Including One, Including All - Ten Years On

It’s a little overwhelming to think about how different the world seems, compared to just 10 years ago, when Leslie Roffman, Cassie Britton and I published Including One, Including All: A Guide to Relationship-based Early Childhood Inclusion.  Our book focused on supporting individual children through relationships and the lens of sensory integration.  In it, we defined a basic framework called Engage-Reflect-Plan, which could help early childhood practitioners use their existing skill set to support a wide range of young learners, without relying on outside specialists or therapeutic expertise.

The response over the first decade of publication convinced us that we had made a significant contribution to the adoption of inclusive principles and practices in everyday early childhood programs.  It has been incredibly gratifying to connect with teachers who described the sense of relief and confidence they gained about working with specific children or in particular contexts because of what they learned from IOIA.

And yet, looking around the field of ECE today, I can’t help but wonder how that focus on sensory integration and neuro-equity speaks to the most pressing concerns of the field today.  And I wonder about the themes and threads, so central to the challenge of teaching today, that we did not address in great detail:

Racial equity and Anti-bias Education - Key works like The Anti-Bias Curriculum were well-established and issues of equity were certainly central to ECE ten years ago.  But we did not at the time emphasize the connection between inclusion of children with special needs and children from disenfranchised communities.

Inquiry Focus – One year after IOIA came out, I wrote From Handprints to Hypotheses, about my early efforts to adapt project-based curriculum – what we today generally refer to as inquiry curriculum – with toddlers and two-year-olds.  Since then, I have carved out something of a professional niche helping practitioners explore the links between inclusive support of individual children and curriculum based on investigating children’s questions in diverse ways. At the time of IOIA, however, I had not yet explored the connection.

Dual Language Curriculum – The need to support children’s multiple home languages (and the English-only backlash) was coming into focus in 2011, and works like Soy Bilingue had entered the field.  Although we were beginning to think about it (and others were developing teaching methods around it), it seemed separate from our view of inclusion.

ACES and Trauma-informed Care – Again, this was on our radar.  We had worked with children who had experienced trauma and neglect.  But it is telling that the two case studies we created for the book did not feature visible adverse experiences. We also did not devote extended attention in the book to where sensory integration challenges may originate; in particular how racism, poverty, homelessness and other chronic stress-related risk factors contribute to the kind of sensory integration issues we addressed.

Gender Fluidity – We have finally begun to devote sustained attention to issues of gender identity over the last 5 years (see my former Little School colleague Janna Barkin’s book, He’s Always Been My Son, for an in-depth discussion).  As with the issues above, our definition of inclusivity did not specifically address children who express their gender identity in unique ways, nor those who identify as gendered differently than how they are perceived or assigned at birth.  It has become clear that this is a widespread need, one that we as a society have been particularly reluctant to address.

I am happy, however, that one thing has not changed: Engage, Reflect, Plan, the basic relationship-based approach we articulated in IOIA, remains an effective, flexible framework for addressing individual children’s unique needs.  And, as it turns out, it integrates naturally with inquiry, dual language curriculum, Anti-Bias education, and trauma-informed care.

The cycle of inquiry stresses relationships, observation, and authentic interest in how children express their questions and ideas.  Inquiry is designed to allow different kinds of learners diverse means of exploring a common topic.  Dual language curriculum is driven by individualizing to each child, and knowing a child in their unique context.  The four core goals of Anti-bias education overlap closely with our principles of relationship-based education. Culturally responsive teaching focuses on understanding children’s behavior in the context of their experience and its effect on development and behavior.

Engage-Reflect-Plan wove all of these threads together as well. It was designed to be universal and adaptable.  And it is based on the humanistic, compassionate perspectives at the heart of all inclusion: seeing and recognizing children’s individuality and strengths; building respectful, reciprocal and equitable partnerships with all the stakeholders in a child’s life; and individualizing to each unique child and family.

In other words, while the definition of inclusion has expanded to incorporate more children and experiences, the teaching principles and practices we described have proven fundamental and flexible enough to accommodate them.  And that’s good news.  One of our key aims with Including One, Including All, was to offer an approach to inclusion that could be practiced naturally, without needing to know, learn or do more than a good early childhood practitioner already does. Our vision of inclusion, as it turns out, was pretty inclusive.