 Okay, so you've had a chance to kind of talk a little bit about if you have had a direct conversation with someone about their disability, how did that go for you? You know, this is one of those tender topics that, you know, when we're when we're with young children, we often say don't stare, don't look, you know, and even as we get older, it's like the elephant in the room, we don't want to directly ask somebody, well, what is it like for you? Kids sometimes don't have that same kind of shyness, right? Like they do want to know things like how do you go to the bathroom? That's a really important question for children. You know, how do you sleep at night? You know, so and child to child, they'll often ask each other very direct questions that adult to adult, we would be mortified to ask a question like how do you go to the bathroom, right? So we're, you know, here to be able to talk about what are some of those attitudes, what holds us back and the research that the Canadian government did about this question found that about 75% of people said that they know somebody with a disability, I'm just looking for the slide, there it is, and about half claim to have asked the person directly about their disability, but sometimes on these kinds of surveys there's a bit of a tendency of overreparting, I would bet not as many have actually had that direct conversation as perhaps said they had, and maybe that's reflective of the conversations in this room as well. What else did this study find? Three-tenths of Canadians said there is somebody with a disability in my workplace, so one might think that the fact that, you know, the person who sorts the mail or who does the filing has an intellectual disability or that somebody with a physical disability is working in the cubicle next to you, one might think that that actually would have a positive attitude on adult attitudes towards, or positive influence on adult attitudes towards disability, but in fact there is no evidence at all that having somebody working beside you with a disability is going to have a major impact on a person's attitude about inclusion, because as adults we're setting, you know, like a lot of our attitudes are set as I referred to a couple of minutes ago, it's much more powerful to have someone at the desk beside you in grade one than when you're 45 years old, and that of course makes sense to the early childhood practitioners in this room. What else? They asked questions on this survey about what do you think are the negatives that persons with disability experience in Canada and Canadians reported, of course, prejudice. They could understand that intellectually that persons with disabilities are often discriminated against. There's a case in Manitoba right now where an agency was attempting to open a group home for two men with intellectual disabilities in a rural community, a bedroom community about half an hour outside Winnipeg City Limits, and the town said we don't want those people living here. They're not from that community originally, but the agency wanted to open the group home there, and, you know, the municipality has voted against it, and now it looks as though it's going to be working its way up to human rights, the human rights sport as a violation. But that's the kind of thing I'm talking about prejudice. So when we asked Canadians, well, what do you think we should do about that problem, they came up with some answers. They said, well, we need more public awareness. We need to increase public acceptance of persons with disabilities, and that makes a lot of sense. And in fact, right now the Canadian Association for Community Living is engaged in a big social media campaign. Some of you may have seen this ad appearing. If you can't read the writing right up at the top, it says chances are he'll never cure cancer, walk on the moon or be Prime Minister. But then again, neither will you. And this is called the no excuses campaign. And you'll see billboards, you'll see ads in the major newspapers. Maybe you've seen those in papers here in Alberta, I'm not sure. But, you know, this is an attempt by the largest advocacy association for persons with intellectual disabilities to do some of that, you know, attitude correction. So please watch for those. I got, and there's a whole series of them. This isn't the only one. Okay, what else? They asked a question to persons responding to the survey about do you know of any government legislation or conventions or policies or programs that support persons with disabilities? And people just blanked. They didn't know this one at all. And I'm just curious, you know, if I asked the question in this room, can you name some of the government policies that tell us about what we should be doing on behalf of persons with disabilities? I want to believe that in this room we would score better than the average Canadian did. Because in fact, only 2% of Canadians were able to name the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and only 1% referred to the Canadian Human Rights Code. And these, of course, are two overarching national pieces of, you know, legislation that tell us it's not okay to say you can't live in my neighborhood. You know, when we're in grade two, we say you can't come to my birthday party. And it's kind of the same attitude that we're seeing in this one community in Manitoba. So when we look at the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, of course it gives strength to the rights of every type of Canadian. All types of Canadians, regardless of color, regardless of religion, regardless of race, regardless of gender, regardless of sexual orientation, and regardless of mental or physical