Connections to Shelley Moore and Inclusive Education
Sara McManus
School of Education, University of Northern British Columbia
EDUC 3336: Inclusive Education
Melanie Baerg, M.Ed. – Lecturer
July 16, 2022
Shelley Moore has the best analogies! Her pedagogical framework of inclusive education has intrigued me since last fall’s Foundations in Education, EDUC 393 course. I was drawn further to her thinking during my EDUC 391 Experiential Practicum when I taught a diverse set of students and felt “the Split” referred to in her Bowling analogy (Moore, 2016). I love teaching with analogies too. I find that when you encounter a complex subject, analogies can offer you an additional means to help explicitly teach your topic. An analogy can fit right alongside auditory, visual, and kinesthetic means of demonstration, just like a mnemonic device or acronym might benefit some learners. I suppose it shouldn’t be surprising that a leading expert in Special Education has fantastic ways to break down tough subjects into thought-provoking analogies so that a vast group of educators can easily understand the concepts. After all, a universal design for inclusive education is her specialty.
The Five Moore Minute Video Series are highly entertaining and thought-provoking. Of course, there was no possible way; I was stopping at the few that were provided on the course syllabus! There were two more analogies that caught my attention that I have built into an ePortfolio Blog Post to keep as a reminder for my future practice. In the first video, Dr. Baked Potato: How can we scaffold complexity, Moore describes herself as a master teacher of Baked Potatoes who prepares a perfectly dressed baked potato for each of her students (Moore, 2019). In her analogy, when the students arrive, some cannot eat what she has prepared. She calls for help to remove the bacon bits for one student and then calls again to scrape the butter off for another group of students, as she is busy with all the other students in her class. Her analogy links the common practice of designing lessons for an assumed base of students and then trying to retrofit lessons for those with “problems.” Moore is proposing that, alternatively, lessons could be designed with the students in mind first. Knowing that there was one vegetarian and a group who were “off dairy” there would have been no need to retrofit the lesson in a panicked frenzy. Moore suggested a backwards-universal-inclusive design would have provided students an opportunity for choice and that support would have been embedded to assist students in their selection rather than trying to fix something that is hard to undo.
The second analogy that caught my attention is Moore’s metaphor of how Special Education was designed based on a medical model. She compared cupcakes to the support that students are offered after they have been identified as needing that support. In her video, Bringing Support to the Students, Just Let them Eat Cake  (Moore, 2020), Moore argues that students require support in education even when nothing is wrong, mainly because kids are “not broken”! This metaphor of cupcakes and cakes using the same batter shares her controversial opinion on Special Education funding, which I was surprisingly drawn to agree with on a theoretical basis. She refers to it as an “Equity model” rather than an “Equality model,” stating that it provides “wrap-around support for the whole community.
In the Five Moore Minutes Video, The Evolution of Inclusion: The past and future of education, Moore discussed a lens of inclusion through a timeline of Special Education and made two special mentions of Geraldo Riveria (Moore, 2018). I found this fascinating and worthy of some investigation, as I remember watching Geraldo’s controversial talk shows during my early twenties. It didn’t take long to discover Geraldo’s vast career accomplishments, including his award-winning work as an investigative journalist. His work sparked a revolution of change in Special Education. Geraldo flung the doors of institutions like Willowbrook wide open and changed the face of educating people with special needs forever with his 1972 exposé, Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace.
So unannounced and unexpected by the school administration, we toured building number six. The doctor had warned me that it would be bad. It was horrible. There was one attendant for perhaps 50 severely and profoundly retarded children. And the children, lying on the floor naked and smeared with their own feces, they were making a pitiful sound, a kind of mournful wail that it’s impossible for me to forget. This is what it looked like. This is what it sounded like. But how can I tell you about the way it smelled? It smelled of filth, it smelled of disease, and it smelled of death. We’ve just seen something that’s probably the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” as reported by Geraldo Riveria (Skinner, 1972).
I should have known by the warning on the YouTube video that it would also profoundly change my understanding of how we have gotten to where we are, but also why inclusive education is so fundamentally necessary. It is also why educators like Shelley Moore advocate for an equity funding distribution model. We cannot allow any students, regardless of their type of need to be cast aside. Every student deserves the opportunity to be in an inclusive classroom with their peers throughout their educational lives.
Moore concluded her Evolution of Inclusion video with a provocation to her viewers: “Can we still do better? Do you think there is another evolution in inclusion? What might that be? How can we inch more forward to make inclusion more better” (2018)? My answer is an absolute yes; we need to do better. I have a new lens when I think about the custodian’s complaint about a student who made a mess in the Special Ed washroom when they were left to toilet themselves. I think about how if we continue down a path of less supports and supports only offered how they have been in the past (albeit better than in the 1970s), we are on a slippery slope of losing sight of the needs of every student in our classroom. For me, the most potent section of Moore’s One Without the Other is:
Is inclusion important? Yes, because students have a right to learn. Yes, because learning within diversity is the real world, but yes, also because these kids, all kids, have contributions to make – whether students have special needs or didn’t eat breakfast that morning; whether they are English-language learners, or whether they have a hard time getting to school on time. The students who are the hardest to reach also have so much that we can learn from, too, because if we can get to them, we can get everyone. We often forget that what helps one helps everyone, and it is precisely this idea that makes what we teach strategically more effective and efficient, even in learning communities (Moore, 2016).
This is how we change the face of Special Education. We move forward by bringing human decency to the forefront of our classrooms and where our pedagogical approaches are based on all students as capable learners.
References
Moore, S. (2016). One Without the Other: Stories of Unity Through Diversity and Inclusion. Winnipeg: Portage & Main Press.
Moore, S. (2018, October 01). Five Moore Minutes. The Evolution of Inclusion: The past and future of education, [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQgXBhPh5Zo
Moore, S. (2019, October 07). Five Moore Minutes. Dr. Baked Potato: How can we scaffold complexity?, [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7j0oL1CNXAs
Moore, S. (2020, February 20). Five Moore Minutes. Bringing Support TO the Students Just Let them Eat Cake!, [Video]. YouTube. Retrieved July 22, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WuygB4j55U
Steve Skinner & Sproutflix (Producers). (1972, February 2). Willowbrook: The Last Great Disgrace. New York: [Video]. Retrieved July 03, 2022, from https://video.alexanderstreet.com/watch/willowbrook-the-last-great-disgrace