Yesterday morning I spent some time observing two of our classrooms in the high school.  In the first room, a design class, students were finalizing a design project that required them to transform a sketch into a design prototype.  Students had been granted the autonomy to pursue their own design as well as use prototyping materials of their choosing.  Once the prototype was complete – as most of them were during my visit – students were required to prepare a formal reflection on their process of taking a sketch to a physical prototype.  

I started asking students about their projects.  One of the students had a prototype of a cereal box sitting on the desk.  Perhaps it caught my attention because in some ways it was a very simple design.  When I asked the student about it, she quickly pointed my attention to a QR code on the box that brought up an audio recording, with the hope that blind people could have access to the information.  She was working out some of the details, and was cognizant of the fact that QR codes are a visual cue that are not always accessible to the blind.  Regardless, she was passionate in her pursuit of a design whose primary purpose was to enhance access for the visually impaired.

After spending some time interacting with students, I went into the classroom next door.  This was a new media class, and again students were working independently on a project.  In this case, they were working on scripts for an awareness campaign.  Apparently, after some discussion, the class had settled on the topic of inclusion as the focus of the campaign.  As I talked with some of the students, they showed me their script storyboarding brainstorms, full of ideas about how to encourage fellow students to be more aware of both the challenges and resources available associated with student special needs.  

On a random day, in a pair of random classrooms, I stumbled upon students actively engaged in thinking about how we can make our classrooms, our school, and our world, a more inclusive place.  It definitely put a smile on my face to see that the work is moving forward at the classroom level with students.  Of course we still have lots of work to do, but it was a welcome manifestation of our collective intentions as a school community.