The Irregular School

Exclusion, Schooling and Inclusive Education

Roger Slee

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415479905
• eBook ISBN: 9781136830204
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Should disabled students be in regular classrooms all of the time or some of the time? Is the regular school or the special school or both the solution for educating students with a wide range of differences?

Inclusive education has been incorporated in government education policy around the world. Key international organisations such as UNESCO and OECD declare their commitment to Education for All and the principles and practice of inclusive education. There is no doubt that despite this respectability inclusive education is hotly contested and generates intense debate amongst teachers, parents, researchers and policy-makers. People continue to argue over the nature and extent of inclusion.

The Irregular School explores the foundations of the current controversies and argues that continuing to think in terms of the regular school or the special school obstructs progress towards inclusive education. The book contends that we need to build a better understanding of exclusion, of the foundations of the division between special and regular education, and of school reform as a precondition for more inclusive schooling in the future. Schooling ought to be an apprenticeship in democracy and inclusion is a prerequisite of a democratic education.

The Irregular School builds on existing research and literature to argue for a comprehensive understanding of exclusion, a more innovative and aggressive conception of inclusive education and a genuine commitment to school reform that steps aside from the troubled and troubling notions of regular schools and special schools. It will be of interest to all those working and researching in the field of inclusive education.

1 Approaching accents

DOI: 10.4324/9780203831564-1

Ever wondered why your Welsh accent starts drifting off towards India the moment you open your mouth?

Is your brilliant Belfast brogue being tripped up by loose vowels?

Are you aiming at Albuquerque, NM, but somehow winding up in Pough-keepsie, NY?

Whether your accents are wonderful, wobbly or woefully embarrassing, How to do accents will give you the structure of your new accent, providing you with plenty of practical guidance and top tips to keep it firmly in the right place.¹

From the back cover of: Sharpe, E. and Rowles, J. H. (2007) How to do accents. London, Oberon Books

Timbre and pitch

Had I not had the good fortune to be raised in the small rural township of Hamilton in the western district of the state of Victoria in Australia, I would not have been blessed with an Australian accent. A thing of elegance and beauty in and of itself, the tonal lilt of my way of talking (pronounced: Oz-tray-yan) has not made it necessary for me to covet the tones of other English dialects. I dare say though if happenstance had not been so generous, if it had been Hamilton in New Zealand or Hamilton in Ontario for instance, I would be reaching inside of a copy of Sharpe and Rowles to affect those soft urbane southern Australian tones.

Browsing in Blackwell's Bookshop on the Charing Cross Road I was captivated by the plain-covered authority of Sharpe and Rowles's promise. (More precisely the promise attributed to their work by the publisher's contracted blurb writer.) Notwithstanding the inclusion of a CD to train the ear and my covert wish to sound like Michael Gambon or even Ken Stott, practically speaking, I think my sixteen pounds was better spent on a couple of George Pelecanos novels.² I am not at all convinced that the combined exercise of mimicking the CD while reading the text would unlock the mysteries or explain the nuances that are acquired and crafted through years of local habitation. An accent is not just sound – it's the fusion of sound, idiom and local knowledge, custom and disposition. Just as years ago when I came to realize that deaf education was not just the challenge of volume.

I can’t blame you for wondering why a book in a series on ‘educational foundations and futures’ commences this way. Let me explain. First is a desire to write this book as if it is meant to be read by those affected by the topic; parents and carers of schoolchildren, our civil servants and political leaders, teachers, school administrators, advocates in community organizations, support personnel, students, researchers and teacher educators. In other words I aim to bring the public back for a reconsideration of public education – its foundations and futures.³ For this task we need to find and use a common language capable of communicating complex ideas and changing social relations.

Recently I was teaching with a colleague, Len Barton, at the University of Athens in Greece. Our discussions and the set readings for the course were in English. Len discussed a chapter I had written with the students who had read it the night before. They took to the issues I had raised in the set reading with surprising enthusiasm. A number of them had said that they had read many things that I have written, but that it was ‘hard work’. This remark, though not entirely unexpected, was deeply troubling. I have been painfully aware of my tendency to conceal an idea within a thicket of words.

As in other fields of education research, academic verbiage in inclusive education writing does neither the cause nor academics any favours. Scholars such as Edward Said, Raewyn Connell, Richard Sennett, John Kenneth Galbraith and a host of others set out the responsibility of the public intellectual to speak intelligently and understandably to the community. Not to do so – finding refuge in obfuscation and jargon – diminishes the potential for and the character of public debate. It raises the spectre of death sentences wherein language is reduced to a ‘shapeless, enervative sludge’.⁴

This is not exclusively a matter of the aesthetics and craft of writing. Nor is it simply a matter of effective communication across different audiences. The issue of language is profoundly political. For as Art Pearl and Tony Knight declare: ‘Nothing is more undemocratic than a language that excludes.’⁵ For those claiming an interest in inclusive education, this is far more than an editorial matter; it is recognition that exclusion and inclusion are about real people who ought not to be abstracted. Addressing their plight should remain urgent. Playful post-modern deconstruction needs to exercise caution and reflect upon the danger of drifting towards conservatism in the social relations of research.⁶

Listening to the Greek women in the class it occurred to me that unlike many of us whose first language is English, they thought about their words whereas we tend to think with our words. In his recent novel, Something to tell you, Hanif Kureishi's main character, a psychiatrist whose life is played out ‘on one page of the London A to Z’, describes his sister as the kind of person who talks and talks until she finds something to say.⁷ So my undertaking is to present complex ideas as precisely, clearly and economically as possible. I hope to achieve this without superficiality or serious omissions.

