In November, 2019, it was my honor and privilege to serve on a team of Community Consultants for the project, Developing Leadership Capacity in Inclusive Education: A U.S.-Ukrainian Partnership, funded by the United States Embassy Ukraine for the Ukrainian non-governmental organization, Without Borders. This organization started three years earlier when a group of Ukrainian educators, participants in a fellowship program provided by the Global Resource Center on Inclusive Education of the Institute on Community Integration at the University of Minnesota, banded together to create a learning community to advance inclusive education for children and youth with special educational needs and their families in their country. As part of the extensive program of professional development that Without Borders was facilitating, our team provided a number of workshops in four cities – Khmelnitsky, Lviv, Ivano-Frankivsk, and Kyiv.
The rooms for all of our workshops over the ten days of our visit were filled to capacity with parents, all types and levels of teachers, educational administrators of national and local services, and university faculty, showing clearly both the strong support for inclusion in Ukraine and the hunger for professional development to advance the practice. Without Borders works to meet this need by providing in-person and virtual presentations when possible and recorded sessions of inclusion-related activities on its website and through its social media accounts. It has also published an edited book in Ukrainian, called Stairs to Inclusion in English. This volume, The Space of Inclusive Education: Voices from Ukraine and Beyond, provides yet another resource, one that shares Ukraine’s story with a wider audience of educationalists and scholars around the world.
As a book, The Space of Inclusive Education: Voices from Ukraine and Beyond embodies several characteristics that make it an excellent resource in a variety of ways. Parts of this chaptered volume are like a scholarly handbook that provides thorough reviews and analyses of their topics. Here, for instance, Telna’s chapter, “Ukrainian History of Inclusion: The Role of Young People with Disabilities” and Matveieva and Palahniuk’s contribution, “Fostering Appreciation of Disability and Diversity in Elementary School”, stand out. Other chapters present important ideas and solid, practical information to guide new and practicing educators on how to teach more inclusively. Sydoriv’s chapter, “Developing Character by Means of Inclusive Strategies and Practices”, for example, describes how common instructional practices like language and grammar charts could serve double-duty by using examples that promote pro-social, inclusive thinking, an idea that was new to me and that I will promote in my future trainings. Also, Derkachova and Tytun’s “Strategies
Most importantly, this book provides a compendium of essays about inclusion in Ukraine, taking the pulse at this time as the country continues to advance inclusive policies and practices. Collectively, the chapters consider what inclusion is, why Ukraine should be pursuing inclusive education, where the country is at this point in the process, and how to help the country achieve its desired goals. Such content is both necessary and very valuable for Ukraine. It also serves as a reminder for educators in other countries to review these core questions periodically to ensure that inclusive education is on the path that is desired.
The authors deliver a feeling for the goals and implementation of inclusive education in Ukraine, and to some extent, other Eastern European countries in the post-Soviet era. The emphasis on spiritual and moral values, humanism, the contrasts with practices during Soviet times, the application of different educational philosophies, and even the concept central to the volume – The Space of Inclusive Education: Voices from Ukraine and Beyond – are different, for example, from discourses in the special education literature of my country, the United States. As a result, my thinking about inclusion has expanded.
The range of topics about inclusion addressed in the chapters – laws, policies, philosophy, terminology, pedagogy, collaboration with parents, information and communication technologies, higher education, children’s literature, and transition – is admirably broad. As a result, the volume helps to satisfy the great need for information on inclusion for educators, parents, and other segments of society at large in Ukraine and Eastern Europe.
Taking the pulse of inclusive education in Ukraine at this time also, unfortunately, requires that The Space of Inclusive Education: Voices from Ukraine and Beyond be an historical record of efforts and scholarship in the midst of the war that began with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Budnyk’s chapter, “Problems of Professional Activity of Teachers Working with Students with Disabilities: Challenges of the Russian-Ukrainian War”, and “Inclusion in Ukraine: What the Future Needs and Should Hold” by Sergiy and Lidia Sydoriv describe how inclusive education in Ukraine is not waiting despite the added hardships and tragic circumstances of the war. The country’s inclusion efforts, already imperative, are now even more critical as the push towards the essential goal of education for Ukraine’s children and youth with special educational needs and their families is also part of the country’s successful resistance.
Clayton E. Keller