Radical Inclusive Education

Disability, teaching and struggles for liberation

Anat Greenstein

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317427247
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Many people who work in education start out with enthusiastic ideals about education as a positive force that can spur change in the life of the learner and in society at large, yet find themselves frustrated with a bureaucratic system that often alienates and excludes many of its students. This is particularly true for students identified as having "special educational needs" (SEN) or disability, a label often used to justify the ways in which students are failed by a system that focuses on narrow definitions of knowledge, seeks to normalise and control behaviour, and values economic productivity over other forms of human activity.

Radical Inclusive Education explores how current educational practices, such as standardised tests and league tables, exclude and fail many disabled students, and naturalise educational inequalities around gender, class, ethnicity and ability. Informed by the social model of disability, the book argues that educational theories and practices that are geared towards social justice and inclusion need to recognise and value the diversity of human embodiments, needs and capacities, and foster pedagogical practices that support relations of interdependency.

The book draws on work in disability studies, critical psychology and critical pedagogy, and also real life examples from interviews with activists in the disabled people's movement, and from research in a school, to offer examples of what radical inclusive education – that is sensitive to the needs of all students – might look like in practice. As such, it will be of great interest to practitioners and students in the field of education, particularly for those interested in SEN and disability, sociology of education, critical pedagogy, informal education and social movement learning.

Part I Setting the scene Politicising education and disability and exploring the need for radical inclusive pedagogy

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781315690483-0

A long time ago in a place far, far away …

All good stories start like that, and so does this one. It was June 2002 in Israel/Palestine and I was about to complete my first year as a speech and language therapist. From a very young age, I have always wanted to change the world and make it a better place. In my youth that commitment had translated into political activism in anti-occupation, antimilitarist and feminist movements, but when the time came to choose a professional career path, I did not want to make activism the source of my livelihood. Choosing to work with disabled children seemed like a good option for having a “practical” profession, while still making the world a better place and supporting people to live a full life.

Yet, a year into my practice in a mainstream school with an “inclusion” programme for students with the label of autism, I was growing increasingly uncomfortable. Initially, I was impressed with the level of service available in the school to facilitate students’ participation in mainstream education. A special educational needs (SEN) teacher and a teaching assistant (TA) were constantly available to support autistic students during lessons, as well as a special after-school provision dedicated to developing students’ social, cognitive and communication skills. In addition to the SEN teachers and TAs, the staff included a speech and language therapist, an occupational therapist and an educational psychologist. One day during a maths lesson, the teacher asked the students to skip over some pages in their workbooks and answer the questions on page 65. Jonathan, one of the autistic students in the classroom, was enraged by this instruction. He wanted to go through the workbook page by page without skipping any questions. ‘You must say open your workbooks on page 61!’ he yelled at the teacher, ‘say that IMMEDIATELY!!’ Screaming and kicking, Jonathan was taken out of the classroom. Later that week the team discussed the incident, attributing the behaviour to Jonathan’s “autistic” tendency to rely on rigid rules and structures. To ameliorate this we decided to use a Social Story, an intervention often used with autistic students to explain social conventions and expectations through clearly and explicitly depicting scenarios of familiar social situations. As the speech and language therapist on the team, it was my job to write a story that would explain to Jonathan that it is the teacher’s prerogative to set out the work, and that it is the student’s role to complete the work without arguing. In other words, I had to spell out in accessible language what Illich (1971) calls the hidden curriculum–comply with authority, don’t question it. That experience made me question my role in the school; was I really making the world a better place by facilitating the integration of disabled students into an authoritarian and oppressive system? While I still believe “inclusion” rather than segregation is what we should all be fighting for, I was asking with Allan (2008, p. 48) ‘inclusion into what?’

