2020 Volume 46 Pages 55-71
In Japan, there are two interpretations of how to promote inclusive education. One is that children with and without disabilities should study together in regular classrooms, and the other is that there should be a variety of learning settings to respond to individual educational needs. Until now, many boards of education have prioritized the latter. However, we need to consider the risk that preparing a variety of learning settings can lead to the segregation of children with and without disabilities. The purpose of this article is to obtain a suggestion about the role of boards of education in order to expand the practice that children with and without disabilities study together in regular classrooms.
The first task is to clarify the reality of inclusive education in Japan. Boards of education take measures for the children with disabilities to study at the regular schools near their residence. One measure is to make it easier to use the resource room in which children with disabilities receive individual instruction for 1 to 8 class hours a week. For example, in Tokyo, specialized teachers go around resource rooms at each school instead of establishing resource rooms only in some schools. As a result, the proportion of children who use the resource room increased to the second highest level among 47 prefectures. Another measure is to set up special support classes in most schools. In Osaka, 98.2% of public elementary schools have special support classes. Therefore, 6.02% of children are enrolled in special support classes, which is the highest in 47 prefectures, and some of them study in regular classrooms by using interactive and collaborative learning systems. Boards of education are trying to increase the number of teachers who respond to the individual educational needs of children with disabilities by setting up resource rooms and special support classes.
The second task is to identify the barriers present when children with and without disabilities study together. The fieldwork at an elementary school, in which the teachers actively engage in interactive and collaborative learning systems, reveals that it is not so easy to integrate individual support and group guidance. If the teachers in charge of individual support and the teachers in charge of group guidance do not communicate effectively, the relationship between children with disabilities and children without disabilities will worsen. Although increasing the number of highly specialized teachers to respond to individual educational needs is certainly an important role for the Board of Education to play, regular classroom teachers may become less responsible for the learning of children with disabilities. Therefore, it is important to think about how reasonable accommodation should be provided in regular classrooms. The Boards of Education must take the initiative in improving the basic environment of regular classrooms so that reasonable accommodation can be provided.