Second, I have a growing aversion to the recent deluge of education Do-It-Yourself manuals. These almanacs of tips for teachers are overcrowding the education shelves in British bookshops. My hunch is that this is a global phenomenon. Notwithstanding their profitability for the authors and their publishing houses, I don’t consider the cumulative effect of these books to be at all educational. Too often they simply provide advice for deck chair rearrangement. Seldom is there a consideration of the dangers of cruising through icebergs. Together with the proliferation of reductive targets for schools and teachers, these manuals are one in an array of symptoms of atrophy in the leadership and management of schooling, and education. Titles such as Getting the buggers to behave, Getting the buggers to write, Getting the buggers to think, Getting the buggers into science, Getting the buggers to add up and Getting the buggers in tune may well produce a collective school staff-room smile.⁸ They may guarantee large door earnings for authors doing the professional development circuit. Some teachers under the inspectors’ gaze clamour for relief from tough struggles in the classroom. However, these and the innumerable other tip-texts forfeit educational potential to the allure of quick fixes for the symptoms of a crisis in education in a complex world. Moreover, the series to which I allude is deeply offensive in its language, is unaware of the complex politics of the term ‘bugger’, and presupposes an agonistic relationship between teachers and their students. Cowley's The guerrilla guide to teaching would seem to confirm this.⁹

The crisis to which I refer is not an attack on teachers and schools. We live in an age where the most frequently blogging teacher in Japan writes under the nom de plum – ‘hopeless teacher’. The crisis has been assembled over time through the relentless tide of neo-conservative and New Labour policies.¹⁰ Teachers work in a climate of distrust and blame. They are distracted from educating by compliance rituals and inspection schedules and sanctions that reach into the public purse with contestable assessments of their efficacy or value for teachers and students.¹¹ This book aims to offer hope for teachers, students and communities through different educational settlements in new times. Borrowing from the introduction to Mike Rose's inspiring research in Possible Lives: schooling is ‘our most important democratic experiment’.¹² As such, great care and consideration needs to attend our shaping of the laboratory under changing conditions.

I am trying not to be elitist in targeting this highly seductive and reductive pulp non-fiction. In 2004 Don Watson published Watson's dictionary of weasel words, contemporary cliches, cant and management jargon.¹³ In this book, he takes a machete to the evasive language and poor ideas that litter management texts and periodicals. A Watsonian approach to ‘edu-speak’¹⁴ is overdue.¹⁵ Teachers and other education decision-makers speak of inclusion and building social capital while reinstating segregation.¹⁶ They speak of teaching and learning and simultaneously distract students from their education with rote training for a battery of standardized tests.¹⁷

How much has changed since the Victorian love affair with examinations? We have become ever more attached in terms of the scale and regularity of assessment, with estimates that a typical student who stays in schooling in England until age 18 will have taken over a hundred external assessments.¹⁸

Even Ken Boston, a former Director of the Qualifications and Assessment Authority reveals ambiguity about testing when quizzed in a Guardian newspaper interview:

We need tests for monitoring individual, school and national performance. The amount of time actually spent on them is minuscule. But if you look at the time spent on preparation for tests, there's a risk in some schools that it will distort the curriculum. You don’t increase the weight of a pig by weighing it repeatedly. You do it by long-term nutrition and diet.¹⁹

Later in the same interview he speaks of rolling on-line tests that enable a constancy of examination and surveillance.

Education jurisdictions around the world converge when they speak of educational accountability and each generate compliance regimes through simplified targets.²⁰ Neo-liberal governments speak of educating flexible and adaptable students to become global citizens and restrict educational choices through narrow national traditional curriculum.²¹ They emphasize the need for autonomous learners and disqualify the role of mistakes (or failure) in learning. They urge creativity and reify uniformity and standardization. Penketh has captured the irony of the attempt to impose standards of creativity in her acute analysis of the role of observational drawing in the examination of students in the English art curriculum.²² The rhetoric is of educational excellence when in actuality it translates in practical terms as ranking on a table of international comparison that is often disrespectful of cultural specificity and geopolitical context.²³ The discourse of building professional learning communities is a vehicle for the confiscation of professional autonomy.²⁴

Of course, this is an area where professional care has to be exercised as we negotiate the dilemmas of assuring ourselves of greater quality in teaching and learning on the one hand, and not falling to the depths of costly compliance regimes on the other. Jonathan Kozol puts it this way:

So the question, again, is not if we ‘need’ standards in our schools but with what sensibilities we navigate between the two extremes of regimented learning with destructive overtones, on one side, and pedagogic aimlessness and fatuous romanticism on the other. Somewhere between the world of Dickens’ Gradgrind and John Silber and the world of pedagogic anarchy, there is a place of sanity where education is intense and substantive, and realistically competitive in a competitive society, but still respectful of the infinite variety of valued learnings and the limitless varieties of wisdom in the hearts of those who come to us as students.²⁵

Dulling England's civic imagination²⁶

Returning to England to work in 2007 provided a lesson in the ascendancy of superficiality (populist reduction), and a lesson in the demise of...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• other
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Approaching accents
• 2 The worlds we live in
• 3 Unravelling collective indifference
• 4 Building a theory of inclusive education
• 5 It’s what governments do – policy inaction
• 6 From segregation to integration to inclusion and back (a policy reprise)
• 7 The Irregular School
• Notes
• Index