Workshops with practitioners

It is widely recognised that transforming everyday practice is a critical challenge for implementing inclusive education, though in many countries including China policies would have been put in place. Thus it is incredibly important to directly engage with practitioners and support their professional development in this project. Two face-to-face workshops were conducted during my fieldwork, with special education practitioners as well as general teachers.

One workshop was conducted with colleagues from Beijing Chaoyang District Guidance Centre of Special Education. The setting up of Guidance Centres of Special Education around the country is a key aspect of special education reform in China in recent years. At the beginning, these centres are often formed by personnel from special schools, recognising their experiences and expertise in educating disabled children. Monitoring and steering the provision for disabled children in mainstream schools is one of the main responsibilities of these centres. The workshop was attended by the managing team and also the research team of the centre. As part of the introduction to the workshop, I compared the social context for disabled children’s circumstances in the UK and China, in particular, the difference in raising awareness among children about issues of diversity and respect. In China, such content related to citizenship education is rarely available to pupils in schools, which could be one of the reasons that disabled children are often alienated by their peers. I gave a presentation that covers theoretical ideas of inclusive education, research evidence of effective practice and pedagogy (in other contexts), and the findings from the Imagining Inclusive Schooling research. I suggested that children’s voices should be heard in the evaluation of provision. With the participants, we had a further discussion around their observations, understandings and concerns about the current situation of disabled children’s inclusion in mainstream schools. They agreed that the competitive schooling system was a main barrier for regular teachers to accept disabled children. As special educators, they also asked about what the future of special education would be like when mainstreaming started to be promoted in Chinese education policy. We therefore talked with more about what special educators could offer in collaboration with mainstream schools, and why the transition of special education could be expected.

The other workshop was conducted with the support from Qisehua, an inclusive kindergarten in Zhezhou, Henna Province. I came to know Ms Lei Cai, the founder of the kindergarten, at the UN Disability and Sustainable Development event. With nearly 30 years’ experience, the kindergarten now has been recognised as a leading example of how inclusive education can work in the context of China. They were planning to host a series of National Teacher Education workshops with general teachers from both urban and rural areas in the province, and it was a privilege for my workshop proposal to be accepted. Although I firstly intended to run a workshop with limited numbers of participants, the interest expressed by teachers was overwhelming. Eventually I was with over 50 teachers in a large room, and gladly I had generous help from Qisehua staff as facilitators. During the workshop, I started with clarifying the concepts related to inclusive education, and addressed how a socio-cultural understanding of disability and learning was much needed. Teachers acknowledged the impact of the bell-curve thinking on their pedagogy, and engaged with alternative understandings of learning capacity. I emphasised that the concepts and techniques introduced today were mostly drawn from research in Northern contexts, thus they should be used to support the teachers to formulate their own ideas about the suitable approaches in their immediate working contexts. The teachers felt that after linking the abstract concepts to the discourse they were familiar with in Chinese policy and practice, they grasped them much better and found them relevant. Teachers particularly liked the section when I shared findings from my PhD research on Chinese teachers’ beliefs of inclusive education, as they could relate to the challenges faced by teachers and the demand for teachers’ persistence in order to realise a commitment to inclusion in the competitive Chinese schooling system. For the last part of the workshop, I introduced the idea of listening to children and let teachers try out the method of photo voice. Teachers took out their phones and were sharing with each other about the moments they documented in their work. It was wonderful to see teachers finding the significance of their daily work in supporting children to learn and participate. I encouraged teachers, after they returned to their work, to reflect on their power relations with children and consider how to enhance children’s participation. The workshop led to the interest of one kindergarten to collaborate with me on teachers’ capacity building for child participation. This resulted in a pilot study, which I would report in another blog article.

My positive experience of engaging with practitioners in China offered hopeful messages, that there were teachers who cared about all children’s welfare, however, they indeed needed support from policy and structure to have space for the work of inclusive education, and further training to support the development of their professional knowledge and skills. Some initiatives have already been taking place in China to address the agenda of inclusive education in general teacher training. While this should be continued, organisers for the training would also need to be aware that inclusive education training should not be a simple replicate of traditional special education training. Furthermore, I hope to see more research being conducted in China collaboratively with teachers, to learn from them and learn about their expertise. So future training would not stay as listing out models and tools developed by Northern countries, but making the content useful and relevant to teachers in China.