Inclusion & Rightful Presence in Education with Kevin Schaefer

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Welcome to the Middletown Podcast.
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I'm Kat Hughes, I'm a researcher at Middletown, and I'm also autistic.
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In this episode, I checked to Kevin Schaefer, who's Director of Equity and Inclusive Practices for the Supporting Inclusive Practices Project in California.
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The project focuses on empowering students, school staff, and policymakers to collaboratively create a world that values, belonging, and equity.
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The podcast was recorded with Kevin as part of the center's work in providing an inclusion symposium promoting rightful presence in Northern Ireland in September 2026.
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It will form part of a series of recordings and resources to support inclusion as part of the Department of Education Northern Ireland's SEN reform agenda.
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Chatting to Kevin was such a treat.
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He's so passionate about inclusion and rightful presence.
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We chat about how viewing inclusion as a social justice issue can help us make leaps in understanding.
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And Kevin shares practical steps that schools can take.
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I left our chat feeling so energized.
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I hope you feel the same way listening.
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Kevin, it's so lovely to chat to you for the podcast.
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First, I thought I wanted to ask you a little bit about SIP and the brilliant work that you guys do.
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Absolutely.
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Supporting the Innovative Practices, it's a project here in California that's funded by the California Department of Education Special Education Division and the legislature.
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We work with school districts, leadership teams to create environments that are meaningfully inclusive for all students with disabilities.
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We work from a systems perspective to ensure that environments are designed to provide students with disabilities not only representation in the environments in which they're educated, but also what is what does a sense of belonging and relationship and community look like?
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Um, so we've also um gone deeply into specific contexts of the individual districts that we work with because every context is different.
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Therefore, every implementation, every systemic implementation um process looks different.
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So for us to be effective in our work, we have to understand the initiatives and the priorities and the mindset, policies, and practices within that organization to really do the meaningful work.
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Having said that, the other piece to this work is eliciting the voice from those that we are designing with, not for.
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I think often we assume that as the adults in the system, as the experts in the system, as the educators and administrators, we assume we know what's best.
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But without eliciting the voice, we don't know and we're we're functioning on assumptions and often miss the mark.
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So we work with our districts over the course of five to seven years to really make that systemic, sustainable change so that the students with disabilities aren't just placed in an environment that's not designed for them, but they're actually experiencing that sense of belonging and rightful presence.
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Beautiful.
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And first question, and and I'm already nodding vigorously and agreeing with everything that you're saying.
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That's brilliant.
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And where did your passion for inclusion come from in your sort of your personal journey towards that?
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Well, that's a great question.
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Um, so I was in a pull-out speech class um beginning in kindergarten.
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So um that period of time is, I think, the most vivid of memories that I have of my entire educational career.
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So I just turned 60 this year, and this was when I was five to 10 years old.
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And so 55 years ago, these memories are so explicit in that feeling of leaving an environment and then not knowing why you're leaving that environment because no one's talking about disability, especially from an asset-based perspective.
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So the the vividness of walking down the hallway alone as a five-year-old and remembering the the color of the tile on the wall and the wires in the window of the office and the names of the two students in the session before me to this day, the emotional connection that the decisions we make as adults carry carry the the self-perception and questioning of our students lifelong.
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Um no one no one said, you know, you're you're you're leaving the class and you're going to do these things that no one else is going to be doing.
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No one talked to me about it.
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And I think in in our culture, what we don't talk about oftentimes turns the shame in the stories that we tell ourselves, the assumptions that we make, the the the um ideas that we create by not knowing.
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So I I I think such a critical part of this work is how we use our language to connect with and to refer to and about and design individuals with disabilities.
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Like, like let's identify the ableism simply in the language that we use that then creates the mindset and the culture that we educate students in.
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Absolutely, and yeah, that's very similar for myself.
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That one of my memories, main memories is that feeling of just having your name called and knowing that you're standing up and everyone knows you're standing up and you're going somewhere else.