disability. This was a remarkable step in Canada that we recognized at a national level that persons with disabilities have the same rights as every other Canadian does. Big step forward for us. And, of course, our Human Rights Act at a national level, and I'm sure that Alberta's code would be congruent with that, is that it is up to service providers to accommodate, you know, including people with disabilities. So if we have a blind person employed in our workplace, we may need to have braille signs. And you'll see more and more public buildings with elevator signs, for example, that are in braille, as well as the numbers. And that's an example of accommodation that's going on. So as service providers, it's not okay for us to say, you know, you can't come to my program because you're not toilet trained, for example, which is a story I heard not that long ago about a program who denied access to a child with cerebral palsy because she wasn't toilet trained. And the nursery school teacher said, well, she'll be embarrassed in front of her friends. Well, hello. The fact is this little girl will maybe never be toilet trained. Does that mean she can't go to preschool? Does that mean she can't go to elementary school? No, it is up to the service providers to accommodate. What else? Here in Alberta, I was very pleased to see the kind of transformation that's going on in your province with respect to inclusion. So your inclusive child care program, you know, has some really strong value statements about children being children first, and that parents should have the same kind of access to programs in their community as any other parent would have. And that a quality child care program can meet the needs of all children, the special programs have been shut down over the years. And it's in the mainstream that children with special support needs are getting what they need from us. You're setting the direction framework, and I know there's information about that on your tables. Talks very clearly about this is a way of thinking and acting. I love those two things together. It's not just enough to talk about it. We need to walk the talk. So thinking and acting together is what inclusion is based on. And we need to have universal acceptance and, you know, and belonging for all kids, all students. It's a values-based approach. And number 10 in the setting the direction framework refers particularly to the government's intent to help you all to develop a model of support, you know, for children with additional support needs that works in the community. The most natural environment, not the special program, but the neighborhood play school, the magic puddle play school is where it's going to happen. And I love the part about a seamless transition into grade one, because that's often a bit of a rocky place, right? Just around the time that the child is really, you know, succeeding in the preschool environment. Now we've got to move them into a new, much bigger system with some barriers that sometimes get in the way. It's up to us to get rid of those barriers. That's on that onus is on us as service providers. You know, internationally, we've got a couple more I want to draw to your attention. Of course, there's the Convention on the Rights of the Child, not that long ago, November 20th. We celebrated Canada's signing on to that. And Article 23 within the convention speaks specifically to the rights of children with disabilities and that they need to be included in their communities. And very recently, we had the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This was the first convention in the 21st century. And it talked about a change of attitude in society is needed. Back to what my keynote theme is all about. Yeah, we need to change attitudes in order to guarantee the rights of persons with disabilities around the world. And I'm a big believer, as I think many of you are, that the place to change those attitudes is by getting it right in the early years. We can work towards an inclusive Canada, baby steps at the beginning, stories like Sean's are what inspire us to keep fighting the good fight. So then my question back to you is, have you got that attitude? And by that, I mean that good kind of attitude, not that bad kind of attitude. And, you know, the research is really clear around this. You can have all the wonderful training, you can have all the physical modifications, you can have all the pieces of specialized equipment, you can have, you know, consultants that come in and provide additional supports. But if the staff attitude is lacking, inclusion will not be in place. So it is your attitude that's absolutely critical to making this work. And so where do our attitudes come from? We talk about that they come from when, you know, the time we're little kids. I'm going to date myself a little bit. Anybody recognize this guy, Mr. Magoo? When I was a kid, Mr. Magoo cartoons were considered to be quite hysterical. And this, of course, was the story of an old man who was blind, who was always being hit by trains and falling off cliffs and terrible things happen to him. And everybody laughed at that. I don't think we'd expect to see Mr. Magoo on Canadian Children's Television today. Right? I mean, we've rethought the messages. But like, what do we share with children? What do they see reflected in their environment? What kind of books have you got? What kind of posters are there in this afternoon? I'll be showing you lots more photos, and I brought some examples of things that I'll pass around for you to see. Where do our attitudes come from and how do we influence that? We want to be using people first language. We want to be referring to the