation and exclusion wdl continue. 

For children - and particularly children with disabilities - have habitually been excluded from discussion about their education (or, indeed, other aspects of their lives). The results of this exclusion are seen in the anger of adults with disabilities over the education that was planned for them when they were children. The tacit assumption has been that children will be neither sufSciently well informed nor sufficientiy articulate or rational to contribute to such discussion. It has been assumed that it is somehow illegitimate to seek or to accept the views of children. And where children are disabled, discussion has predominantly taken place about disabled children by professionals and academics (see, for example, the critique offered by Rieser and Mason, 1990). 

Alongside this systematic exclusion, there has been an awakening to the reahsation that 

To be both a child and disabled therefore conjoins characteristics which are doubly disadvantaging as far as having one s voice heard is concerned. Disabled children are people for whom it has seemed only too self-evident that rights about self-determination should have been taken away and important life decisions taken instead by someone else who knows better . And these others who know better are guided by models of childhood which elevate adult rationality, diminish child rationality and relegate the child to the status of onlooker. 

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Estabhshing a circle of fiiends in the inclusive classroom can be one way of addressing this difficulty. Such a circle functions ideally not oidy as a means of mutual support but as a way of promoting challenge and self-advocacy. It may also be used for making action plans -that is, enabling teacher, class, family and student to plan the individual s curriculum jointly (see O Brien and Forest, 1989). The initiation of such a circle should take place before the child s arrival in school, and can involve support for parents from a network in the community, and the planning of a welcome for the child in the first few days of attendance. 

As we noted in chapter 1, the principle of self-advocacy is one against which the activities of any inclusive project must be judged. Consistent with the notion of inclusion is the principle that children and young people should be allowed and enabled to determine their own future, and that they should have a say in the way that their schooling proceeds. The alternative to self-advocacy, as Mittler (1996) points out, is a continuation of a situation in which professionals dominate decision-making about people with disabilities. In such a situation, children s abilities are often underestimated and they are put in situations which are inappropriate and in which they are open to indignity and injustice. 

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