Inclusion in the Early Years

Cathy Nutbrown, Peter Clough, Frances Atherton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781446289532
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

This insightful text shows how the attitudes of adults in early years settings can influence practice. The authors argue for a broad definition of inclusion, not limited to those with learning difficulties or impairment, but addressing factors affecting all members of the learning community. The book shows how the lives of practitioners, parents and children have been affected by inclusive and exclusionary practices.

This new and revised edition includes an increased focus on:

- inclusion as a political issue

- social class

- poverty

- children?s rights

- gay and lesbian parents and staff

This text is essential for all early years students, practitioners and researchers who want to become familiar with current research into inclusion and to develop ways of drawing on such studies to inform and devleop their own inclusive practices.

Cathy Nutbrown is Professor of Education and Director for Research at the University of Sheffield.

Peter Clough is Honorary Professor of Education at the University of Sheffield

Frances Atherton is Head of Department of Early Childhood Studies, at the University of Chester.

 1

Politics and policies of inclusion

Introduction

Various claims are made about the success or failure of inclusion projects, for example Foucault’s statement that:

Realised through technologies that make visible particular objects of scrutiny … inclusion functions as a panoptic mechanism through techniques which allow the assignment to each individual his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. (1977, p. 198)

Such accounts tend to be mostly descriptive and usually take for granted that the inclusive project is a transcendental ‘good’, a position which has been variously contested (Clough and Clough, 2013).

Throughout this book we examine assumptions and practices which bring to life some of the conceptual foundations of inclusive theory, policy and practice in the early years, focusing specifically on the years from birth to five. Inclusion is commonly an issue of location, by which we mean that there remains the view that as long as children share the same space, all are included. This, of course, is not the case, and many inclusive policies and projects do not meet with success because the necessary work on understanding and meeting individual needs is missing (or inadequate).

Graham and Slee (2008) point up the conflation of inclusion not only with location, but with a hegemonic centricity. ‘Existing un-named in this tokenistic play that Said (1978, p. 310) calls the “pure politics of identity”’, Graham and Slee (2008, p. 286) point out, are ‘the characteristics held by dominant groups, which in Australia can be said to include whiteness, ablebodiedness and so on.’

A great deal happens – or doesn’t – in the name of ‘inclusion’. Graham and Slee identify ‘a dangerous assumption’ in the way in which different presumptions to include are ‘concealed by the continued use of … generalised terms’, and thus how inclusive education, which started life as a radical challenge to the traditions of schooling, becomes a means ‘for explaining and protecting the status quo’ (2008, p. 277). They remind us that ‘to include is not necessarily to be inclusive. To shift pupils around on the educational chessboard is not in or of itself inclusive’ (p. 278).

Policies can ‘fail’ because of ‘uninterrogated normative assumptions that shape and drive policy’ (Popkewitz and Lindblad, 2000), which result in no more than ‘tinkering at the edges’ and actually leaves things much as they were. For Harwood and Rasmussen (2002, p. 5) too, there is a need to arrest ‘inclusion’s need to speak of and identify otherness’.

In a brief history of the education of ‘exceptional children’ we can see three broad periods of educational policy (during the last 100 or so years), characterised by segregation, by integration and by inclusion. Children who were considered different from the ‘normal’ were either isolated at home with no access to provision of care and learning or they segregated schools and institutions, according to their impairments and difficulties. The critical histories of integration policies commonly identify a generalised global movement which in the context of its early days was surely a Good Thing: it sought to dismantle a gross distinction between students’ abilities and their placement in either regular/‘mainstream’ or ‘Special’ schools; it sought to abolish the categorical silos into which individuals were sorted for such locational distribution; and in its tacit recognition of the importance of environment, it called for interventions in the first instance at the curricular, rather than the individual, level (Clough, 1999). But that set of policy developments barely disturbed the status quo of discriminatory social and educational provision, for the characteristic move is essentially from outer to inner, from margin to centre, from exceptional to normal, and so on. The early years have long been at the forefront of inclusive provision of education and care, inclusion (at least in terms of location) most often being the first and default option, with exclusion (to a specialised unit, centre or school) being an option once inclusion has failed.

