EENET: Advancing Inclusive Education in the South, an interview with Susie Miles

BK: Can you tell me about the origins of EENET -- why it was created, when and how?

SM: EENET - The Enabling Education Net work - was created in 1997 to respond to the information gap on the issue of inclusive education in the South. By promoting South-South and South-North learning, we aim to redress the global imbalance in access to information, which tends to be dominated by Northern agendas.

Save the Children UK's Global Disability Adviser, Sue Stubbs, travelled extensively in the early 1990s and met many pioneers launching initiatives in including disabled children in education, but they were isolated from others doing similar work. The idea of setting up a network for the exchange of ideas and experience was born!

Professor Mel Ainscow, who played a leading role in developing UNESCO's "Teacher Resource Pack: Special Needs in the Classroom", supported the establishment of EENET. He arranged for EENET to have a room in the School of Education, at the University of Manchester, when the network started in 1997. Initially the member organisations of the International Disability and Development Consortium (IDDC) provided most of the funding for EENET, but in the last three years NFU, a Norwegian parents' organisation, has been our main funder. For the first four years I ran EENET on a part-time basis, with occasional help from students. Since 2001 I have worked as EENET's Co-ordinator on a full-time basis, and since March 2002 Ingrid Lewis has been working with me on a part-time basis as EENET's Research and Development Worker.

There was a particular emphasis from the beginning on examples of instructive practice in the South in order to demonstrate that inclusive education was not dependent on the availability of high levels of material resources. 'A lack of resources' is an excuse given by policy makers and practitioners in both rich and poor countries for not implementing inclusive practices. Change can be achieved with positive attitudes and relevant and accessible information. EENET took on the task of making these Southern examples better known internationally, and in reversing the tendency of Southern countries to follow Northern examples of special educational practice.

BK: Do you have any facts and figures with regard to whom EENET shares information with, and who you have found has the greatest need?

SM: EENET users include: teachers, teacher trainers, young people (mostly school and university students), parents of disabled or other marginalised children and their organisations, disabled people's organisations, policy makers, academics, national and international NGOs.

EENET's newsletter, "Enabling Education", is circulated in hard copy in English to a subscription list of 1700 people and to an additional 3000 people in the course of the year. The newsletter provides a main focus for EENET's work and we try to ensure that there is something in it for everyone - in order to satisfy the key stakeholders in inclusive education. It is more than just news items and is designed to have quite a long shelf life. We are currently preparing a special issue to commemorate the 10 th anniversary since the Salamanca Statement, in June 2004, in collaboration with UNESCO.

We hear from at least one new 'contact' each day, and usually add 300 new people to the mailing list each year. Ingrid is in the process of analysing our correspondence files and preliminary findings suggest that routine correspondence, and information disseminated, is heavily focused on the South. Detailed statistics will be available mid-2004, but we can tell you now that 69% of the people on our mailing list are from the South.

We respond to a large number of individual e-mail, postal and telephone enquiries. We currently have on-going contact with individuals and organisations in 150 countries. As far as possible we put people in touch with each other to encourage south-south and south-north networking.

EENET has a policy of disseminating information and resources free of charge to South-based individuals and organisations, while charging North-based individuals and organisations to recover some of these costs.

BK: In addition to the newsletter -- what other ways do you network?

SM: The web site is a major focus of our information sharing and networking. The site includes posters, reports, guidelines and training materials from a variety of sources on: inclusive education policy and practice and covering a range of marginalised groups; teacher education; early childhood issues and child-to-child work; the role of parents; action learning; and a section on deafness and the education of deaf children. Selected issues of the newsletter are also available in French, Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic on the web site and in Braille/audio-cassette. Last year we added our first Russian document to the web site.

EENET has begun a process of assisting the development of regional or local information networks which can reach more people and provide more locally appropriate information. Regional networks are being started in Latin America, Asia, and in West Africa.

BK: What do people express as their biggest information needs?

SM:   Practitioners working in Southern countries often express a sense of desperation for information. In the age of the global information and knowledge society vast numbers of people still do not have access to easy-to-read information about inclusive education in accessible formats and relevant languages. EENET is committed to meeting this need for information - not by writing these materials ourselves, but by identifying existing resources and making them available to a wider audience. We are often asked for materials in different languages, and we simply do not have the capacity to translate all the materials - most of the translated materials have been done by keen EENET users!

