student reflections: IDEA Inclusion Project

Barbara Dyer

Issues of fairness for children with disabilities are a powerful theme in my life and in the life of my family. Problems our children encountered were the original impetus behind my husband and my decision to get involved in these issues, and that involvement has now become a major commitment that he and I share. Through my work on the Inclusion Project, I feel that I was able to take that commitment one step further or deeper, and a number of things have become more clear to me.

A. Facing challenges of inclusion within the project itself
B. A foundation for future work
C. Why community legal education on this issue is important

A. Facing challenges of inclusion within the project itself

One thing that is particularly striking to me as I look back on this project is that the very same issues we are trying to get school systems to address, the very same issues that families of children with disabilities so often encounter as they try to help their children meet their futures, were also present in our work on this project. We were carrying out this project across many kinds of difference, and sometimes those differences made life difficult.

For instance, some of the children in the dance group had diagnosed educational disabilities, while others did not. Further, each of the disabilities present was different from the others, and each posed its own challenges and offered its own rewards in the context of planning and carrying out our performance. The children were also of different ages, races, and economic backgrounds. Few of them knew each other at the beginning of the project. They had different degrees of interest and experience in dancing. The children’s parents, whose help with transportation and other support was crucial to the project, were each laboring under different kinds of burdens as well, and for quite understandable reasons they had different degrees of commitment to the project, and experienced different kinds of barriers to their own participation. So you can imagine that the path toward our final performance was not always smooth.

At one point, for instance, I remember Mark having a talk with one of the dancers who had strong ideas about excellence in dance, and who was struggling with what she took to be a lesser commitment by some of the other participants. Mark worked hard to help her see that the whole idea of the project was for each person to bring his or her issues to the table and express them through dance and gesture. He explained that it was important for all to be accepting of each other’s problems and to work out ways to resolve those differences and support one another. Then they discussed the larger picture of being involved in a project such as this, and how beneficial it could be for everyone involved. This was a great conversation, although of course it didn’t neatly resolve all the different pushes and pulls that we all continued to feel as we worked on the project.

Despite the undeniable difficulties, it was great to see the children working through them and delivering a performance that moved its audience. I remember especially the day that we performed at the LRE for LIFE conference. We had called a final dress rehearsal for late that afternoon, on site at the hotel, and there was some time between that last rehearsal and the actual performance, while people were gathering, and the children had to wait for curtain time. As I looked over at the place where they were waiting, I was really struck by the scene. The children were braiding and fixing each other’s hair, playing together, and just enjoying each other’s company, without any big fanfare or programming or supervision. After all, they had naturally gotten to know each other over the course of rehearsals, and they were about to carry off a high-stakes joint endeavor.

It seemed to me as I looked at the children that afternoon that the project had transcended its original boundaries and had become larger than we could have planned. Not only were we depicting in a performance that children may learn and build relationships together if only given the chance; but in reality, in the process of creating and rehearsing their dance, our children had done just that. They had found a bond among them that had emerged in the course of their working together, and in that moment of calm before the performance, it was there for all to see.

I am not suggesting that all our political and artistic goals and visions for the project were fully achieved, or that all the tensions among our multiple goals and desires were easy to navigate or optimally addressed. But the project was a wonderful start, and I believe the very difficulties we encountered among ourselves made the project more authentic and more encouraging.

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