Inclusive Education is not only about students with/without disability but also about including everyone (minority) without discrimination into a regular classroom.

Although it is the brief definition of inclusive ed, we often consider it as the former (including kids with disabilities). But I just found other type of inclusion from “Teacher Tuesday”.

Teacher’s Tuesday is a social media campaign implemented through Global Monitoring Report(GMR) of UNESCO, introducing 10 teachers from 10 countries around the world for 10 weeks (Tuesdays) from the 25th February, to share their stories, motivations and challenges in their work. The detail is shown on the map below.

This week’s story is about “The Importance of Inclusive Education for Indigenous Children”

This story tells the importance of multilingual classroom of Natalee, a teacher from Bay Islands, Honduras where there are 9 indigenous groups and 7 languages. As a result of the historic and cultural background in the Bay Islands, English is the main language of instruction while on mainland Honduras, Spanish is the main language of instruction.

Not only do they use different languages, kids own different cultural background, tradition and religion. But the curriculum and textbooks are made for Spanish speaking population. In this context, she explains that integrating other cultural contents into the classes (the arts, crafts classes, maths, science and music) is very important (e.g., using materials around kids such as coconut or almond seeds in the classrooms).

By the Honduran Ministry of Education, this year was declared as the “year of inclusion” trying to prepare every teacher to create an inclusive education, embracing learning styles and cultural baggage of the children.

Even though I don’t think 1 year is not enough to prepare for inclusive education at a national level, I like the approach of including children with different cultural background and not only disability focused. I look forward what will happen after this.