Children with physical disabilities are as significant as everyone else in society. However, children with a physical disability do not often receive the chance to speak up and to be heard. Voices of people with disabilities have been excluded for a long time in research (Hove et al., 2012; Ytterhus, Egilson, Traustadóttir, & Berg, 2015). In this study, children with disabilities are considered first and foremost as children with the same needs and rights as other children.
Inclusion is the worldwide trend for children with disabilities, entailing teaching children with different special needs at regular schools instead of teaching them in special schools. This has been internationally supported as found in documents like the Convention on the Rights of Disabled Persons (CRPD). Children with disabilities should not be “excluded from the general education system on the basis of disability and receive the support required within the general education system to facilitate their effective education” (United Nations, 2006).
The general aim of this work is to describe the social dynamics in two classrooms with a child with a physical disability at regular schools in the Netherlands. This research took place in two different regular schools in two different areas in the Netherlands. The total sample consisted of 49 informants, 25 boys and 24 girls, including two key informants. In both classes, there was one child with a physical disability, both a boy and a girl, and they were both included in my study.
To be able to fulfill the research aim, different child-friendly methods were used to ensure triangulation. The methods used in this research are focus group interviews, participant observation with social interaction analysis, and drawings. Besides that, theories and key concepts from childhood studies and disability studies were the basis for this study. The different perspectives on social inclusion and disability are taken into consideration and used as a theoretical basis for the analysis, reflecting constructions of disabilities and approaches towards social inclusion.
In this research, the main results are that both children with a physical disability seem well included. In addition, the perception of children of social inclusion is diverse. This might suggest that children have an awareness that children express feelings of social inclusion and exclusion in different ways. All the children seemed content in their classes and they mentioned three different factors with a considerable influence on social wellbeing, which are: friendships, bullying, and teacher influence. When comparing the social welfare in both schools, there is a clear difference between both classes both in terms of social cohesion as in social well-being of the children. When it comes to bullying and exclusion, the children seemed to associate these concepts with feelings of being popular. The availability of peers seemed to be a protective factor that could help tackle social exclusion and/or bullying from happening.
For policies, this research points at the influence of the teacher that is present after the child acquires the disability on social inclusion. In general, also for children with a congenital disability, communication found to be a possible key factor in preventing social exclusion from happening and stimulating the social inclusion of children with disabilities in a regular class. For further research, more children with a physical disability could be researched and they could be, as key informants, more thoroughly interviewed and observed or included in other research methods.