How Underdeveloped Policy and Planning for Inclusive ECE Produces “Disability”
June 22nd, 2024
9:30 - 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time
Online
Presented by Dr. Laura Coulman
This talk argues that weak policy and poor planning for children with disabilities in ECE sends a message that they do not belong in ECE. More specifically, it discusses how ECE policy and planning reinforces a perception that inclusion of children with disabilities is optional. In other words, although children with disabilities are invited to participate in child care, the invitation is always conditional.
This discussion is timely as Canada is on the verge of a nation-wide early learning and child care system. The biggest policy event in Canada’s history. How might we develop good policies and plans for children with disabilities in ECE? How, then, might we avoid perpetuating the conditions whereby children with disabilities are subordinate, less than, and not fully human in ECE?
This discussion is intended to provoke thoughts about what needs to change in policy so that children with disabilities are no longer conditionally invited into child care.
Professional development hours will be provided for participants.
Laura Coulman tells her bachelor students that she is their much-loved professor of early learning program development at Conestoga College in Ontario. Accumulated scholarly and experiential evidence has made Laura into a confident believer that good policy and clear system planning is a requirement for excellent child care programs to exist in a sustainable way in this country. As a former policy analyst in municipal government, a registered early childhood educator with the Ontario College of ECEs, and, most recently, a Doctor of Philosophy, she is even more committed now to figuring out why in the heck ECEC so readily defaults to oppressive tropes and rhetoric when the chips are down and when the possibilities for real change present themselves! Laura finds joy and existential answers in RuPaul’s Drag Race, slow running, and unconventional uses of Hobbes’s social contract theory for early childhood education. Laura lives in Guelph Ontario with her husband and lovely dog, Mia. Together they plot how to get their grown children to leave home.