 Welcome to Five More Minutes, useful videos in five minutes or less that support the teaching and learning of all students. I'm your host, Shelly Moore. Today's topic is the evolution of inclusion. Okay, so you remember the dots? I know, I know, I know. I've shown you these before. But one colleague of mine suggested to me once. He goes, what if we didn't look at these as different concepts that we compare to each other, but instead as an evolution of time? It was totally brilliant. Now we can look at this timeline through the lens of any marginalized population. But to understand this timeline from the inclusion and disability perspective, we have to go back in time a little bit. Many of us know or are connected to someone who experienced institutionalization. It was even recommended to families by doctors. Although British Columbia was the first province in Canada to close down their institutions, there are still individuals living in these conditions across Canada today. The institutionalization movement is an example of exclusion. It separated individuals with disabilities from their families without choice, but the disability rights movement over the past 50 years with the hard work of some incredible self-advocates and families and maybe a little help from Geraldo Rivera pushed communities to shift so that individuals of all abilities were welcomed and living in the same settings as their family and friends. To shift from institutions to communities, this was the start of the inclusive evolution. We have movement, but can we do better? Although many individuals are no longer excluded from their families and communities, they were, and let's be honest, they still are, expected to attend segregated schools or self-contained special education programs that are totally separate from the rest of the school community. And so parents started to ask some very good questions. You see children with disabilities have siblings without disabilities, and families wanted all their kids to have equitable access to community-based education together. Kids started to be integrated into classrooms with their peers. They're in math together. They're in gym class together. They're eating lunch together. Kids are together. This is better. To shift from segregated to integrated schools and classrooms, this is the next step in the evolution of inclusion. We have movement, but can we do better? Well, this is where things get tricky, because integration, it doesn't take long to realize that just being together, it's not enough. Although in the same classroom, students with disabilities are often just that. They're physically in the classroom. They may sometimes have parallel activities, but mostly it's loosely connected classroom tasks. Now you don't need me to tell you that just physically sharing space and time is enough to make you feel like you belong in a community. I mean, come on, there are Disney movies made about this. Breathing the same air is not enough. Do you remember the Titans? I do. The evolution from integration to inclusion is now the topic of many conversations in communities and schools around the world. How do we support individuals to be meaningfully included and not just physically integrated? It's not just about where kids go on their day, but why? What is the purpose to the places that they go? It's now school-based teams and staff that are asking questions about how to do this. How can we support purposeful and meaningful placements for kids with disabilities? In inclusive classrooms in schools, students aren't just present, but they have roles and responsibilities in their classrooms and also meaningfully connecting to their peers. This is inclusion. So there you have it, my friends. A brief history of inclusion in about five minutes. If this is interesting to you, though, definitely investigate your local history as well because every community is in a different place in this journey and it's so valuable to know where we've come from. The other thing, though, is looking at these visuals as a timeline. It really helped me to shift my own thinking from which bubble am I at or not at and shift to more about where are we now in our inclusive journey and what's our next step. All of a sudden the goal of inclusion becomes action-oriented and just feels so much more possible. We may not all be at the same place in the journey, but we can all move forward. We can do better. And so this is the question I'm going to leave you with today. Can we still do better? Do you think there's another evolution in inclusion? What might that be? How can we inch even more forward to make inclusion even better? Thanks, Geraldo!