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CCT Community Open House (online):

Developing Inclusive Spaces for Creativity and Engaged Participation

Spring 2020 Dialogue Series on Reflective Practice, free and open to all.
Graduate Program in Critical and Creative Thinking, UMass Boston

 

Monday, February 24, 7:00-8:30pm ET

Participate online using Zoom: https://umassboston.zoom.us/j/783326698
Reference: Five Phase Format
For more information or to RSVP: cct@umb.edu

 

Background: Reflective Practice is relevant to any field -- education, health care, organizational leadership, arts, and sciences, activism and many others. It refers to ways that people continually develop or change the practices that they use in their workplaces, schools, and lives. Through reflection, we examine our experiences and seek to understand how they can guide us to make those changes. In this series of participatory dialogues, we'll explore together how we might then relate our individual directions to the bigger picture -- the changing world around us.

Activity: The sessions use a Dialogue Process format, centered around a group discussion where participants hear what others are saying and take a turn to speak when they are ready, and where the discussion emphasizes listening well, sharing thoughts-in-progress, and raising questions to help us get clear in supporting us as developing reflective practitioners. The goal is that learning emerges directly from the discussion among all participants, rather than through presentation or lecture.

Topic: Developing Inclusive Spaces for Creativity and Engaged Participation.



Session pre-reading:

In this dialogue, we explore the relationship between creativity and inclusion through our experiences in our spaces of work, learning, and life. Consider the following statements on inclusion:

Definitions:

  • Inclusion is "The process of improving the ability, opportunity, and dignity of people, disadvantaged on the basis of their identity, to take part in society." (World Bank)
  • Inclusion is "the process of improving the terms of participation in society for people who are disadvantaged on the basis of age, sex, disability, race, ethnicity, origin, religion, or economic or other status, through enhanced opportunities, access to resources, voice and respect for rights." (UNDESA)

Additional ideas:

  • "Inclusion can be described as a system, a process, a condition, and an outcome."
  • "On an individual level, inclusion is reflected in situations where someone is present in some kind of space and participates fully without the idea ever occurring to them that they didn't belong or were not welcome. On a collective level, inclusion is reflected in the shared efforts that groups, communities, or nations make in order to create those spaces."
  • "Inclusion has physical and social dimensions. Also, inclusion takes on important meaning with respect to exclusion. Current efforts around inclusion might be responses to historical realities of exclusion."

With respect to teaching work and education:

"Based on the assumption that individual differences are a resource for educational processes, inclusive education assumes a pedagogical perspective that is centred on the individual learner. In addition, it recognises the necessity to restructure the educational system with the scope of adding value to differences, effectively maximising individual potential and responding to the learners’ needs in a flexible manner (Lascioli, 2012). Thus, an inclusive educational system requires a reform that not only guarantees the infrastructure and the learning processes but the one which also restructures teacher education. This is because, as Reynolds (2001) postulated and as evidenced in the international literature review Teacher Education for Inclusion, teacher education needs to focus on challenging teachers’ knowledge, beliefs and values and developing teacher capacity “to work effectively with a wide range of students and colleagues, to contribute to the school and the profession, and to continue developing” (EADSNE , 2010, p.37)." (Di Gennaro, 2014, 57)

Questions:

  • What is the importance of diverse participation, views, and contributions to the creative process?
  • How has your own sense of "inclusion" developed through personal experiences? How do you define this term now?
  • Who is being (has been) included or excluded, and why? What are conventional understandings of "inclusion", and what happens when we stretch the meaning of inclusion to a wider view of who has been excluded and needs to be included?
  • What are creative approaches for including highly diverse and engaged participation in organizational, educational, and/or community settings?
  • What are the new creative opportunities gained from such inclusion?
  • How do we create a culture of inclusion? As reflective practitioners, what do we do next?

 

 

Reference: Di Gennaro, D. C., Pace, E. M., Zollo, I., & Aiello, P. (2014). Teacher Capacity Building through Critical Reflective Practice for the promotion of Inclusive Education. Problems of Education in the 21st Century, 60.