Challenges

Currently, Uruguay is going through a paradigm shift process regarding its educational model. Inclusive Education has sparked momentum in the different spheres that make up the educational system so that various organizations, areas, and policies progressively incorporate this perspective, according to a set of legislation, regulations, and recommendations from international organizations that advocate for a Human Rights approach.

Within the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC), the National Directorate of Education has developed an educational policy in the Inclusion and Human Rights Axis, which responds to the issue of Inclusive Education and attention to diversity, through the “Articulators of inclusion in territory” (AIT by its Spanish acronym) Project, initiated in 2019. This configures a public policy of Inclusive Education that includes strategies to train, raise awareness, advise, and attend to diversity with educational centers and their teaching teams from a Human Rights approach.

Toward a Solution

The AIT Project seeks to support educational teams in identifying barriers and subsequently developing proposals, guidelines, and guides that promote resolving and innovative strategies to progressively eliminate those barriers that limit the learning and participation of all students. Additionally, it seeks to contribute and collectively build, with educational teams and central coordinators, the most appropriate tools to achieve and improve the center\’s accessibility from a Human Rights approach. Likewise, it has the learning of all students as its beacon, which implies the challenge of providing proposals that are adapted to their interests, in order to achieve commitment through motivation, through learning preferences and the deployment of skills. It represents a change in pedagogical dynamics, developing an inclusive culture based on new ways of educating and motivating. The AIT Project promotes Inclusive Education through teaching, support, and leadership strategies that aim to guarantee equal right to Education for all people.

The project implementation process is characterized by the following intervention stages:

1. Familiarization
2. Demand construction.
3. Planning of timely actions.
4. Development of timely actions.

The project has managed to position itself as a reference on the subject within the MEC. After four years since its inception, requests for advice and training increase year after year. Work has been done with 100% of the Educational Centers for Training, Art and Production (Cecap) under the MEC, consolidating inclusion processes and annually conducting national conceptual update instances. Inter-institutional articulations have increased in order to promote processes of transformation of inclusive education environments and practices. The project has accompanied more than 22 educational communities throughout the Uruguayan territory. Systematization reports are available for each experience. During 2023 alone, 19 resources and materials were developed from the Inclusion Articulators in Territory Project for accompanied educational centers. More than 150 training activities on accessibility and inclusive education, aimed at officials of the Ministry of Education and Culture, and training instances aimed at other institutions, were also carried out.

The project is based on an innovative methodology that can be characterized as an in-situ practice, challenged by the exercise of active listening, and individualized to each educational community, while being flexible to the construction of territorial characteristics, generating intervention accents according to the requirements of the teams, which is substantial for the development of inclusive cultures and policies, in tune with the particularities of each territory.

Inclusive Education is understood as a process that unfolds over time through actions at various scales and with the inescapable commitment of its protagonists. Therefore, the intervention aims at defining sustainable strategies, built and assumed by the local teams themselves, which once implemented are the subject of collective reflection with the purpose of installing learning dynamics from practice. This way, the construction of Inclusive Education capacities and resources that remain in the educational center once the work process is completed is favored.

It is a replicable proposal: on one hand, its conceptual and methodological framework is based on the Index for Inclusion (Booth, 2000). Based on this document, an implementation plan is developed with stages similar to the process of action research. Furthermore, the intervention is conceived from proximity, knowledge of the characteristics of the educational community, and the flexible adaptation of the most convenient work strategies. Therefore, various work modalities are possible in each of the educational areas.

The first conditioning factor for replicability is the commitment of the educational center to be willing to work in the framework of this methodology. The project will not be successful if the teaching team does not facilitate timely intervention in the detection, transformation, and evaluation of educational practices. Likewise, the territorial situation will determine the possible lines of action around inter-institutional articulation. The existence of thematic nodes and networks will enable greater scope of the intervention. Finally, it is crucial to have professional profiles to assume this role with technical knowledge in inclusive education, flexibility, and creativity for the design of interventions.