By, Ms. Mayuri, St. Mary’s School, New Delhi

What is the satiety of inclusion? Do we think that since nowadays inclusion is particularly used for people with disabilities, thus ensuring the participation of people with disabilities in different departments will ensure inclusion is happening? Can inclusion be measured, gauged, assessed or appraised? Inclusion is not a space where everybody is living happily ever after; rather it is a process, a practice and an attitude in every situation that a human being gets into. Thus removal of barriers is not enough.

When we visit restaurants, cafes do we know that who was served or has used the tableware before we came to eat? But often at home or even in a workplace we are very hesitant to share our mugs, glasses. The NGO where I worked earlier had adults and children both with cerebral palsy. Some individuals with cerebral palsy have drooling management difficulty. Thus, that particular workplace enforced on every employee that nobody will have a specific mug or cup during tea time, we all used to wash our mugs and we were quite comfortable with the system. This also not only ensured a sense of togetherness in the people with disability within the community, the auxiliary staff who often are discriminated, excluded would also have tea at the same time and in the same cups thus a communion in solidarity. 

Children in school always want to be accepted by the crowd. Thus small tribes within the large class community are very organic. Thus if the “in crowd” behaviour is that of excluding or socially not accepting a particular child or another within class tribe it can become a cause of huge concern for everybody. Usually lot of onus is on adults. We want to make our children empathetic as well as resilient, so in order to build the resilience skill we confuse ourselves as tell the child who is getting socially excluded to learn to ignore, play or make friendship with others, but these strategies are not very helpful as they often give the message that it is ok to not take account of someone. We should always be able to check our diversity deficits. We as adults if we honestly ask ourselves, how often do we interact with people who are not like us? For instance, do we have friends from different races and religions? Are we accepting of people? Or do we make judgments and maintain stereotypes? If you want our kids to be inclusive, you need to be that way too. By checking in our own behaviours, patterns we will be able to teach our children that “in crowd” doesn’t always equals to “best crowd”.

Often for human beings, the opportunity to reflect is a beautiful learning strategy. Why I use the word opportunity? It is because in order to reflect you have to yourself go through certain processes, experiences that will enhance your reflective skills. If you have not worked with a team, under a group head, when you yourself become a head of any space or team, you tend to ignore or not understand the dynamics both socially and mentally. This holds true for adults as well as children. Thus, from a very early age children must be given experiences of both problem solving and decision making in a group than in isolation. This not only promotes acceptance, encourages children to value their own as well as others dignity, also persuades them to accept defeat which when in group is easy to absorb than in isolation. So from a resilient group I learn to be a resilient individual. 

If we repeatedly practice an attitude of inclusion in front of our children, we will be able to achieve many objectives with that one arrow and it will not look like something that has to be enforced, adhered and need judiciary interference.