Dr Erin Mahon is a Research Fellow in the Caribbean Educational Research Centre at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill. She holds an Honours BA in Psychology from Trent University,Ontario and graduated with distinction with an MSc in Counselling Psychology from the University of the West Indies. Erin’s PhD is in Education and her doctoral thesis investigated Parental Involvement in Special Education in Barbados. Erin has worked for over a decade as an educator, andserved as Head of both the English and Remedial Departments before joining the team at the Caribbean Educational Research Centre. She had lectured in both Inclusive Education and Psychology at the University of the West Indies and is currently investigating special education and inclusive practices in Barbados and the Eastern Caribbean.
Session Description
“Cultivating spaces where all students thrive: Teacher reflections on inclusive practices in the Caribbean”
The Disability Inclusion Policy and Strategy (DIPAS) 2022-2030 serves as a guide for the achievement of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development Goals (United Nations General Assembly, 2015). Annex A of DIPAS presents UNICEF priorities as they align with the UNICEF Strategic Plan (2022-2025) and states that an educational goal is to “develop teacher education that allows teachers to reflect on their biases and prejudice, and strengthen teacher capacity in inclusive pedagogy” (UNICEF, 2022).
Some research has been conducted on teacher perspectives on inclusion in Barbados, and the Caribbean (Glasgow-Charles, Ibrahim-Joseph, & Bristol, 2017), and the need for teacher training in inclusive practices has been noted (UNESCO, 2020). Further, Blackman (2023) investigated how teachers enrolled in a Master’s program in Inclusive Education incorporated principles from the Learning without Limits (LWL) (Hart et al, 2004) project into their teaching practice. The LWL project promotes a pedagogy free from ability labelling and focuses instead on learner capacity. According to the project, learner capacity can be transformed using three practical pedagogical principles: Coagency, Everybody, and Trust (Hart et al, 2004).
In response to the juxtaposition of the international research and research that has been conducted regionally and locally, and results of a study investigating how a sample of teachers from Barbados and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines who have been exposed to the principles encapsulated in the LWL project view their own inclusive practices will be presented.