Chapter 9: Just the Bathwater, not the Baby: Presenting an Alternative Framework to Inclusive Education in the Global South

Working as a special education professional and international consultant in inclusive education to the government Ministry of Education in Cambodia, I met a family with a 12-year-old blind daughter, Phalla, who had never been to school because her parents believed her blindness made her incapable of learning. However, in conversations with her, I noticed that she was bright and eager to learn and, with my Ministry colleagues, began to try to persuade the parents to send her to school. We explained that the Ministry of Education had just developed a collaborative pilot initiative with a local nonprofit agency to enroll students with visual impairments at the local school and provide them with the necessary supports to ensure their academic success in inclusive settings. It was the first such effort in the country—surely the parents would want to avail of such an opportunity! Besides, Phalla had the right to an education. But the parents sounded reluctant. How could Phalla learn anything if she was blind and started to study so much later than her siblings, they asked. They pointed out that, at 12, she would be older than her classmates and would be teased. No, she was useless, they said, she couldn’t even help to plant rice!

As we listened to the family, we realized that what the family wanted for Phalla was for her to contribute in some way to the family income. Perhaps there would be good outcomes for her by going to school and being a good student, but there would be better outcomes for both her and her family if she could help to reduce their burden of poverty. And although we believed that Phalla had the right to an education, to this family and community, the group prerogative was more important than her individual right. So, together, this family of rice farmers and the special education professionals set about to develop a modification that would allow her to plant rice. I learned that there are two steps involved in planting rice. In the first step, the seed is sown at random, even thrown in, where Phalla could be involved if she used small sweeps of her hand to keep the seed within the rice bed. But in the second step, the transplanting, each plant must be placed manually in neat rows at equal intervals, a back-breaking task undertaken by women because of their manual dexterity. But if she couldn’t see the rows and measure these distances, how could she help to transplant the rice? The device that the group came up with was low-cost and used local materials: two sticks that would be placed by a sibling at two ends of a row and connected by a string that had knots at the same distance at which the shoots should be transplanted. By running her hand along the string, Phalla would know where to place the new shoot; when she came to the end of the row, her sibling would just move the stakes to the next row. The family was delighted with this simple device and, at the end of our visit, even said they might consider enrolling Phalla in the school once the planting season was over!