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And that feeling of being different is yeah, it stays with you, doesn't it?
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Yeah.
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Well, and the other thing that I think is super interesting is being a part of the LGBTQ community, spending spending the early part of my life trying to deny a part of who I am, to deny an identity in order to fit in and be safe.
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I think our students with disabilities, same thing.
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We deny our identity of disability because it's seen as a deficit too often.
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So we work to hide it or deny it in order to feel that sense of of um connectedness to avoid isolation or segregation.
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It's it's it's a super interesting flip.
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Most definitely, yeah.
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And how has our understanding of inclusion and approach to inclusion changed and evolved over time then?
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Do you think?
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I think inclusion too often, inclusion and placement are seen as synonymous.
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Or maybe another way to put it is that inclusion as seen as simply moving students into a place.
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When we when when we connect rightful presence to inclusion, now we're talking about um students having a starting point in that space, not being invited into the space, determined on whether or not they've earned it.
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Like nobody has to earn their way into a place that should be designed for them as that starting.
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I mean, that that that that inclusion too often is rooted in the guest host dynamic, that the adults are seen as the hosts in spaces that uh students with disabilities should automatically have a sense of belonging in.
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And on the flip side, the adults also have the power to uninvite uh students to say you don't belong in this space.
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And think about the power that a person has to say you don't belong here.
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You don't you have you you aren't going to be afforded the connection or access to your peers.
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You won't be afforded authentic learning environments that you're gonna have to navigate after you leave the educational system.
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Like we we too often disable students, we handicap students from lifelong opportunities and positive outcomes.
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When we start identifying the impliciteness of ableism in our decisions and our thinking, now we're getting to a level of understanding.
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And um I think that's I think that's where improvements are made.
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We've gone from simply compliance to how are we just how are we um defining inclusion from a perspective of human dignity?
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I love that term rightful presence.
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I think that's so useful and it's such a a switch in thinking, isn't it?
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Because as you say, you can look at inclusion or even I I often say it about the term autism friendly.
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It's sort of like it ring fences whatever it is, an event, a classroom, whatever it might be, and say, okay, this belongs to the non-autistic, non-disabled, neurotypical kids, but we'll invite you in.
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But it's still ours, but we'll invite you in.
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But rightful presence just puts everyone right in the center of it, which is just gorgeous.
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Yes, the best.
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Yeah, it really is.
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And then have you found pushback in your work in terms of elements of inclusion or pushback in certain places in relation to inclusion from certain organized, like whether it's policymakers or educators, are there places where there's a pushback?
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Yeah.
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Our project was just refunded for another five-year cycle.
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So I think legislatively, policy at the state level, beyond anything I've experienced in my 30 years in education, the the the legislate, the legislation is just um really focused on inclusion and special education, uh, which I'm beyond excited about.
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Um, I think when when we talk about pushback, it almost it almost takes us to the individual district or organization, site, and classroom.
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Like the individuals that make up an organization, that's where you that's where the groundswell has to happen.
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Because we it it's easy to um kind of blame general education teachers for maybe pushback for students with disabilities coming in their classroom.
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But when we get to the root of that, it's are they are are general education teachers trained in in their um college-university experience?
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Are they trained?
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Do they have the resources?
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Do they have the knowledge, not just of special education, but disability justice?
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And those are two separate things.
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Um, but then we can also look at the special education teacher perspective.
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And we've found, and this is a generalization, is that oftentimes the um ableism is in the special ed world where I want to segregate my students because it's it's my identity as a special education teacher to protect students with disabilities.
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Therefore, I'm going to keep them safe in the segregated environment.
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So we have an or we have a system that bifurcates often at the teacher level.
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Um, but when we when we get down to this idea of protection for students with disabilities, um, we're also denying them the dignity of risk or like making mistakes and failing in authentic environments, or like practicing how do I develop relationships?
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What are the words I need to have in order to mitigate an argument?
