Being inclusive
Being inclusive in the learning environment means acknowledging and including everyone's diverse attributes, regardless of whether they are in a minority group or have special needs. Some examples of diversity are differences in gender, age, ethnic origin, culture, sexuality, disability and socio-economic background.
It's not just being fair to people to treat everyone equally, it's also a legal obligation. There are various laws that protect particular groups of people who may be disadvantaged by unfair treatment from the trainer, other students or management.
These include the following laws:
- Anti Discrimination Act
- Disability Discrimination Act
- Equal Opportunity Act
- Racial Discrimination Act
- Sex Discrimination Act.
As well as these general laws, there are specific parts of the Vocational Education and Training Act and the Standards for RTOs that deal with the responsibility of trainers to ensure that no-one is discriminated against on the basis of their personal characteristics or attributes. This includes making sure that other students don't 'pick on' or exclude a fellow participant because of their differences.
The Acts referred to above can be viewed or downloaded from the Australasian Legal Information Institute website.
Inclusive practice case study
Read through the case study below, and then answer the questions.
You are delivering a traineeship to a group of workers in an engineering workshop. The eight trainees come off the job once per week for a half-day group session in the company's board room.
All of the workers are native English speakers, except for Jian, who was born in Hong Kong. Jian's spoken English is very good, because he has lived in Australia for the last 10 years, and also studied English at school in Hong Kong.
The biggest problem Jian has with verbal communication is understanding the subtleties of 'ironic' humour, which is a particular characteristic of Australian working-class humour.
For example, at the end of the first day's training the workers were asked questions in a group session, and had to give on-the-spot answers to demonstrate their understanding of the topics.
Each time Jian was asked a question he gave a technically perfect response, which impressed everyone in the group.
After a couple of these 'textbook' answers, someone said: 'Oh Jian's obviously cheating, he must be reading the notes under the table'. Everyone laughed, except for Jian, who protested that he wasn't cheating at all. His innocent reaction had made the joke even funnier.
Since that time the ironic jokes have continued, because that is a normal part of the trainees' sense of humour. However, some of the jokes have been directed at Jian simply because he doesn't 'get' them, with the result that he thinks they are poking fun at him.
You have started to think that the jokes are going over the top, too, but you haven't said anything because you don't want to spoil the relaxed atmosphere among the participants.
The problem now is that Jian's supervisor has phoned you the day before you're due to attend the next training session. He tells you that Jian won't be coming along and wants to drop out of the course completely. The supervisor can't understand it, because Jian is an excellent worker and is obviously very bright.
You are very surprised and a bit embarrassed by this development - you had no idea the situation had become this serious. You agree to meet with the supervisor early the next day, before you start the day's training, and also to meet separately with Jian, to see if you can persuade him to stay on with the training program.
Questions
1. Why do you think Jian has reacted like this? How do you think he would he be feeling?
2. What are you going to tell the supervisor when you meet with him? What course of action will you put forward as a way of dealing with the problem and trying to get Jian to reconsider his decision to leave the course?
3. When you meet separately with Jian, what will you say to him?
4. Would it be fair to say that you should have seen this problem coming? What could you have done earlier in the piece to defuse the situation before it got to this stage?