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Social Capital

Writer's picture: Saundra BishopSaundra Bishop

I'm a huge advocate for students with special needs to be in traditional classrooms if at all possible. There are a ton of reasons: peer role model, access to academics, potentially less exposure to classrooms with high intensity behaviors (when you get multiple students together it can feed off of itself), opportunity to make friends with an additional cohort of kids, and the fact that they can't be a part of a community if they aren't allowed to engage with it. 


I was in a workshop recently and they talked about social capital as well. I was thinking about the factors above and how they relate to the protective factors of inclusion. If people know you, then they look out for you. If a student is well known, then other students are more likely to step in (or avoid) bullying and predatory behavior. Now this is certainly not universal but is an interesting concept. The other notion is that if people know you, they are more likely to consider inclusivity for events. Students are more likely to think about accommodations and invitations.


This  made me think about a student that I once worked with who was well known by his peers. He was given the opportunity to be the “manager” of the baseball team. He collected the equipment and whatnot. This allowed him to be a part of the team. He was included in team movie outings, the homecoming float, and the group limo to prom. This could easily turn into tokenism (inviting him just because he is disabled and making a big deal about how nice they are to include him) but ultimately it just provided an opportunity for him to be with peers. 


I worked with another student who had a supported job placement. This meant that he worked at a grocery store as a bagger with an aide. There was an employee who was alone with him at one point and asked him for cash and the student gave it to him. Another employee found out, immediately reported it, and that staff person was fired. We were able to swiftly review a teaching program related to this. Because he was engaged in a community role (versus a sheltered job placement) he had the opportunity to engage with coworkers who supported him. They created space not only to protect him but also created an opportunity for natural environment teaching that could protect him from more serious fraud in the future. 


Another example is a student who used an AAC device. He was in a lower elementary classroom and his peers were so excited that at recess some of his peers made paper versions of the AAC device for themselves to use. This meant some modeling took place, there was some normalization, and there was some understanding of how the communication worked. Now, there was a line between pretending they couldn't communicate with words and using it as a collaborative tool. We had to keep an eye out for that. But ultimately it created a situation where community was built. 


Keeping kids in inclusion isn’t just about giving kids with disabilities peer models. It is also about creating that social capital- providing opportunities for students to develop opportunities in social relationships. The next step is having leverage and power in those relationships. We don’t want our students to only rely on being included- we want them to also be able to choose who they want to interact with. The 1st step to that is them having access to a wide variety of peers so they can choose who they like and who they don’t like. Now we need to focus on the second step. 


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