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If we educate our students with disabilities with other students with like disabilities in an artificial environment and then expect them to be successful post-secondary, it doesn't happen that way, which requires us to have a long-range view of the decisions that we make when students enter our system and every year throughout.
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What are we planning for?
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That moment in time they're in our care, or ensuring that we're developing the skills and the self-advocacy and the self-determination necessary for students to be independent.
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That that's something that I've heard you speak every time every time I think I've heard you speak or read something that you've written, you bring that notion of self-advocacy into it.
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And I don't think that is always thought of in relation to inclusion, but it's so central to it, isn't it?
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I it's the goal and it for a young adult to know themselves, know what works for them, know what doesn't work for them, and then to have the knowledge and the skill to actually ask for it.
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And and that's what we develop in in our that's what we should be developing in our educational environment, because we make decisions for students with disabilities, not with students with disabilities based on what their hopes and their dreams are too often.
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Um and then we expect self-advocacy and self-determination, and it it just doesn't work that way.
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Yeah, yeah.
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There has to be that room to explore and learn what works and what doesn't work.
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As you say, you know, it's so very important to navigate those challenges and and explore things that don't work out and how you back out of those situations and can advocate for you so yeah.
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It's very important.
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One of the terms and myself and my team, our team of um 15 across California, one of one of the um terms that we've learned and use is the dignity of risk.
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Like we deny the dignity of risk when we over-accommodate for students with disabilities.
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And and one of the examples, and I love this this example because I think it's number one, very common.
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And then number two, um it's a it's a decision that we make in the best interest when we provide a one-on-one paraeducator.
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Like we want the student to be successful, we're gonna um uh have a one-on-one paraeducator with the student, and all is gonna be good.
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Too often, the paraeducator might be untrained, might not um understand deeply how to de-escalate or to communicate or to fade their support, and we end up with a student that then relies on an adult for the decisions that they make or their wants and their needs and their accommodations because they're speaking for the student.
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So that accommodation with the best interest is often resulting in a negative outcome if not applied appropriately, and that the system is set up to train our paraeducators and to understand disability, different categories and um like the same, you've met one autistic student, you've met one autistic student.
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Um, but we often apply the same accommodations and the same approaches to all students with disabilities as an umbrella category.
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And it's just not how things roll.
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No, like it isn't for anyone, you know.
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It you know, and we all are individuals, disabled, autistic, whatever it might be, or not, you know, it it we all have our own individual preferences and need.
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Well, and that I love um one of the one of the areas that we ask to really focus on um most often is universal design for learning, this idea of learner variability.
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Like it's not just students with disabilities who need different accommodations or um different methodologies to actually access the instruction or the the benefits of the environment.
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This idea of um like a jagged learning profile, the myth of average, like no one's average.
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And students with disabilities are not always the um lowest academically or most um ill-behaved or in need of social emotional learning.
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But because they have a label, oftentimes there's the assumption that oh the students can do more of something that I maybe don't have or know about.
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But universal design for learning and and really thinking about learner variability, thinking about how to design the environment through a lens of how do we engage students, how do we represent information, how do we allow for multiple ways for students to express themselves.
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Yeah, I think it's very powerful.
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Certainly, it certainly is.
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And would you have any kind of practical tips for an education setting where they want to embrace that rifle presence idea?
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Yeah.
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Um a couple things, actually.
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Um we we recognize that many of the uh districts that we work with, they made they make the request that they want to see inclusion or rifle presence in practice.
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Like who is doing this work well and how can we connect with them?
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So we set up um demonstration sites with some of the districts that we have worked with over a period of time that have really made progress in a specific area of inclusion, which could be preschool inclusion, it could be co-teaching, it could be universal design for learning, um, secondary school master scheduling.
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And we've set up daylong um uh opportunities for visits.
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So they share their artifacts, they do classroom visits, they do panels, um, and they create a community of practice, which is really beautiful.
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So now we've got educators and administrators who are learning from each other um at different phases of the implementation of inclusion.
