All young people deserve the opportunity to flourish in school academically, communally, and emotionally. Realistic life needs just Recognition, Acceptance & festivity of differences among people. Ableism is not a lesser form of discrimination. The harm of disability bias is continuously questioned, minimized or excluded. The devaluation of disability bias is itself ableism. It dehumanizes special needs people and special needs lives.
Many factors play a vital role to feel marginalized in school for the students’ name-calling, bullying, harassment, and bias. For positive actions and emotional outcomes, every presentation of the group for curriculum and visual displays are essential. Such biases can be minimized and prevented by challenging them directly as they occur. The main thing is that schools should strive to prevent bias and identity based bullying. They can teach proactively about different kinds of people and construct empathy and perspective through books, Islamic stories, images, history and role models.
For selection, all learning stations should be open for the whole community. This can only be functional when we have inclusive logos with inclusive scenery in our society.
What does it signify to have inclusive, secure, deferential and unbiased schools?
All schools possess varying degrees of diversity in their students/family and population. From policies to curriculum, to school climate we need constructive human logos. Schools must prioritize being inclusive and representative of all voices and on many indicators. It should be good for every single school and society to prepare students to live in a pluralistic society.
All schools should strive towards a high degree of representation so that students learn about, implicitly and accept different kinds of students from different societal groups regardless of every discriminatory means; their families should also be trained with max energy of accessibility, acceptance and learning.
Our schools should be inclusive places where students learn about different people, identities and cultures. This includes identities of people that inhabit your school and those who don’t. School personnel may need to stretch themselves to consider group’s not typically represented in the book shelves, the images on the soft boards/walls and the history told in the textbooks.
Further, it’s important that educators pay particular attention to groups of people who are often marginalized and bring their presentation and stories to light.
When we talk about inclusion, we are talking about people with disabilities, both visible and invisible, students family members, religious that are not the majority including Muslims and non-Muslims ; and gender non-conforming people; women and men; people of different ages and sizes.
Why an inclusive culture?
Bullying and cyberbullying are issues of concern in schools. Identity –based bullying, harassment targets students on the basis of their identity (e.g. race, gender, identity, disability, economical status, and sexual orientation .etc) and negatively impacts school culture.
Students who are bullied and harassed are more likely to skip class, miss school altogether, avoid school indoor activities and get in physical fights or depression. Students especially those in middle and high school- are often targeted based on the aspect of their identity. Therefore, acknowledging and teaching about various aspects of identity is a key element to prevent this behavior.
Providing an inclusive learning environment benefits all students, not just those who are marginalized, as our society becomes more diverse, schools must prepare all students to understand one another and learn how to work and live together. It is a life skill for all. Therefore, it is important to go beyond just focusing on preventing harassment and bullying. It is important that schools make the extra input to highlight and elevate all members of our community.
Various implications:
Planning policies; in addition to school policies, procedures and codes of conduct about all such negativity ,school should state in their policies that it is a priority for students to feel safe(physically and emotionally) and welcomed. Policy should be designed upon the language about inclusive and culturally responsive pedagogy that includes disability, race, gender, gender identity, Skin color Religion etc…
Curriculum:
through both windows (perceive others) and mirrors (perceive oneself) for students of all ages is very essential to their education.
Address individuality and Bias:
on the daily /weekly basis activity should be on going topic of class room discussion in terms of social interactions, current events ,school incidents and the history of peoples struggles around the world and stories from Islamic teachings and from life of our beloved Prophet Hazrat Muhammad SAW and his companions for equity and justice.
School society:
from the presentations to the language used by head to support staff should be meaningful and calm, because the selection of words to communicate with someone is a game changer formula.
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