Episode 5: Inclusive Education, a Collaborative Approach

On this episode of the Inclusion Think Tank Podcast we welcome my guest Priya Voleti. Priya and I discuss how making inclusive education a collaborative approach by involving all faculty, staff, other students and families is beneficial to all students.

Episode Transcript

Arthur: Welcome to the Inclusion Think Tank podcast brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education NJCIE. As the name suggests, this podcast will discuss inclusive education and, most importantly, why it works.

On this episode, I welcome my guest Priya Voleti. Priya and I discuss how making inclusive education a collaborative approach by involving all faculty and staff, other students and families is beneficial to all students.

Arthur: Welcome back to the Inclusion Think Tank podcast brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education.

On today's episode, I'm happy to welcome my guest Priya Voleti. Priya I'm very happy to welcome you to the podcast today. Thank you for joining us. 

Priya: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be here, and chat for a little bit.

Arthur: Yes, so I would love to share a brief story about you where you were a great welcome to me during my first week of working here with New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education. 

I was in many seminars that week, and one of the first ones that I was in, you and I shared a breakout room, and you definitely helped calm my fears and my nervousness of being overwhelmed with all of the information.

So I definitely, I want to thank you publicly for that and making my transition into this position very, very easy.

Priya: Yes, I remember those, I remember that feeling, being overwhelmed.

So happy to have helped you with that. Take it, one thing at a time. Yes.

Arthur: Yes, it definitely helped me prepare for the other seminars that I was a part of. It was like, OK, I'll get it. It's just taking one thing at a time, and it will all come to me. So again, thank you for that.

Arthur: To start off, can you just tell us a little bit about yourself and just tell us who you are, some things that you like to do, and anything else that you would like to share with our listeners?

Priya: Sure. So, like Arthur said, my name is Priya. I have really been involved in education my entire life. I have always wanted to be a teacher. I became a teacher and actually did one of the pilot programs at my college, Boston University.

They were initially piloting a program where they said you can get duly certified in elementary and special education, as it was called at that time, and I thought, ‘Hey, why not?’

So I was one of the first to kind of try out that program and fell in love with it. I taught for many years, mainly in New York City, and while I was teaching in New York City, I always kind of had a bug for pre-service education, and so I thought, let me try this out, why not go back to school, spend some more money, and I decided to do that.

So, I returned to Teachers College, where I did my doctoral work in curriculum and teaching. And while I was, there is where I really got introduced and kind of immersed in a way to inclusive education, because I was working in the department as junior faculty and also supervising student teachers in both their general ED and critical special ED placements, as we called it. 

I really just fell in love with it. So decided, this is really where I'm meant to be, and since then I've been teaching at Montclair State and their inclusive education department, and through that actually got introduced to Fred, who is, the head of NJCIE, And he linked me up with some consulting opportunities with schools and providing professional development and training. I really feel like I hit the jackpot, because I kind of get to have one foot tapped into the academic world, teaching at Montclair State, but my other foot stays embedded in the practice and seeing all the great things that teachers are doing in schools. That really allows me to kind of marry the two worlds together, and feel very lucky that I have the opportunity to do that.

Priya: Then beyond that, that's kind of my education world. For fun, I grew up in upstate New York and my whole life I thought, Oh, let's not move to Jersey, anywhere but Jersey, but here I am and fell in love with Jersey. I love living here. We've been living here  for about eight years now, and my husband and I have three girls, so they are currently ages nine, seven and five. So they definitely keep me on my toes, and remind me that I don't know everything that teachers know.

And for fun, I like to hang out with my family. I love being outside. 

I have been trying to read for fun more than usual, which has been nice and I love to bake, that’s my go to, so that's a little bit about me.

Arthur: Oh, that's great. I love being outside as well, and baking is one of my favorite things as well, so that's really cool to hear.

I love what you said about being able to have one foot in academia and being able to be a professor at Montclair, and then also being able to be in the schools and seeing some of the things that you’re teaching those soon to be teachers in action. So it's a really cool thing, I'm sure.

Arthur: So our next question is a very interesting question, and I'm asking this of all of our guests just to see the difference and the similarities and some of their answers.

So the question is, what does inclusive education mean to you and how would you define inclusive education?

Priya: Yeah, that is a big and essential question. I’m interested to listen to the podcast to see some of the similarities and differences that come up.

I think that one of the beautiful things about inclusion is that it’s so dependent on the students, the environment you're in and all of that. So to have one standardized definition, I think, would take away from some of those nuances in some of those complexities that come about with inclusion.

