The place of the Resource Room In Inclusive Education

The Resource Room – It’s Place in Inclusive Education

Much has been written about inclusive education and the best way to implement it in schools in India.

While the concept is firmly established in the States, many other Western countries and India continue to struggle with the best ways in which to implement it in their school system.

Most countries are comfortable in including those children who will benefit from the prevailing academic curriculum and are willing to make slight modifications in content. They also make huge modifications in terms of adapting teaching strategies as well as the evaluation procedures. So children with learning disabilities (dyslexia, dysgraphia) and slow learners benefit immensely from this system.

But inclusion means that ALL children will be educated by ALL teachers in ALL schools so we have a duty to include those children whose learning needs will be different enough to warrant more than slight adaptations in the curriculum.  In this context I am talking about children with moderate to severe intellectual disability (mental retardation) children with severe autism. These children are usually in special schools since there is no place for them in the current school system.

It is for these children specially that the resource room becomes an invaluable construct in the road to inclusion.

The value of resource room can be seen in many forms.

1.     Any child can be a student of the school. Having a resource room allows a school to admit children with moderate to severe cognitive disabilities. In other words these are the children who typically go to special schools because they cannot “COPE” with the regular school. Instead of saying that we cannot admit  children with severe disabilities, the school can welcome them since the resource room allows for a different program where the needs of  these students will be met, By giving them a separate classroom any child can learn at his pace in the resource room and gain all the benefits of inclusion which include interacting with his peers while participating in the the daily rhythm of life  of his school community.

2.     A seperate curriculum- When it comes to curriculum modification King-Sears (2001) identified four types of curriculum modification. The resource room allows for the development of a parallel or overlapping curriculum so that children with more severe learning difficulties will be part of the school. Thus children with severe learning difficulties need not be banned from a regular school environment. The table below  explains the different types of modifications that a school will have to make in order to admit children with a range of learning abilites.

Level	Content/Knowledge	Conceptual Difficulty	Intended goals	Methods of instruction
Accommodation	Same as general education curriculum	Same as general curriculum	Same or modified	Modified
Adaptation	Same as general curriculum	Slightly modified	Modified	Modified
Parallel	Same as general curriculum	Significantly modified	Modified	Modified
Overlapping	Different	Different Significantly	Modified	Different

3.     Development of the IEP (Individualized Education Program). A key component of any resource room is the development of the IEP. Based on the type of curriculum existing in the resource room, each student will have an IEP. The aim of this is to provide each child with a set of functional goals which accomplish the dual purpose of learning skills which allow for independence as well as those which allow for interaction with students in the general stream

4.     Highly individualized instructional strategies. The existence of an IEP naturally means that many teaching strategies will be highly individualized and very activity based. While this is extremely difficulty in the general classroom it is munch more feasible in the resource room where the numbers of children are less. One can also change the organization of the classroom to allow for different activities which is very difficult in the general classroom

5.      Allowance for participation in the general school routine. Given our current educational system where there is still an overly academic focus in the classroom and also overcrowding it becomes difficult for children with intellectual disability (ID) and autism to spend the entire day in the general classroom The resource room allows students who face these difficulties to participate in the general classroom activities  at times which are beneficial to them e.g. non academic classes, or assembly while still learning skills which are necessary to them in the resource room.

An aid to sensitization and disability awareness. The RR also has the advantage of being a place where mainstream students can come and interact with the students with special needs in small groups. They get a chance to be with their students of the resource room and participate in activities and learn first hand that children with disabilities are capable of learning. It is an opportunity for them to ask question about the students of the resource room and clarify myths and misconceptions that exist about disabilities. The awareness of disability is not just limited to the students of the school. The parents of the general school, the teachers and the non teaching staff are all exposed to the world of