It was precisely that question that motivated the current research. Being a political activist made it easy for me to understand schools as political institutions, involved in disciplining subjects into becoming productive and governable citizens of the market economy (Foucault, 1977; Rose, 1996), and I left the school at the end of the year. It took a few years of changing jobs and provisions (going between an out-of-school educational provision and a child development clinic) to understand that disability was a political issue as well. Working as a speech and language therapist in both healthcare and educational settings often required adjusting children’s behaviour and thinking to the system’s needs rather than the other way around. It also required adherence (or at least acquiescence) to an individual model of disability. This model conceptualises disability as the result of physical or mental impairment, an inherent trait located in the disabled person’s body and mind. The difficulties experienced by the disabled person, as well as chances for future achievements, are seen as a direct outcome of the impairment (Oliver, 1990a). Several years into my practice as a speech and language therapist, I was increasingly frustrated with the oppressive nature of my profession. The unbridgeable gap between my political values of diversity, emancipation and solidarity and my day-to-day practice of training and adjusting individuals to fit narrow norms of personhood, independence and rationality was haunting me, and I was anxiously searching the Internet for new ideas that would enable me to use my skills to support disabled people without reinforcing their exclusion and marginalisation, and sometimes even devalidation of their personhood. Encountering the social model of disability (Oliver, 1990a), which looks at how social structures and environments enable certain people to participate while disabling others, was for me a “light bulb” moment filled with many possibilities for combining activism with providing support to disabled people.

This book is an attempt to rethink education following the understanding of both disability and education as political. This means developing radical inclusive pedagogy that abandons the pursuit of norms and standards in favour of supporting children to better understand themselves, the world and their relations with others in the world, while taking into account the full range of human embodiments and support needs. The book draws on the literature and on research findings to explore what such radical inclusive pedagogy might mean. Specifically, I draw on theoretical ideas from disability studies to explore notions of difference, interdependency and social exclusion/inclusion, and on ideas from various critiques of education, particularly those associated with the field of critical pedagogy, to rethink the meaning of education and the role of schools. In the second part of this book I draw on analytical accounts from activists in the disabled people’s movement (DPM) and inclusive education campaigns, as well as on the views, experiences and practices of students and staff in an innovative “special needs unit” (SNU) in a secondary school, to explore how these theoretical ideas may be enacted in practice. In that, I take a stance of inspiration to research, meaning that as a researcher I do not seek to arrive at an accurate representation of any existing practice, but rather, try to create thick and rich descriptions of what education might look like if we imagined it under radically different conditions. This thinking starts with recognising and valuing the endless diversity of human embodiments, many of which are classified as impairments under current social and medical discourse, rather than understanding inclusion as the integration of disabled students into an already thought-out system.

Radical pedagogy–thinking with critiques of mainstream education

I would like to begin my discussion by distinguishing between education and schooling, two concepts that are often used interchangeably. As Watkins and Mortimore (1999) note, the word pedagogy, which is often used in Europe to denote a wide range of educational relationships in and out of schools, is seldom used in British educational discourses. This, they suggest, is due to the narrow view of education as comprised mostly of classroom instruction of curriculum subjects. In this work, I use the terms education and pedagogy not as synonyms for schooling and teaching; rather, I argue with Fielding and Moss (2011, p. 46) for an understanding of ‘education in its broadest sense’, a relational process that stresses development and wellbeing in all aspects of community life. Education is the process by which we become a part of society. It is through education that we learn what is expected of us and what we can expect of others, what we can achieve and to what we may aspire. Through education we also learn who we mustn’t be, what is forbidden and what is unspeakable. We learn to distinguish between what is exceptional and admirable and what is perverted and foul. Education takes place in many contexts and in different institutions such as families, communities, schools and workplaces (Wallace, 1961). Schooling, on the other hand, is one specific institutional context in which education takes place, which has only become synonymous with education at the turn of the previous century. In Chapter 2 I explore how functionalist and “scientific” discourses of schooling, which were framed through macro-social changes in modes of production and governmentality, have come to dominate our thinking about education.

Thus, education is a deeply political process that can serve to reify or challenge the social order. It is shaped by political and economic demands, and often serves as a form of disciplinary power working to construct individuals as governable subjects within the social order (Foucault, 1977), but can also serve as a transformative power, supporting learners to connect their personal experiences with the social circumstances in which they occur, identify mechanisms of exclusion and oppression and collectively take action against injustice (Freire, 1972). The question of what kind of education we should have is, therefore, inextricably connected to the question of what kind of society we want to live in (Suissa, 2010).

