Nearly a decade ago, I bit the bullet and created a Twitter account. I had no idea what to expect. I was in for a big surprise.
I made my Twitter account in preparation for a conference in Atlanta called TASH; I was presenting. At the time, I was a classroom teacher for students with significant intellectual disabilities, and the Georgia Department of Education partnered with my school district for a pilot inclusion program. The charge was to select one of my students and create an inclusion plan for them. Historically, students in my classroom spent very little time with their same-age non-disabled peers.
My very first tweet was a YouTube video of the four-minute mini-documentary the Georgia Department of Education produced about the inclusion of my student Damian, a gregarious first grader with multiple disabilities. The video highlighted his experiences with short portions of the day in a general education classroom. The team created a plan that took into consideration his strengths. The plan determined which parts of the day he would spend learning in the typical first grade classroom.
Despite my first tweet never being liked or retweeted, I continued to share my thoughts about inclusion and segregated classrooms on Twitter. During that same conference, I connected with hundreds of other like-minded people, including some who weren’t even at the conference, and were just at home reading my tweets. It was then that I realized that there were plenty of people who wanted to see inclusion move forward but didn’t know how to start, nor where to get good information about inclusive education.
Skip to the present, with over 75K followers on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, I’d like to think that we at Think Inclusive are doing a good job filling a void in the knowledge gap of inclusive practices. I knew that I wasn’t the only educator out there who was passionate about seeing the educational landscape become more inclusive and equitable for students with disabilities. If you are of the same mind, here are some tips on how you too can flex your social media muscle to promote inclusion.