2026 International Early Childhood Inclusion Institute

Creating a welcoming program or neighborhood for children with disabilities and their families can be challenging but the work of Fred Rogers taught us how to embrace inclusion, equity, and diversity. Through this work, he used developmentally appropriate strategies to help us understand child development, different disabilities, implicit biases, and how to support a sense of belonging in our communities. Using Rogers’ six fundamentals of learning and growing (self-worth, trust, curiosity, solitude, looking and listening carefully, play) specifically from the lens of disability, we will focus on examples (e.g., songs, books, episode segments, characters) from Rogers’ work to develop strategies to affirm the value of inclusion and belonging within early childhood programs.