So when I think about inclusion, first and foremost, I see it as a civil right for students to be able to get the education that they deserve in an environment that suits them with their grade level peers.

I think one of the major misconceptions about inclusion is that it’s thought of as a place or a location, meaning that, if you were to put students who have varying needs in another classroom, now you've accomplished inclusion or you're doing inclusion. I think that one of the things that I often talk about with my students is that it's a mindset. 

Inclusion is something that we need to believe in first. We need to believe that all of these students belong here, and all of these students are capable. And I think that is one of the essential prerequisites of inclusion, and I think beyond that, we have to think not as inclusion as doing something. In other words, it's not something that we are, checking off the box, by physically placing the students inside or giving them certain work to do. Really, it's creating a community. 

So I see inclusion or an inclusive education as our ability to kind of create a community where learner diversity is apparent, and is being attended to. And there it goes beyond attending to learner diversity in terms of academic needs. But also, we are creating a community of learners where there is social belonging so that students are feeling that they belong in that classroom. It's not just about providing accommodations and modifications, but it's really making opportunities for students to feel part of this inclusive community.

So I think all of those things go into the mindset and creating this community, recognizing learner diversity, and creating that social belonging. That’s what it means to me. And I think, in an ideal world, I always dream of the world where we no longer have to say, inclusive education, because all education, really, in my mind, should be inclusive. In other words, there's learner variability, not just students with IEPs,

but all students have learner diversity and variability. So it's just, doing our job by meeting their needs both academically and socially.

Arthur: Yes, it's so important. I love what you said about first, it starts within the mind of believing and then, also what you said of it’s not just something a box we check off like, Oh, ok, yeah, we're now inclusive…that’s that's what we did, and this is checked off. 

And then, it’s so true that you could have a room of 30 students or 20 students and every single person will learn in a different way.

And I've shared before that I remember being in class where what the teacher was saying and how the teacher was explaining it just did not make sense to me.

Priya: Yeah

Arthur: But if one of my classmates, really just said, ‘just don't pay attention to that, think of it this way.’

And they gave me a whole new way of thinking of something, and I was like, ‘Oh, wow, OK, I get it.’

And it goes back to the visual learners and the textile learners and things like that. So, it's just like some people need to see it and hear it at the same time. And then other people can just read it and comprehend certain things. So I agree with you as well, like looking forward to the day when we can just say it's education and not inclusive education. Where everybody is just there and learning and everybody's together. So, hopefully that day is coming soon.

Priya: I hope so.

Arthur: When I asked you to tell us about yourself, you gave a bit of a background about your educational background. Can you tell us when you at what point in your life did you realize you had an interest in inclusive education?

Priya:  Yeah, so I mean, I mentioned that when I was in my undergrad, I entered as an elementary major and then part way through my freshman year, our department presented us with this opportunity to get duly certified in elementary and special education. We would take a few additional summer courses. We would have to do an additional student teaching placement, but they kind of advocated as this is the future, and you really need you really should be learning, you know, how to teach varying groups of students, and so I thought, of course, why would I not want to be equipped with teaching students with varying needs?

And so that was, I would say, my absolute first introduction and I was immersed with it in and out. While I was teaching, I did get a chance to co-teach some of my classes, so got a taste of that. But I would say that my, kind of the turning point for me when I realized this is what I want to focus on is when I was doing my doctoral work at Teachers College and there I had, I mentioned I had the opportunity to supervise student teachers in the field, and it just so happened, with the logistics that I ended up supervising many student teachers who were in co-taught classrooms, or what  were labeled as inclusive education classrooms because of the make up of the students in the classroom,and really just kind of piqued

my interest in terms of this is really an art in itself, and a lot of the strategies and tools and things that they were learning and utilizing, I felt that, we fell short of some of the education that I had strictly in elementary education and really saw the need of it that being out in New York City public schools, entering so many schools and seeing the need and seeing the benefit. 

I think that that's when I really, not that I was ever doubting it, but I really just felt it was my passion to kind of advocate for this as much as possible. 

When I saw students who in any other school would have been in a self-contained classroom, succeed and participate and be so happy in these classrooms where they were included with their grade level peers that I thought, this is where my passion is, and I want to do everything I can to try to advocate for this. Whether it's through academia or consulting or whatnot. 

So, I think being in those classrooms, and seeing the success of the students in particular and talking to those teachers really piqued my interest.  And that's when I kind of said, All right, I'm going to help teachers get prepared to teach in an inclusive way, and that's kind of what drew me to this field.

