Free Articles from Interaction 28 Issue 2 Choice does not equal “informed choice” ...

v28/2/’14 : interaction Choice does not equal “informed choice” around inclusive education Catherine & Andrew McDonald “First we make our choices. Then our choices make us.” Anne Frank Almost from the moment Soﬁa, our ﬁrst born was diagnosed, we told ourselves and the very few people we could trust that we would give her back in an instant if that meant she could avoid the isolation, loneliness and sense of purposelessness that we believed would deﬁne her future. We truly believed that at best we could hope to perhaps trick her somehow into having some sense of belonging. We wondered what sort of band-aid we would be able to ﬁnd to make life bearable for her. No one had told us otherwise in those early days and we had both grown up in worlds that gave us no reason to expect that anything more than this was possible. We had no way of knowing that our “not quite whole” baby would grow into a young girl with such gifts to share with all she encountered…that Soﬁa with her ‘intellectual deﬁcit’ would become the teacher and we the students. School was always going to be a daunting prospect. Handing over our tiny “June” baby at the tender age of three and a half to complete strangers and trusting that they would do the right thing by her was a leap of faith that felt like a free-fall from the international space station. The fact that Soﬁa was born in June meant that she would be the youngest in her class, but we wanted to give her exposure to her typically developing peers from as early as possible. Our theory was that the peer modelling of children with age-appropriate development was likely to push Soﬁa along or at least drag her along in its wake. We started thinking about school shortly after Soﬁa turned one years old, researching our options and trying to grasp just what ‘Inclusion’ meant, what it would look like when it was working, how “do-able” it was and how the costs and beneﬁts stacked up. Little did we know the answers would remain elusive for another ﬁve years. We visited multiple schools, attended a number of Education Options Forums and spoke to the director of the Centre for Inclusive Schooling, several teachers, therapists, a school psychologist, our Disability Services Commission Local Area Coordinator, parents of children with similar diagnoses who had already been through the schooling process, tapping into every imaginable source of information. The overwhelming focus of all of these was the level of funding and resources available and the rights of parents and children. We most often left these encounters feeling none the wiser and somewhat numb. Reﬂecting back on it now, it all makes sense. Australian Institute on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities !21