Fostering Inclusive Education: Intentionally vs. Spontaneously

Abstract

Inclusion has become a mainstream value promoted by educators, curriculum designers, and educational policy makers. To achieve an inclusive classroom environment, a variety of learner‐centered curricula and pedagogies are actively implemented and practiced. These educational efforts are made intentionally to improve the external environment for a learner to bring better learning outcomes. However, creating learner‐centered curricula and implementing pedagogies that promote active learning often requires more educational and technological resources as well as specifically trained personnel and thus may not be cost‐effective. Furthermore, external causes become operative through internal causes, or a learner's internal mind setting. If a learner's internal mind setting does not respond/echo actively to the supportive student‐centered, active learning environment or resistant to it, engagement in the learning process may still remain passive in spite of the favorable external learning settings that have been deliberately and cost‐intensively created and provided. In other words, when a learner's internal mind setting is not actively approaching and engaging, the effectiveness of intentionally prepared and implemented approaches may be discounted. Learners may also be spoiled, taking everything they are provided with for granted with no appreciation. In this presentation, we 1) address the rarely‐studied importance of optimizing a learner's internal mind setting, with which an inclusive classroom environment could be achieved spontaneously rather than intentionally; 2) share our personal experience with this approach; and 3) call for discussions and contributions of more techniques and strategies that may induce, trigger, or shape a learner's self‐inclusion mind setting.