And so the current phase of this brief history is a properly radical one: a broadly-understood inclusion movement which seeks to realise a sociology that insists that it is primarily in the environment where we will discover the root cause of, and the root solution to, exclusive practices. In contrast to integration, the inclusion ideology looks to change not the individual – so that s/he can be ‘brought in from the cold’ – but, quite simply, to change the environment, the school, society, the world. … It is no less radical a task. And in this sense it is about eradicating prejudice, injustice and inequality.

Many assumptions about what inclusion means, and looks like, go unchallenged, and make up, bind and constrain our social organisation. The task, then, is to enact inclusive policies in practice that challenge our preconceptions about human beings: children and their families, society, and success and failure themselves. If we can re-orientate our attention to the concept of inclusion (by challenging our own preconceptions), we can perhaps move from seeing inclusion as a set of practicalities to seeing it as an attitude of mind and will, for the practicalities of inclusion are merely imported remedies that ‘compensate’ for a ‘normal’ worldview. The wheelchair ramp, for example, no more spells inclusion in itself than does anything else. Without picking apart our preconceptions, enmeshed as they are with our own take on the world, we can only appeal to practicalities of adjustment which ‘fit’ this worldview.

What we need to do, if we are to even approximate our goal as inclusion practitioners, is to engage in a personal interrogation of our own views and prejudices around difference and difficulty.

The propensity, across various policies, to measure inclusion in quantifiable, locational terms betrays our aspiration to ‘de-centralise … normalcy’; we are just as much participants in centralised normalisation as we are critical proponents of de-centralisation. Sticking unswervingly to codified, quantitative measurements of inclusion does not necessarily equip us with the faculties of openness and critical reflection which allow us to challenge the norm of our societies.

Cultures, communities and curricula are by definition exclusive; we know things by their characteristics and by the boundaries of those features; we group things and we group people, for example, by religion, age, geography, role; we classify and we recognise what lies outside those classifications; were we unable to exclude we would be a different kind of being. Cultures, then, communities and curricula are as exclusive as they are inclusive.

Clough and Clough (2013) set out a series of simple theses which they identify as ‘agnostic’. They are agnostic in the traditional sense of the term because they are properly sceptical of many current claims of the successes – and indeed ‘failures’ – of inclusive policies and projects. The theses are:

 

• Inclusion has an operational rather than conceptual focus. While we can give a dictionary definition of inclusion, what it is ‘about’ is such a relative, shifting, organic set of processes that any such characterisation will speak more of moral aspiration than empirics. In early education and care, we need to consider what happens in practice based on how we construct our own view of what it is to be inclusive.
• Inclusion is always in a ‘state of becoming’. There can be no such thing as a fully inclusive, ‘arrived-at’ institution or society. In early education and care, practitioners, families and children are constantly working in a state of ‘becoming inclusive’ for new challenges and new exclusionary factors can confront settings at any point. Thus:
• Inclusion can/must only be known by its outcomes – not by its rhetoric. There is a need for evidence, and an even greater need for agreement on what counts as evidence. As a set of statements, there is little to falsify inclusion, but there is a tendency to identify (and hence to measure) it in quantifiable, locational terms. In early education and care, it is the effects of successful inclusive practices and attitudes that really make a difference. But:
• There are as many versions of inclusion as there are people to be included – and as there are people who are to include them. So in early childhood education and care all practitioners, whatever their status, need to think through their own ‘take’ on what it is to be inclusive and how they adopt and enact inclusive policies and practices. Inclusion is not the exclusive property of any one domain, be that political, academic, professional, cultural or otherwise, and how it is defined differs uniquely from person to person. Each version is made up uniquely of a cultural confection of experiences, beliefs, ideologies, hopes, loves, disappointments, passions, fears, of hierarchies of tolerance, thresholds to our empathies and boundaries to our sympathies. And:
• Cultures, communities and curricula are, by definition, exclusive. We know things by their characteristics and by the boundaries of those features; we group things, we classify, and we recognise what lies outside those classifications; were we unable to exclude we should cease to be (as we know it). Therefore, cultures, communities, curricula, and indeed consciousness, are all as inalienably and dialectically exclusive as they are inclusive. In early education and care, where settings work with a diverse range of children and families who represent many heritages and backgrounds, values and beliefs, the creation of inclusive curricula is a key challenge. So:
• Inclusion must not be imposed from without, but developed in partnership with those who seek it. In early education and care ongoing professional support for all practitioners to work towards their own definitions and understandings of inclusion, and to work within a set of agreed inclusive practices is essential.