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So demonstration sites, the data that we've collected is very impactful.
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And then we've also created inclusion academies, which are three all-day sessions focused on inclusive culture, inclusive policy and data, and inclusive practice.
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And we take leadership teams through these day-long um uh sessions to create an implementation plan specific to their individual organizations.
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Um so yeah, I think I there there are so many examples.
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I think one of my favorite examples is the University of California at Davis, here close to Sacramento, where I am.
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Um it's called the Redwood Seed Scholars Program.
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And it's California's first four-year inclusive residential opportunity for students with developmental and intellectual disabilities to have an authentic college experience.
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Um, and it's fully inclusive.
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They are able to take any course that any um other student attending UC Davis can can take.
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And we work really closely with the director, and she's like, you know what?
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These youth that come into the program for the first time at the age of 18, 19, 20, have been asked, what do you want to do?
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What what what what class do you want to take?
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And often they don't know how to answer the question because they've never been asked.
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Um, and you know, they've they've now had two graduating classes, and all of the students are fully self determined.
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They're earning a competitive, integrated, family sustaining wage.
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Many of the students aren't from Davis, but they stay in Davis after graduation and oftentimes in the summer because they found their community.
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They found The place that they have a sense of belonging and worth, and they don't want to go home.
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Just core.
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That is so lovely.
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The best.
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Yeah.
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You can look it up online, and it's um just the most perfect example of what inclusion can lead to.
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And often our question that we ask the district teams that we work with is so we know that a college-university experience is available to our most marginalized students in our system.
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We have to reflect as the adults to say, is what we're providing our students while they are in our system leading to that potential opportunity if if if that is a need or a want for for our students.
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And we get into education to support students.
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The difficulty in this work is self-reflecting on our positive intention that could lead to outcomes and impact rooted in harm.
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And I think that that that dichotomy is difficult for some to digest.
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That what I'm deciding for a student, in the best interest of the student, I think, could actually harm lifelong.
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That's a hard, hard, hard pill to swallow.
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And what does an educator do in that instance?
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How do they take that step back then?
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It's you know Kat um coming to terms with our own ableism has to be normalized.
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Um and when when we when we talk about special education, we get people like in our inclusion academies or the the districts that we work with, when we talk about special education, there's this like separation.
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Like that's not that's not my responsibility.
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I don't know anything about special education.
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But when we talk about disability justice, when we talk about social justice through a disability lens, when we talk about ableism, when we talk about what it means to be an ally, people lean all in because it's something they don't know about.
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They they like when we bring up ableism, they're like, what is that?
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And if you can't identify it, you can't disrupt it.
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So separating out this idea of special education has roles and responsibilities, but it's everyone's responsibility to ensure we are designing a system rooted in disability justice.
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I think that that that delineation is critical because we assume that special education and special educators are responsible for students with disabilities.
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And that's a misnomer.
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We're all responsible.
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I love that.
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I love it.
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It's so true.
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And yeah, it's it's we don't talk nearly enough about that concept of disability justice and social justice in relation to disabled and autistic experience, and it's so, so important.
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And I think it also almost takes some pressure off because I feel like if people are just focused on, well, this is what I'm supposed to do, this is an autistic child, I need to do this, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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I've been told in the true training that this is what I have to do.
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If you take that step back and just think of it as a justice issue and serving everyone and and allowing everyone to have that equality and equity, it just makes such a difference.
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And it's something that we we keep on learning as we go.
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No one immediately knows everything, which I think is I live in this world, Kat, and I learn every day.
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I learn every day, and like sometimes it's just like my mind is blown.
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I'm like, I would not have thought of that.
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We had um a speaker, we always we always bring the the voice of the disability community into anything that we do.
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And um he was talking about labels, and um he said, you know, in in in my experience with education, I was always called the student with special needs, not derogatory, but I was just always the student with special needs from the disability community lens calling out the needs of a particular population as something special and different is othering.
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I'm like, I had considered that.
