8. Roots of Inclusive Education

The seeds of inclusive education were planted at the Haring Center over 50 years ago. Throughout those five decades, those roots have grown in a number of different directions, as roots often do, to signify that inclusion has changed considerably and so have we. The Experimental Education Unit was created to conduct research with the goal of developing more effective techniques to teach children who did not have access to the public school system. At that time, many children with disabilities or delays were excluded from public education for reasons that had nothing to do with academic performance, leaving many families without options for their children’s education and future well-being.

Those children received an education at the EEU. The scientific approaches to the learning or educational interventions for young children within the classroom which are now used in classrooms around the country, can be traced back to a handful of Experimental Education Unit (EEU) pioneers, such as K. Eileen Allen.

While teaching at the EEU, Eileen and her colleagues Betty Hart, Joan Buell, Florence Harris and Montrose Wolf, were the first to record the effects of teacher interventions on social behaviors of children with disabilities. The result of the study, titled Effects of Social Reinforcement on Isolate Behavior of a Nursery School Child (1964) is now considered a seminal work in early childhood education and special education.

Eileen continued her work, writing The Exceptional Child, a book filled with classic and then-current research on all aspects of educating young children with special needs. The text, now in its eighth edition, as early as the original printing (1991) advocated for the necessity of inclusion as a classroom milieu, not a style of instruction — a distinction that has since defined every program, training and child’s education at the Haring Center. This book continues to be a classic text for students in early childhood education.

Subsequent work by colleagues Norris Haring, Alice Hayden, Ilene Schwartz, Tom Lovitt, Felix Billingsly, Gene Edgar, Owen White, Susan Sandall, Rebecca Fewell, and Joe Jenkins are deeply rooted in the same philosophies as Eileen Allen:

1. Everyone Can Learn
2. Ability Should Not Stand in the Way of Friendship
3. Student Failure is Instructional Failure
4. Children with Disabilities are Children First

Following these principles has led Haring Center researchers and educators to discover breakthroughs and develop best practices in the field including in the areas of family and sibling support, Down syndrome, applied behavior analysis, teen media, Head Start and autism intervention.

Recently, the Haring Center has taken a more active approach to spreading these philosophies and instructional practices throughout the Seattle community and Washington state by creating the Professional Development Unit. The PDU provides training and coaching to teach the methods refined at the EEU to school districts, childcare and early learning centers. The next goal for the Haring Center is to plant new roots in as many places possible to eventually see a garden of inclusion where everyone can participate regardless of ability. Only at that point will our communities truly blossom.