Planning Inclusion: The Need to Formalize Parental Participation in Individual Education Plans (and Meetings)

Abstract

Inclusive education is promoted as an educational setting that brings together students with disabilities alongside non-disabled peers. As the rise in inclusive education continues, many recognize the Salamanca Statement of 1994 as an influencer. This paper discusses how the vision of inclusion grounded in “the need to work towards ‘schools for all’” remains unfulfilled through a lack of intersectionality. Centering the experiences of Spanish-speaking mothers of emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled, this paper presents how educators limit parents’ abilities to engage as equal stakeholders. Therefore, this paper explores the tensions culturally and linguistically diverse mothers encounter during Individual Education Plan (IEP) meetings and the possibilities that can come from reimagining IEPs and IEP meetings in ways that allow stakeholders to actively tend to the intersectional vision of inclusive education that Salamanca put forth and that emergent bilinguals labeled as disabled desperately need.

Keywords:

• emergent bilinguals
• inclusive education
• individual education plans
• Latinx mothers
• Salamanca Statement

Acknowledgments

I’d like to thank: (1) Dr. Artiles for leading the charge, (2) Rebecca Linares for pushing me to get this finished, on time, in the midst of a pandemic, and (3) the editors and reviewers, whose feedback were integral in getting this piece to press.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 While the data are presented here in English, it was collected in Spanish. Excerpts are italicized to indicate they are translations of the original text – parenthetical numbers at the end corresponds with the original Spanish quotes available online as supplementary material.