October 23, 2010

This is for my dearest friend Lorraine. She has been keeping the medical side of this journey on a path of integrity, along with the efforts of my other dear friend Bill Worrel. I’m sure that any quirkiness of the system will be defeated by these two intrepid individuals.

Lorraine has heard me speak of the BMX Model of Inclusion. Today we realized that the thinking behind it may in fact be of some use to her in her public health career. I promised to send her something in writing.

Searching my documents I realized – yet once again – that I have spoken at length and done power point presentations about BMX Inclusion but I have not written anything substantive about it. It’s amazing how much goes on inside my head!

Here’s an excerpt from a draft research proposal:

The BMX Model of Inclusion I propose that three distinct states of Inclusion co-exist. Neither is better than the other, but often there is an emergent pull to move from one state to another. I am calling these states B, M, and X:

 State B (Basic): Groups allow the presence of people with diverse characteristics. State B’s principal quality is that the includers share presence with diversity, but no other changes are anticipated or offered. The includers like their community as is, expect no major shifts, and the included are expected to adapt to the ways and means of the includers and to get along as best they can. Typically the included express gratitude for the opportunity and work hard to not cause difficulties.

 State M (Mechanical): Includers recognize that the included are struggling to get along, and are willing to make “accommodations”. The included move beyond simply being grateful for the opportunity to coexist and begin to advocate for support. For example, service providers currently tend to segregate individuals with cognitive challenges and the professionalization of supporters tends to turn citizens into helpers and volunteers instead of friends and colleagues.

 State X (Crossover): Both includers and the included recognize that another world is possible, one that benefits from the gifts and contributions available in the cultures, characteristics, and experiences of members of both the including and included groups. The perception fades that there are two sides and a distinct boundary.

Operationalizing the BMX Model:

State B (Basic) A teenager with autism and no speech is kept at the back of a regular classroom, with no attention paid to whether he is building friendships.

State M (Mechanical) All teenagers with “disability” labels are given opportunities to be in a homeroom for 1st period. The school has a resource room for tutoring, an “inclusive” lunchroom, and Special Olympics classes to replace regular gym.

State X (Crossover) Ninth grade students are invited to form a support circle with a teen who loves music, and who also has autism and no speech. Twenty-three students respond. They meet regularly and enthusiastically at different points in their day and week for the next four years. The teen who focuses the circle enjoys participating in the school band, gym and many more classes than anyone originally expected. The other teens express their appreciation at having an alternative to being “Nerds”, “Preps” or simply left out. The school administration notes a dramatic decrease in fights and vandalism.

The BMX stages are not only descriptive of the world of ability. I’ve had the good fortune to be part of inclusion conversations involving leaders from other cultural areas where inclusion is an issue, such as non English speaking women immigrating to Toronto, and for Aboriginal peoples who often are viewing their situation as one of chronically dealing with invaders.

A B example is of a Rastafarian man who, as part of his cultural practice continuously wears a hat in public. He was invited to a wedding of a more or less traditional Christian congregation and was told by the ushers upon entering the church building that he would be required to remove his hat. He stepped outside and prepared to wait until the ceremony was over, but in the meantime the ushers gathered together and decided that they can make an exception in his case. One stepped out and invited the man back in requesting only that he wait at the back, and he did so.

The strength of B is that neither the includers nor the included are required to give up their unique identities. Many individuals and groups are quite content with B stage inclusion.

The strength of M inclusion is that it gathers a momentum and an impulse for equality. That is to say that people come to believe that if this situation is good for one person than it must be good for everybody. Large scale, even world wide, changes take place in order to make something about M available to all who fit the appropriate characteristics.

A non ability related example of M is ESL classes. In North America perhaps in the 50’s or thereabouts, some schools discovered that making an effort to intentionally support immigrating students to learn English could lead many of them to take full advantage of public school education as they graduated and/or went into adult education. In a short period of time ESL was offered automatically, even forced upon, students as newcomers to Canada.

However under M one’s personal identity is obliterated in favour of whatever characteristics set you apart. A good friend of mine who is a retired high school teacher told me a story of a brother and sister who had been placed in ESL classes in her school. This was no problem at all for the brother. He progressed in a typical manner through ESL to regular class to graduate in a non academic stream. However, his sister had a dream of becoming a medical doctor. She immediately recognized that a placement in ESL would not get her to an academic level where she would be taken seriously as a potential medical student. Somehow she got the ear of my friend who worked against her own high school staff the get the student out of ESL, some extra support, and placement into the more intensive academic stream. That young student in now a gynaecologist.

There is no question that the M approach to inclusion is powerful and effective. Its tendency to obliterate identity, however, in some respects defeats its fundamental purpose.

And so people long for the X or the crossover approach or stage of inclusion.

Small communities often exhibit creative approaches to differences that become quite stable, especially if nobody makes a big deal of them. In my youth there was very little interchange between groups of different faiths, and yet people worked out the economic strategies that made life easier for each other. For example, the staffing of the convenience stores in town would look something like this: mixed from Monday to Thursday, Christian on Friday, Muslim on Saturday and Jewish on Sunday. Everybody gets his or her appropriate day off for religious celebration and everybody gets to have the stores open all week long. Part of the characteristic of X is that the management of it is invisible. Whereas M is very policy driven X is driven by self interest and on the spot creativity.

Nobody has the energy or the desire to be X all the time. It doesn’t hurt to have some of the basics of life run by policy, and at the B level most of us want to just get on with our day to day life without making issues of things. So clearly a mix of BMX in any individuals or groups experience can be optimized so that inclusion sheds its benefits for all.

And finally, this is where the tendency towards peace making comes in. In any community or any individual’s life an appropriate mix of B, M and X irradiates any need or incentive for strife. In other words as people learn to engage in value creation around diversity they experience a genuine alternative to fear and defensiveness when faced with differences in others.