Arthur: Yeah, I love asking that question because something in our life always clicks that leads us into what we're doing and in our life, and as you said, it's your passion and I'm always interested in hearing how people came to hold the positions that they have, and what part of their experience led them to where they are today. So that's really great. 

And just, how it was always, part of your education from undergrad through your graduate work and the doctorate program. It's just it was like it was there all the time. And then you're just like, ‘Okay, this is what I'm doing.’

Yeah, yeah,that's really great. 

Arthur: We've touched on this, I think, already, but can you share with us why you feel inclusive education is important?

Priya: Yeah, sure. So I think, I mentioned how I know that there's this definition out there that kind of defines it as a civil right, and I think that first and foremost, it's important because it is the right of these students to be educated in a way that mirrors our society and thinking about,

 you know, the fact that we hopefully are not segregating groups of students in our society and keeping them apart from their peers or their colleagues. I think that we owe that to our students for our schools to mirror the society that they're going to enter. I think that research upon research has shown the benefits of inclusion.

So there's really no reason to not advocate for inclusive education where students are taught along their grade level peers with accommodations and modifications as need be.

I'm not saying that there’s not a time when it doesn't make sense to pull a student out. Of course, there may be times when that is the best thing for them to meet a certain need, but for the most part, the needs can be met within the general ed classroom. 

And then I think, having those interactions with their peers in the social interactions, which I think are not talked about as much as the academics, understandably so, I guess. But, I have a little bit more of a passion and kind of trying to bring that to the forefront, too, and thinking about the social benefits that the students are having and engaging with their peers.

 And so, I think that it’s funny. I had a conversation with my soon to be fourth grader last year, when she noticed that some of her friends were getting taken out of the class to go to, it’s not a self-contained room, but to get some basic skills instruction, they call it.

And she was perplexed. She said, I don't understand, why can't they just do that in the classroom? Is there something special in that room? And it just led to this whole conversation with an eight year old at the time thinking, I don't get it. Why do they have to leave like she's my friend? I don't want her to leave and she's gone half the day. 

So it's the innocence of that I think just brings us back to it just makes sense. It just makes sense for them  to be educated alongside their grade level peers as much as possible and that their needs are being met in an equitable way. So again, getting what they need, but having access to that curriculum and to their peers. 

Arthur: It’s so amazing how kids understand those types of things, and they notice it. 

It was like, hey, why is she leaving this room, why can't you just do it here with everybody else?

Kids really pick up on those kinds of things, and that's so important to notice.

And it's really great. I think children are the first ones who understand the differences, and a lot of times they help educate the adults. 

Priya: We had this whole conversation about, I mean, we didn't  call it this till the end, but it was like equality versus equity. And she was commenting on how, some people do need help in reading and some people need help in math. And no, it doesn't make sense for me to see this teacher because, then that would take away from so-and-so who needs her support and learning how to read and all of that.

And it's helped me as a mom, because one of my kids, my youngest, gets car sick and so she gets to have gum when we go on long car rides, and that's always a fight. I'm like, Oh, equality versus equity, do you need the gum? You don't need the gum. So yes.

Arthur: Oh, my goodness. Yeah, kids, kids are really, really great in that way where they are, I think they're at times they're more accepting of their peers and their differences, their disabilities or whatever you would like to call them, and it's just like they want their friends to have the same experiences as they like and whatever it takes to get there, it's like, let's make it happen. 

Priya: Yeah, exactly. 

Arthur: So to wrap up this conversation, I just have one final question, and that is, can you tell us something that schools can do to become more inclusive? 

Priya: Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of the center of so much of our work that we're doing with the grant project and also, NJCIE. I think that for schools, the one thing that I see coming, in talking with administrators and being in so many schools in New Jersey, I think a lot of it and the schools that I've been in have already taken this step, is to offer the opportunity

 for teachers to have some professional development, some training, even just allowing time for conversations about these important topics like posing out there, what is inclusive education? What does that mean to you? 

Taking something like that that's just a conversation starter and getting that conversation going because, I think, as teachers, I remember it's go, go, go all day long. You're, grading papers, you're planning your lessons, you're looking at the standards and, planning units with your colleagues that you often don't have the time to kind of stop and think about, these questions that are guiding a lot of your philosophy and teaching.

I think that allowing those opportunities, whether you have the opportunity to do a more formal professional development or even just taking the time in a faculty meeting and pausing and thinking, alright, let's have this conversation and get this going because, I think that, coming back to this idea of inclusion as a mindset.