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And and we use that term all the time, like special needs.
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Um, student, student with a dis if it's not relevant to the conversation, don't use it, you know.
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Um, but just just that that language we use, the the the the labels that create stigma and stereotypes, we don't recognize because oftentimes we are non-disabled adults trying to create programs and environments for students with disabilities.
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And once we uh connect with that humility, like it takes humility that you are not an expert in disability.
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You're an expert in education, maybe delivering instruction, but not in the needs, the wants, the desires, the um expectations for students with disabilities.
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And that requires humility.
00:28:19.440 --> 00:28:24.559
And that's not often a place educators and administrators want to go.
00:28:24.880 --> 00:28:25.519
Yeah.
00:28:25.920 --> 00:28:41.680
And then my very last question for you, and we've I think we probably touched on this a few times already, but is there a particular myth that you would like to sort of get rid of in relation to either autism and autistic experience or inclusion in particular?
00:28:42.079 --> 00:28:43.680
That's a great question.
00:28:43.920 --> 00:28:47.759
Um, there are so many myths.
00:28:48.000 --> 00:29:13.920
Um, I think the one the one I will choose is that students with disabilities, it's assumed, require intensive support and services that have to be delivered in a segregated setting.
00:29:14.079 --> 00:29:27.599
Instead of looking at it through the lens, how do we bring those supports and services to the student in an authentic environment to honor the neurodiversity in our classrooms?
00:29:28.160 --> 00:29:38.400
Um, you know, if if if there is a need or a support or a service, we think about where where is that, where is that support or service?
00:29:38.559 --> 00:29:44.960
Like it's over there, or it's at that school, or it's in that that that that classroom in the back of the campus.
00:29:45.119 --> 00:29:57.279
They got to go there instead of flipping the coin and being like, well, we have experts that we can bring into a classroom into an authentic environment.
00:29:57.599 --> 00:30:05.359
And also that support and service then translates to the adults in that space.
00:30:05.519 --> 00:30:14.240
The adults are learning then how to work with a student that might require more intensive support and service in that authentic environment.
00:30:14.400 --> 00:30:25.839
And then we're pulling back on the expert to allow for more independence and for the instruction to be delivered by the instruction that's being delivered to all other students.
00:30:26.640 --> 00:30:30.079
So I think it's it's just that idea of supports and services.
00:30:30.160 --> 00:30:33.680
The students have to go to the supports and services somewhere else.
00:30:33.920 --> 00:30:47.680
Let's let's like flip that and change the system because special education too often has become the program that allows general education to maintain its homogeneity.
00:30:48.559 --> 00:30:55.920
You know, how do we expand the the need and the benefit of diversity?
00:30:56.160 --> 00:31:00.319
Because inclusion is not just in benefit to students with disabilities.
00:31:00.480 --> 00:31:09.119
We're denying non-disabled students the opportunity at empathy and connection and allyship to disability.
00:31:09.279 --> 00:31:16.000
And these are often the students that become the adults that are doing the hiring and the teaching and the doctoring, right?
00:31:16.720 --> 00:31:23.839
So it's it's it's it's it's a give and take that we're not being charitable to bring students with disabilities in an environment.
00:31:24.000 --> 00:31:32.720
We're actually doing it because it's the right thing to do for everyone in that environment, the adults and the students, to create more peer connection.
00:31:33.519 --> 00:31:35.519
Thanks so much for listening to the podcast.
00:31:35.839 --> 00:31:40.799
This is a conversation-based interview designed to stimulate thinking and hopefully support the development of practice.
00:31:40.960 --> 00:31:44.079
It's not intended to be medical or psychological advice.
00:31:44.400 --> 00:31:48.079
Views expressed from these chats may not always be the view of Metal Tan Center.
00:31:48.240 --> 00:31:53.200
If you'd like to know more about Middleton, you can find us on Facebook and Instagram at Middleton Center for Autism.
00:31:53.359 --> 00:31:55.200
Go easy until next time.