child first before the special need. When I hear about special needs children, I just cringe. All children have needs. And at any time, an individual child may have some special needs, right? But let's talk about the child first. A child is a child is a child. And then we talk about what are their additional needs and what do we need to do to support them? We want to be talking about what they can do rather than what they cannot do. There's an interesting theory that's being put out by disability advocates these days about a social model of disability, which suggests it's not the person's physical state that is the disabling condition. It's what's going on in society around them, right? So the problem is out there, not inside the person. And I really like that as sort of a conceptual framework for what it is that we do. And we've changed our language over the years, like we've gotten rid of Mr. Magoo. I'll give you an example here in Alberta. You used to have the Alberta Association for the Mentally Retarded. And these days it's called, you know, Community Living Alberta. In Manitoba we used to have an organization called the Society for Crippled Children and Adults. And now it's called the Society for Manitobans with Disabilities. Those kind of small changes in language show us where is our focus? Are we talking about the negatives? Or are we talking about these people's rights to live in the community and to be counted as citizens? So there's a bit of an attitude continuum that's gone on over time. At the beginning there was a lot of rejection. Like my grandmother being told by the health professionals at that time, you have two other children send your son to an institution. There's no place for that child here. And we still have programs that say, well, if your child's not totally trained, they can't come. And that's that rejecting kind of attitude. We also have attitudes of accepting or tolerance, like, okay, in theory, it's a good idea to have inclusion, but not in my backyard, right? I like the idea of children with disabilities going to school, but when they're in my child's classroom, does that mean my child gets less of a learning experience? You know, we accept, but we're not really comfortable with it yet. And then we have this idea of romanticizing. Many of us found our way into inclusion this way. I'll save all the little children. This wonderful place will be the rescue, right? Sometimes we say, well, let's let the child with a disability win, even though they don't deserve to win. We may accept behaviors from kids with special needs that we wouldn't accept from our typically developing children. So there's a bit of a romantic attitude there. Where I want to head towards where I hope that you're on board that inclusion train with me is to get us to a place where we're truly celebrating diversity, where we're not saying, you know, that person is different from me, but rather, we're all humans together. There's been some British studies that have looked at attitudes in the early childhood field. And some of this is really quite interesting stuff. Just going to give you a couple of the points that they came up with. They talked about providers who provide the best outcome for children are people who identify, understand and break down barriers to participation and belonging. Three strong action words. Understand what the problem is. Identify it first, understand why it's there. And then what are we going to do about it? It implies action on our part as advocates for inclusion. And sometimes the British study tells us it means that we've got to really change attitudes back to that again. We've got to find a way to help correct and transform negative attitudes. These are the things that they said were true about the best providers in Britain when they looked at early childhood programs. They got to know the kids well. They built respectful relationships. They helped children to make choices like, Hey, I mean, these are the things that you do every day in your work with children. So it's not that you need to have a PhD in inclusion to make this work, but you've got to see children as children and families as families. And you've got to have a positive can do attitude. You've got to be the kind of person that says we can make this happen as opposed to being the one who says but but but there's always going to be those but but but but we can get around them. People who work in these British programs said, you know what, we believe in what we're doing. We believe in quality and quality inclusion go together. And if we can create these wonderful learning environments, all the children benefit from them. And that's really the beliefs that we have in our special link quality inclusion rating scale. And I mean, one day, maybe I'll come back and do training only on how to use this tool. In fact, I was here in Edmonton earlier this year with grit doing that same kind of training. But these values about inclusion are really at the heart of the work the special link has been engaged in over the years. And there are a series of principles. These are like our overarching beliefs and values, things like zero reject the idea that we don't say you can't come if you're not toilet trained. And this idea of naturally occurring proportions, we know that children with special needs are out there. Are they in our programs? Right? And the same way that they are in the community, we should see those numbers reflected in our own early childhood programs. And they get to come the same days and the same hours as other families do. We don't say, well, you can only come two hours on Tuesday, because mom and dad need to work just like Sean's parents did.