I think it is so important for administrators and schools to allow teachers to have those opportunities because. if it's presented as, this is something to do, again, I don't know if that's really accomplishing what we want to accomplish, because it comes back to, this is not a checklist that we're marking off that we have these students physically placed in the rooms and we have these, flexible seating and all of that contributes to it.

But it's more than that, and I think that for schools to take that time and allow teachers to reflect, to converse, to collaborate and to get professional development on how to put this into practice is really helpful.

I think that another thing is that, I hear from teachers a lot of the times is that they would love more professional development and thinking of something like co-teaching, which is one of the more common practices used, and, spending the time and learning about the benefits of the different models and seeing examples.

I was in one school that adapted a peer visit program, which was phenomenal. They took the time to allow teachers to visit their colleagues when they were doing a co-taught lesson in some way to kind of get ideas from and see what their colleagues are doing, which we never get to do. I mean, even though teaching is such a collaborative profession, I think it can also be a very isolating profession where you kind of stick to your room and don't get the opportunity to see what's going on outside your doors.

So I think providing those types of opportunities as much as possible for teachers to feel confident. I hear so many teachers say there is no way I can teach so-and-so, he's reading at a second grade level, and I'm a fifth grade teacher and I hear that all the time. But then, after saying, OK, well, tell me about the student, and tell me what you know about them, and let's take a look at your curriculum and see what we can do to accommodate and to modify, if need be.

And I think those are lost opportunities where we get caught up in thinking we can't and then it transforms into, not then presuming competence for the students. So I think essentially it is, offering that time for teachers to really get trained, converse and collaborate.

And then one other thing I want to add is I think that is sometimes overlooked is trying as much as possible to involve the families as well, as much as they would like to be involved. I think that you alluded to this in your comment, Arthur, about how thinking about learner variability and how certain students may just prefer learning in a different way. And I think, a lot of that we have to look at families as experts as well, and I think that they're bringing with them all these sons of knowledge from their houses, their cultures, their backgrounds and knowing their children.

Something as simple as a monthly check in where I saw a teacher do that, where they would send out a monthly check in and the families would fill it out, and it was something as simple as How's it going? Is there anything that you see as red flags? Anything we can do to make this experience better? Tell us one exciting thing that happened to your child this month. Something like that where you keep the line of communication open. Because I think, families are experts as well, and we need to draw on them to learn about the students and to involve them. 

One thing I saw recently, Shelley Moore, who I'm sure many of you know, posted an image a couple of weeks ago which just sat with me.

And she said, so often, I remember growing up walking into classrooms and there were these signs that said, all our welcome here. Right. So it was kind of like, everyone’s welcome. Come on in.

And she said, she had heard someone, and I don't know the sort of the exact source, but Shelley Moore retweeted it and said, what if we reframe that, and say this classroom was made with you in mind?

And I think that just sat with me and was so powerful, and really spoke to the need to get to know our students, and part of that is through the families and to think about who our students are and then design our classroom in a way that is fit for them to succeed.

So I really love that, and felt like it went along with this piece of what we need to do as teachers, as schools, as administrators and families can help us with that as well.

Arthur: Yes. And I think throughout our conversation, the word collaboration has come up a few times, and as part of that collaboration, as you mentioned, the family to be a part of that. Because, they do have those behind the scenes clips and views into the students life. Like you said, even cultural differences. And that plays a huge role in learning for a lot of people, for a lot of different reasons.

So including the family is definitely a very big thing. And I love the This classroom is created with you in mind. That's a really great way, because it really is framed differently and it really made me think like, Oh, wow, that's so different than, all our welcome here. It takes it to a different level. So that's very great. 

Very great quote there.

Arthur: Priya, thank you so much for your time today. I really enjoyed our conversation and getting to know a little bit about your story and of your interests and your family. And then also thank you for sharing the knowledge that you have in the area of inclusive education. It has been such a great pleasure to talk with you today and to hear what you had to share. So thank you for your time and I really appreciate it.

Priya: Thank you so much for having me. This has been fun. I was nervous to do a podcast, but it was fun, and I'm excited to hear the other episodes as well.

Arthur: Yeah. thank you again

 and have a great day.

Priya: Thank you. Take care. 

Arthur: You, too.

Arthur: We thank you for listening to this episode of the Inclusion Think Tank podcast. This podcast is brought to you by New Jersey Coalition for Inclusive Education. Be sure to subscribe on YouTube or Spotify. And don't forget to follow us on social media @NJCIE

Until next time.