They express concern about the effect students with distracfing or disrupting behaviours have on other students and their ability to pay attention and benefit from instruction. Again, however, direct experience seems to be the key to a fear of the unknown. Ones the teacher gets to know the student and begins to experience the success of integration, attitudes begin to change.
One of the M&R teachers noted an interesting ambiguity between the way some teachers talk about integration and the way they act. She suggests that while some teachers still say they are opposed to it, their actions aren’t consistent with their words:
Even though you hear them saying things against [integration], their actions don’t support what they’re saying. I think people are still afraid of saying in front of their peers, “Well, maybe it’s not such a bad thing.” They’ve been saying that it’s so terrible for yeors and they can’t lose face and say that may be their attitude has changed. There seems to be a thing about it that once you select a side you have to stay with that side.
The attitudes of teachers in districts 28 and 29 have been changing for the positive. One M&R teacher surveyed the opinions of teachers in her school about integration. She reported that twenty-four of the thirty teachers responded and only two of the twenty-four teachers indicated they did not think that students should he integrated. Although a few continued to have negative attitudes about the integration process, twelve of the twenty-four said that their attitudes had changed and nine of the twelve reported that their attitudes were more positive.
