At school with a disability

Last week I wrote about ways in which the national (Australian) curriculum supports students who live with a disability. This is through the General Capabilities. I mentioned the Personal and Social Capability, but there’s another – Ethical Understanding.

In an ideal world we would not need to directed towards ethical behaviour but unfortunately that is not the case. Prejudice abounds. People of colour experience it as much as people who live with disability. I am neither but I find myself writing books and articles with a social conscience – for adults as well as children.

To quote ACARA: In the Australian Curriculum, students develop ethical understanding as they identify and investigate the nature of ethical concepts, values and character traits, and understand how reasoning can assist ethical judgement. Ethical understanding involves students building a strong personal and socially oriented ethical outlook that helps them to manage context, conflict and uncertainty, and to develop an awareness of the influence that their values and behaviour have on others. It does this through fostering the development of ‘personal values and attributes such as honesty, resilience, empathy and respect for others’, and the capacity to act with ethical integrity, as outlined in the Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (MCEETYA 2008, p. 9).

Exactly how ethical understanding is to be taught is left to the teacher, with advice such as:

Complex issues require responses that take account of ethical considerations such as human rights and responsibilities, animal rights, environmental issues and global justice.

Building ethical understanding throughout all stages of schooling will assist students to engage with the more complex issues that they are likely to encounter in the future, and to navigate a world of competing values, rights, interests and norms.

HUMAN RIGHTS include those of children who live with a disability.

In the absence of specific lessons or books, I hope teachers will find ways of addressing this general capability. I invite them to browse my book for younger readers – In My World – which portrays two children (one short-statured, the other a wheelchair user) and introduce it as compulsory reading!