The most common request is for training manuals and articles which explain 'how to do IE'. In response to this expressed need, EENET aims to provide a range of resource materials, relevant to economically poor situations, where education budgets are low and classrooms are not well equipped. The materials include booklets, posters, videos, CD-ROMs and audio-cassettes, as well as our annual newsletter. Some have been produced by EENET, such as the 'Family Action for Inclusion in Education' book. One of the most popular resources which we have been disseminating for the last 6 years is a video training package which was produced in Lesotho by Save the Children-UK, with Comic Relief funding, and in collaboration with the Ministry of Education. The video package is entitled, "Preparing Teachers for Inclusive Education", and demonstrates that it is possible to include children with a range of different impairments in schools in remote rural areas, where classrooms are overcrowded and teachers overworked. In fact some teachers in Lesotho have said that they have become 'better teachers' since being involved in the inclusive education programme.  

BK: Who do you think has been helped the most by EENET? 

SM: We know from the feedback we have received and from anecdotal evidence that our resources are being used extensively to influence government policies, to train teachers, to raise public awareness, and to inform individuals and organisations. Here are some examples:

In Ethiopia the entire contents of EENET's web site has been used to inform the development of teacher training materials for a new course to prepare all teachers to include disabled children in their classes.

In South Africa and Brazil EENET's newsletter is used as core reading material for university students who are studying inclusive education. The lecturers say that it is the only easy-to-read material available and it gives the students a global perspective, which helps them to critically reflect upon their own situations.

In Sierra Leone the Lesotho video package and the training materials from Cambodia were used in a recent 'training of trainers' course for Ministry of Education employees. They found the material inspiring and useful, and are planning to develop their own training material for use in Sierra Leone.

In Pakistan materials from EENET's web site, and the Lesotho video package in particular, have been used to develop open learning materials for the training of teachers. The course is entitled 'Inclusive Education for Children with Special Needs' and is part of a Masters degree.

BK: What have you learned about networking since EENET started 7 years ago?  

SM: Networking requires a set of skills, which take time to develop. Networking opportunities are often overlooked, especially if practitioners haven't made a conscious effort to develop these skills, or because opportunities to network are inadequate. Although I have been involved in running EENET for 7 years now, I still find networking an enormous challenge, especially in Southern contexts. It is something I have to constantly think about and evaluate.

We often find that as people's information needs are satisfied, their need to network directly with EENET is often reduced, and so we hear less and less from them and we move on to networking with new groups of people. Networking and information sharing cannot be controlled or monitored very easily. Once the newsletter is published and the information is available on the site, it takes on a life of its own. It is up to the network users to change or adapt the information for their own purposes.

BK: Where do you see the greatest successes and challenges in inclusive education? 

SM: We have plenty of anecdotal evidence to show that the introduction of more inclusive practices in education helps improve the quality of education for all children, while paying particular attention to children who are most at risk of being marginalized. It is more difficult, however, to provide convincing evidence of this.

In particular we know that in Laos and Lesotho, inclusive education practitioners have demonstrated the link between the introduction of inclusive education and a reduction of the drop out, failure and repeater rates. More evidence of this would help to make inclusive practices in education, which benefit marginalized children, such as those with impairments, a legitimate part of the international efforts to make Education for All (EFA) a reality.

A further challenge is to collect evidence of how much it costs to implement inclusive education. The tendency is to calculate the cost based on the number of disabled children and their individual access needs. Yet the benefits that their presence can bring to the education system as a whole in terms of better quality teaching, the development of more socially responsible and aware citizens, and the increase in tolerance and acceptance of difference in society, cannot be measured so easily in financial terms. The question should perhaps be re-phrased: can education systems afford to continue discriminating against marginalized learners?

A particular interest of mine has been the challenge, and appropriateness, of including deaf learners in their local schools. This is a complex and controversial issue, which requires much more debate. Most organisations of deaf people tend to be opposed to educational inclusion. Yet the reality for most deaf children in Southern countries is that they are excluded from the school system altogether because the few schools and units attached to mainstream schools which do exist are over-subscribed. An African head teacher of a school for deaf children recently wrote to say that he could no longer cope with the demands of raising enough funds to keep their residential school open. He suggested that their specialist expertise would be better used in training mainstream teachers to teach deaf children as part of EFA. The deafness section on our web site includes case studies of community-based approaches to ensuring deaf children's access to education. In some cases deaf adults have been centrally involved in the education of deaf children, in other examples deaf children have been educated separately, but in the same buildings and by the same teachers as their hearing peers, just at a different time of day.

It is not for EENET to prescribe to practitioners how inclusive education should be interpreted or implemented. Our role is to start where practitioners are, stimulate them to think critically about their situations, support them to make changes in their own attitudes and practice, and to encourage their colleagues to become more innovative and responsive to difference.