Because:

• Inclusion is ultimately about how people treat each other. (Such a claim takes us back to the first statement, and thus forms an endless loop.) And this, for us, is a matter of respect, and respectful educators, in so far as they can develop their professional knowledge and practice to be so, are inclusive.

Workshop 1 Seven statements about inclusion

Think through the seven statements put forward by Clough and Clough (2013):

 

 

1. Inclusion has an operational rather than conceptual focus.
2. Inclusion is always in a ‘state of becoming’.
3. Inclusion can/must only be known by its outcomes – not its rhetoric.
4. There are as many versions of inclusion as there are people to be included.
5. Cultures, communities and curricula are, by definition, exclusive.
6. Inclusion must not be imposed from without.
7. Inclusion is ultimately about how people treat each other.

To what extent do these apply to you? Can you use them to identify your own attitudes and responses to inclusive issues as they affect you and your own practice, the children and families you work with, and your colleagues?

Throughout this book we shall continue to discuss issues which emanate from these ideas, and to identify inclusive issues and practices as they relate to young children, their families and their practitioners. Each of the subsequent chapters of this book ends with a related workshop which can be used by staff as part of their ongoing professional development, and some direct links to policy documents of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

Further reading

Graham, L.J. and Slee, R. (2008) An illusory interiority: interrogating the discourse/s of inclusion. Educational Philosophy and Theory, 40(2): 277–93.

Popkewitz, T. and Lindblad, S. (2000) Educational governance and social inclusion and exclusion: some conceptual difficulties and problematics in policy and research. Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, 21(1): 5–44.

2

Cultures of inclusion in the early years

Introduction

There is a quite particular argument that informs the whole spirit and organisation of the book. The argument is quite simple: while their form may derive from specific and common policies, every early years setting represents a culture which is created by children, practitioners, parents and others. This is, in a sense, quite obvious, but we think it has important implications for how settings might be understood, developed and researched: much of the work which we report in this book is based on our systematic attempts as teachers and researchers to understand the meanings and stories at work in the lives of settings, their children, practitioners and parents. We believe that the book will not only add to the research community’s understanding of early years policies and processes, but – and more importantly – help practitioners themselves to locate, reflect on and hence develop their own meanings and practices.

The book examines inclusion in its broadest senses (that is, concerning all children, parents and practitioners in each and every early years community) and seeks to demonstrate how inclusive processes can be embedded within early years curriculum, pedagogy and services which are designed to help all children reach their potential and achieve all that is possible for them.

One of the challenges in developing an inclusive agenda is finding a way to marry such with the agenda of raising achievement. Both are important: inclusion is an essential plank in the broad platform of social justice and raising achievement is a goal which all educators must hold for their pupils. Raising achievement has been presented within policy documents in terms of more narrowly-defined attainment and establishing standards and targets for all pupils, in England, from around five years old. Implicit within this normalising discourse is the categorising of individual children, whose (lower) attainment is attributed to factors such as ethnicity, gender, special educational needs and disability (SEND), family background or economic status.

Inclusion is a political and social struggle which foregrounds difference and identity and which involves whole setting and practitioner reform. It has moved from being specifically related to children with SEN to being a central part of global agenda. While special educators have come to understand inclusion as both increasing participation and removing exclusionary pressures, social inclusion, as it is framed within policy documents, problematises the social exclusion of disenfranchised groups and their disengagement from society (Sparkes, 1999). Social exclusion theories and policies are intended to avoid deficit models and pathologies (Leney, 1999), but they may contribute to the generation of a core of excluded groups and individuals.

The competing demands upon the wide range of early years practitioners in training, arising from the contrasting discourses and practices of raising achievement on the one hand and inclusion on the other, need to be reconciled ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Author
• Contents
• List of tables
• List of figures
• List of boxes
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Politics and policies of inclusion
• 2 Cultures of inclusion in the early years
• 3 Key studies on Special Educational Needs
• 4 Defining inclusion
• 5 Thinking inclusion
• 6 Talking inclusion
• 7 Including children
• 8 Including parents
• 9 Including staff
• 10 Including: the future
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index