Supporting the Transition Toward Inclusion in St. Vincent and the Grenadines 

• In Event: Inclusive Education: Canada’s Connection to the World

Abstract

The demand for professional development on inclusive practice has recently become a target area in many countries, including the Caribbean. This goal is in line with UNESCO’s (2017) call for inclusion of all children by 2030. This presentation will highlight the collective experience of the four scholars as they navigated their own pedagogies throughout the various phases of professional development and support provided as it relates and differs from their experiences working with Canadian educators and schools, including direct support to students and families within the community. The purpose of this presentation is to share our team’s collective experiences working with educators from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, towards building capacity for inclusive education for students with special education needs. Our team consists of four scholars of inclusive education from two Ontario Universities who spent the last three years preparing students, teachers, and other stakeholders for the transition of students with special education needs from segregated settings into mainstream schools.

In 2021 our team engaged in the coaching and mentoring of teachers and support staff in the three special education schools in SVG. We began our professional development online amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Shortly thereafter, we traveled to SVG in the spring of 2022 for in-person training and observations. Our goal was to help build capacities for effective planning and programming with students with special education needs (SENs) in their classrooms. In our 2022 final report, we identified that segregated/special schools were inequitable and that SVG should work toward an inclusive model. We then embarked on a journey with SVG to pilot inclusive education on the island of Bequia.

In order to capture, express, and make meaning from our collective experiences , a collaborative autoethnography (CAE) method was employed. Chang and colleagues (2013) describe the value of CAE as a unique qualitative method. Unlike a traditional autoethnography, CAE allows multiple people to look inward through self-reflection of their shared experience and then combine those reflections in an effort to create rich data from multiple perspectives. We consider the sociocultural contexts of Canada and SVG through our past and current experiences with inclusive education training, practice, and research and journaled our experiences based on the following prompts:

● What were some of the strategies used to support teachers, students, parents, and community members?

○ What worked and what did not? Why do you think this might be?

● What were some of the differences or similarities between strategies to promote inclusive education in Canada vs. SVG?

● Identify the most significant success from the work. Explain why it is successful.

● Identify the most significant challenge. Explain why it was most challenging

● How has this experience shifted the way you consider teacher education for inclusion?

● What was your greatest learning? About yourself as an educator? About teacher
education in general? About inclusive education?
Three themes have been identified which are deemed essential to understand the learning journey experienced by the authors. These include: Relationships, Change and Barriers.
These will be further discussed with specific examples provided.

Authors

• Margo Allison Shuttleworth, Brock University

• Monique Somma, Brock University

• John Freer, St. Clair College

• Sheila Bennett, Brock University