The Language of Inclusive Education

Exploring speaking, listening, reading and writing

Elizabeth Walton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138794344
• eBook ISBN: 9781317638674
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The Language of Inclusive Education is an insightful text which considers the writing, speaking, reading and hearing of inclusive education. Based on the premise that humans use language to construct their worlds and their realities, this book is concerned with how language works to determine what we know and understand about issues related to in/exclusion in education. Using a variety of analytical tools, the author exposes language-at-work in academic and popular literature and in policy documents. Areas of focus include:

• What inclusive education means and how it is defined
• How metaphor works to position inclusive education
• How textbooks construct inclusive education
• How we use language to build what we understand to be difference and disability, with particular reference to AD(H)D and Asperger's Syndrome
• Listening to children and young people as a means to promote inclusion in schools

Woven through this volume is the argument for a more critical awareness of how we use language in the field that we call 'inclusive education'. This book is a must-read for any individual studying, practicing or an interest in inclusion and exploring the associations with language.

1
Inclusive Education as a Discourse

What is inclusive education?

Picture a situation of social introduction, which typically proceeds as follows:

Other Person:	So I hear you are a lecturer. What is your subject?
Me:	I lecture in the field of inclusive education.
Other Person:	Inclusive education? What is that?
Me:	Well … it’s an education reform initiative that’s concerned with reducing exclusion, so it’s about every child’s right to education and valuing diversity. It’s policy in South Africa and my field of research. I work with teachers and student teachers to enable them to teach diverse learners effectively.
Other Person (politely attempting not to look bored):	Huh? What do you mean by ‘diverse learners’?
Me:	Unlike when we were at school, South African classrooms now include learners who come from a variety of language, racial and socio-economic backgrounds, and there may be learners with disabilities too. We aim to …
Other Person (interrupts):	Oh, you mean special education – why didn’t you say so? You know, my husband/wife/sister once worked with someone whose kid was special needs. Shame,^1 hey? It’s nice to know that there are people like you who can help them, I know I would never have the patience. Nice to meet you.

And Other Person goes off to mingle and I am left contemplating the impossibility of distilling ‘inclusive education’ for cocktail party use. Situations like these are a reminder that inclusive education is not easily pigeon-holed. Not only is its meaning contested, what it actually is is not often interrogated. I suggest that while debates about definitions have value, they should come second in the quest to clarify the nature of inclusive education. This is because its meaning could well be different, depending on what we are assuming inclusive education is. Inclusive education can be identified in different ways. In this and the next chapter, three possibilities will be explored: inclusive education as a discourse, as an ideology and as a field. Each of these positions inclusive education differently, and offers different analytical possibilities. To begin, I will explore inclusive education as a discourse, and then discuss inclusive education discourses operating in the professional, policy and public domains.

Inclusive education as discourse

I am not alone in suggesting that inclusive education is a discourse. Rose (2010a: 5) writes of ‘discourses of inclusion’ and Kalijanpur (2011: 98) reviews a book, saying that it would contribute to the ‘critical discourse on international inclusive education’. But before examining inclusive education as a discourse, discourse itself needs to be understood. There are various useful definitions of discourse. Fairclough offers discourse as ‘language use conceived of as socially determined’ (2001: 18), and Blommaert (2005) says variously that it is ‘language-in-action’ (2) and ‘all forms of meaningful semiotic human activity seen in connection with social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments’ (3). Gee (2008: 154) suggests that discourse is ‘language in use’. So ‘discourse’ is more than a pretentious word for language, it encompasses the multiple contexts in which language and other semiotic activity takes place. Gee maintains that discourse is a part of Discourse (big ‘D’ deliberate) which is ‘saying (writing)-doing-believing-valuing combinations’ (2008: 154). Big D Discourse is associated in Gee’s schema with the capacity to couple ways of speaking and writing with ways of behaving and believing to realise various socially recognisable identities.