BK: What achievement are you most proud of and why?

SM: I am proud that we have been able to contribute to the sharing of ideas and experience globally about an issue which tends to be very marginal in many countries. A South African friend and colleague told me some years ago that whenever she had a difficult meeting to attend where she had to fight for inclusion, she logged on to EENET's site beforehand to gather her ammunition! Information is extremely powerful. It can change lives and contribute to the Millennium Development Goals of reducing poverty and increasing access to quality education.

Most recently we have been working with a group of Zambian teachers in the Mpika area in the north of the country on an action research project, funded by the UK's Department for International Development. One of the aims of the project was to support them to make sense of the term inclusive education in their context. They previously had quite a narrow understanding of it as the integration of disabled children into mainstream education. But they had found that most mainstream teachers were not interested or committed to participating in the inclusion process since they regarded this as the responsibility of specialist teachers. However by engaging all the teachers in a discussion about the barriers facing the inclusion of all children in education, the teachers began to relate their experience of fighting for the rights of school-age mothers to continue their education and of tackling the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS. It was no longer perceived asa separate, specialist issue, but one that made sense to the teachers in their everyday lives.

The teachers wrote personal accounts of the way in which they were working towards more inclusive practices in their classrooms. Only some of these accounts were about disabled children, the rest were about early marriage and other gender issues, poverty, absenteeism, democracy in the classroom, and national policies on free education. The accounts were published by EENET in a document called 'Researching Our Experience'. This is available from the web site and in hard copy and has rapidly become a very popular resource as teachers in similar countries can relate to the dilemmas facing the Zambian teachers: the stigma associated with albinism, the lack of accessible sanitation facilities, children missing lessons because they have a lot of domestic work to do, the strain that the education system has been under since free education was introduced, and so on.

Finally, though, I felt very proud a few months ago when I overheard two students in the university debating whether EENET was a Kenyan or a Tanzanian organisation. They were shocked when I told them that it was based in Manchester. I took it as an enormous complement that they perceived the newsletter as coming out of Africa, not a university in the UK!

BK: What has been the most frustrating?  Why?

SM: Running EENET is an extremely rewarding and challenging job. Life is never dull! It is a privilege being in personal contact with hundreds of individuals, by email and by letter, all over the world. However the cost of disseminating information and maintaining a network tends to be under-estimated and often taken for granted by individuals and organisations who use the information, and so information needs are not always prioritised as a legitimate part of the overall budgets of development programmes. The information revolution has resulted in vast amounts of free information being available through the Internet. We have found it difficult to convince funding agencies that they should contribute towards the total cost of running EENET, which has increased from £25,000 in the first year to £55,000 in 2003.

Many development agencies are not prepared to donate funds to networking agencies, which are based in the North, even though most of our efforts are concentrated on meeting the information needs of people who live in the South. Ideally there would be a complex web of national, regional and international networking organisations, and in the long-term it may not be necessary to have a UK base at all. We believe, however, in taking full advantage of the resources available in the North for the benefit of organisations in the South, while at the same time encouraging the development of networks all over the world. In summary, our current frustration is that we have had to spend a lot of time fundraising. This can drain our energy and enthusiasm away from the main business of information sharing and networking.

BK: What are EENET's plans for the future?

SM: Our main aim is to ensure EENET's survival! Assuming we secure sufficient funds, we have our hands full simply keeping the information network going. We have lots of ambitious plans, but can't guarantee that all will come to fruition. Here are a few of our plans:

We aim to further develop our capacity to share information on wider exclusion issues, such as gender, poverty, refugees, etc, and to demonstrate the way learning from the different issues of difference and discrimination can contribute to the wider movement to combat social exclusion. We also are working towards greater inclusion of children's voices in our networking and information sharing, on the website, in the newsletters, at conferences, and so on.

In order to make EENET's information resources more accessible, we aim to make more use of images to complement the written word. Many of the materials we have already produced include examples of posters, diagrams and photos, but we want to build on this and develop it further. We plan to develop interactive CDs with videos, pictures as well as words. We also aim to dedicate a section of the web site to images. We hope that this will help broaden people's understanding and 'image' of inclusion.

Contact:
Susie Miles or Ingrid Lewis
EENET
c/o Educational Support and Inclusion
School of Education
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
U.K.
Tel:   44 161 275 3711
Fax: 44 161 275 3548
Email: info@eenet.org.uk
Web site: www.eenet.org.uk

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