The Discourse of inclusive education enables a variety of identities to be enacted in different domains. Participation in the Discourse takes different forms and is legitimated in different ways.² But what is particularly useful in calling inclusive education a discourse is the idea, emphasised by Gee’s hyphens, of the interconnectedness of speaking, writing, doing, believing and valuing. Inclusive education can readily be seen as a combination of speaking and writing (evidenced in policies and legislation, conference presentations, workshops, journal articles and books), particular beliefs and values about equity and participation in schools and various systemic, school and classroom practices. These elements cannot be separated – what is said/written and done cannot be considered apart from the belief systems that inform and sustain the saying, writing and doing.

A seminal piece on inclusive education discourses was Dyson’s 1999 contribution to the World Yearbook of Education. In this article, Dyson maintained that inclusion was ‘located within a limited number of discourses’ (39). From those offering a rationale for inclusion he identified a rights and ethics discourse and an efficacy discourse and, from those promoting the realisation of inclusive education, a political discourse and a practical discourse. Importantly, Dyson recognised that these different discourses constructed different notions of inclusion, and made different questions possible. He concluded that we should talk of ‘inclusions’ (46) to acknowledge its many versions. Fifteen or more years have passed since Dyson categorised inclusion discourse, and while much of what he said is still valid, things have changed. I agree that we still have discourses (emphasising the plural) of inclusive education, but it is my sense that Dyson’s rationalisation discourse has diminished over the years. Its place has been taken by a multi-disciplinary, critical and theoretical discourse of inclusion that interrogates the concept and the ways it has been encoded and enacted. The practical discourse that seeks to realise inclusion is flourishing.

I argue that it is fruitful to consider inclusive education as operating as a discourse in three overlapping domains, which I have categorised as the professional domain, the policy domain and the public domain. The saying-doing-believing of inclusive education in each of these domains is different, but their boundaries are blurred, and the discourses seep into one another. I am reminded by Gee (2011: 36) that ‘Discourses are not “units” with clear boundaries’ and that I am engaged in ‘recognition work’ (37). Recognising discourses and labelling them is thus a tentative exercise, because discourses change over time and not everyone will agree on the distinctions I make. Despite this, it is productive to look at the different domains to examine how inclusive education is languaged in each and to what effect.

Inclusive education as a discourse in the professional domain

By the professional domain,³ I refer to places and spaces where inclusive education knowledge is produced, recontextualised and reproduced⁴ (Maton 2014). I am deliberately collapsing finer distinctions that could be made between the field of practice and the field of knowledge production, or between academics and practitioners, and am considering a broad domain that encompasses universities, schools and publishing houses. There could be various ways to classify the discourse of inclusive education in this domain. Slee (2011: 62–3), for example, has identified clusters of influence on inclusive education⁵ and an argument could be made that each of these clusters could be identified and analysed as a discourse of inclusive education. My categorisation of the discourse of inclusive education in this domain is broader, as I draw on Aristotelian terms and read two main discourses which are contrasted and connected – epistēmē and technē.⁶ These two terms have a complex history and have been used differently by different ancient philosophers, some of whom used the terms interchangeably (Parry 2008). However, using Kemmis and Smith’s (2008: 23) definitions, epistēmē can be said to represent the disposition of seeking truth, with the associated actions of contemplation and theoretical reasoning, and technē can refer to the disposition to act in a reasoned way, according to the rules of a craft, with a means-ends orientation. My use of these Greek terms deliberately resists calling one discourse ‘theory’ and the other ‘practice’, given the many meanings and contestations embedded in those terms. Epistēmē and technē serve my purpose well, not only for their relative unfamiliarity which dislodges the conventional ascriptions of meaning, but also because they are both contrasted and connected. So thinking of these two inclusive education discourses as dichotomies is less helpful than thinking of them as bifurcations. Bifurcation is both branching and linked, and is generative, suggestive of new possibilities. It is also a reminder of partiality (Davis 2004), both my own as I recognise my bias in drawing distinctions, but also the incompleteness of the distinctions drawn.

The epistēmē discourse in inclusive education represents multiple disciplinary and theoretical gazes. These include Allan (2005, 2007), who puts philosophers’ ideas to work on inclusive education; Slee’s (2010) sociological lens on inclusive education; various (critical) disability theories (Barton 2010; Gable 2014; Oliver 2013; Oliver and Barnes 2012; Terzi 2008); comparative education, particularly with reference to globalisation (Rizvi and Lingard 2010); and policy studies (Liasidou 2012). The discourse is conceptual and analytical, not empirical, and is often critical as it reflects on the epistemology/epistemologies of inclusive education and interrogates policy and practice. Alan Dyson recognises this epistēmē discourse as he is quoted in Allan and Slee (2008: 35):

… [Y]ou get a kind of wing of the inclusion movement which is very much about conceptualization, critical thinking. If it has a home in academic disciplines it’s probably within philosophy of education, sociology of education, where people do not feel it is necessary to do empirical work out there in the field because it doesn’t actually tell you very much.

This epistēmē discourse offers theoretical understandings of the problem(s) of exclusion and marginalisation in schools. In some iterations (for example, Brantlinger (2006) and Slee (2011)), it is critical of the ways in which prevailing special education norms and practices have been thinly overlaid with a veneer of inclusive-sounding language.

Various grammatical and semiotic devices indicate the abstract nature of the written epistēmē discourse of inclusive education. Consider the first sentence of Allan’s (2007: 281) chapter titled ‘Inclusion as an ethical project’ as an example:

The inclusion of disabled students within mainstream schools continues to be debated amid criticisms of conceptual confusion among those holding opposing views (Gallagher 2001), and accusations that inclusion has become an ideological battlefield.

This sentence has a complex grammatical structure, and employs a number of features that signal this as abstract, specialised language. These include nominalised verbs, such as ‘inclusion’, ‘confusion’ and ‘accusations’. Nominalisation removes actors, tense and modality from verbs, and changes them from being processes into abstract things. Allan’s sentence also uses noun phrases, like ‘conceptual confusion’ and ‘opposing views’. Noun phrases work to condense ‘a whole sentence’s worth of information’ (Gee 2011: 8) into a couple of words, thereby complexifying the content of the sentence. The verb processes in these sentences are not material, i.e. about ‘actions and events’ (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004). The processes are verbal (‘continues to be debated’), mental (‘holding opposing views’) and relational (‘inclusion has become an ideological battlefield’) which dislodges them from specific contexts.⁷ Neither the writer nor the audience are explicitly present in this sentence, reinforcing its abstraction. Other features, like in-text citations and predominant verbal text (i.e. minimal diagrams, pictures, tables, etc.) would characterise this kind of discourse.

The epistēmē discourse of inclusive education is, in my experience, not always highly valued by those working directly in schools. When invited to conduct workshops on inclusive education, I am usually reminded that teachers want ‘practical’ ideas, not theory, and that I should provide information that teachers can go away with and put into practice the next day. The teachers in Du Toit and Forlin’s (2009) study confirm this, saying, ‘we want it [training] in layman’s terms: ten easy steps to pinpoint a problem’ (656). In other words, they are clamouring for the technē discourse of inclusive education.

The technē discourse could be said to focus on presenting the solution to the problem(s) of exclusion and marginalisation in schools by providing the ‘how to’ of inclusive education. The attributes of the Aristotelian term technē are very evident in this discourse, as it has a strong focus on practical knowledge and it suggests a ‘rational ability to intervene and change the surrounding world’ (Saugstad 2002: 380). The idea of the rules of a craft is inherent in technē, and learning the rules requires apprenticeship with an accomplished craftsperson. So the technē discourse in inclusive education presents, The Teachers’ Guide to Inclusive Education: 750 Strategies for Success! (Hammeken 2007) and What Successful Teachers Do in Inclusive Classrooms: 60 Research-Based Teaching Strategies T...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• List of illustrations
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms
• Book beginnings
• 1 Inclusive education as a discourse
• 2 Inclusive education as an ideology or field
• 3 The meaning of inclusive education
• 4 Metaphors that matter in inclusive education
• 5 Inclusive education on the (university) library shelf
• 6 Languaging ADHD
• 7 Reading and writing in/exclusion
• 8 Speaking and hearing in/exclusion
• Book ends
• Index