As a feminist, I am politically committed to visions of an egalitarian, anti-authoritarian society in which power and resources are horizontally shared, and solidarity is fostered within communities that value difference and interdependency. These values are in striking contrast to ideals of independence, competition and the increasing marketisation of every aspect of life that are underpinning neoliberal global capitalism (Ball, 2008; Burman, 2006). Thinking about education that embodies those values, therefore, requires more than fighting for policy reforms; it means a radical change, both in the ways we think about and practice pedagogy, and in the social structures in which such pedagogy is embedded. As Slee (1997, p. 412) puts it:

Are we talking about where children are placed and with what level of resource provision? Or, are we talking about the politics of value, about the purpose and content of curriculum, and about the range and conduct of pedagogy?

The questions phrased by Slee are often explored by theorists of what I broadly call radical critique of education, including critical pedagogy (e.g. Apple, 2004; Darder, Baltodano & Torres, 2009; Freire, 1972; Giroux, 1981; hooks, 1994) and democratic education approaches (Fielding & Moss, 2011; Holt, 1982; Neill, 1968), and thus the engagement with such theories may benefit our thinking about inclusive education. In Chapter 3 I explore some of the main ideas proposed by critical pedagogy, arguing that while these provide some exciting directions, we still need to carefully and explicitly articulate the place of students with a range of cognitive, sensory and physical needs within such pedagogies.

Further, working towards radical inclusive pedagogy means engaging, publicly and collectively, in debates about questions, such as: What kind of society do we want? What kind of education system (if any) would exist in this society? What are the barriers for achieving this, and what do we need to do to get there? These are precisely the kinds of questions that get debated (and acted upon) in social movements (Barker & Cox, 2002; Cox & Flesher Fominaya, 2009). Social movements, particularly those often referred to as New Social Movements (Habermas, 1981), are spaces where members engage in political conscientisation through sharing experiences and analysing them in the context of social structures, and build on this process of politicisation to take action for change. This process is described by Freire (1972) as praxis, which stands at the heart of ‘pedagogy as the practice of freedom’ (Freire, 1998, p. 2). It is fair to say, then, that social movements are sites of radical pedagogy and that the disabled people’s movement, as a social movement composed of people with a variety of embodiments, cognitive styles and impairment labels, and which explicitly addresses the social processes of disablement, deprivation and exclusion, is a site of radical inclusive pedagogy.

Inclusive pedagogy–thinking with disability studies

In the previous section I have argued that radical critiques of education that question the taken-for-granted assumption of the social order and the role of education within this order are necessary for developing radical pedagogy. In this section I will explore what is meant by inclusive education and why it is necessary to consider disabled students in our thinking about radical pedagogy.

Educational policies that support the “inclusion” of disabled students in mainstream education began in the United Kingdom with the Warnock report (DES, 1978) that introduced the concept of special educational needs and sought to minimise the segregation of many students with different impairment labels into special schools. However, these policies have come under attack in recent years. In 2005 the same Baroness Warnock who authored the original report published a book in which she argues that the ideal of inclusion has been carried too far and has to be reconsidered. The legal imperative to place children with special educational needs (SEN) in mainstream schools, unless that is incompatible with the efficient provision of education or the wishes of their parents (Education Act, 1996), she argues, had made it difficult for schools to exclude disruptive students, thus hampering the education of their peers. Further, she suggests, many students with SEN who struggle academically and socially in mainstream schools would benefit from a place in special schools. The Lamb Inquiry report (DCSF, 2009) identified serious problems with SEN provision within schools, with a large number of parents feeling they need to battle the system to get support for their children’s needs, and made a series of recommendations to make mainstream schools more responsive to the needs of students with SEN and their families. With the 2010 change of government in the United Kingdom, the new Coalition government published its policy on SEN provision (Department for Education, 2011), which, while accepting some of the recommendations of the Lamb Inquiry, sought to ‘remove the bias towards inclusive education’ (p. 5), arguing that a wide range of special schools and academies would better support disabled students and their families. While this statement was removed from the Children and Families Bill (2013), official government data show that since the Coalition government has come to power, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of children with statements of SEN attending special schools (Department for Education, 2013a).

Many proponents of inclusive education share the concerns about the incompatibility of the ideal of inclusion and the reality of mainstream school...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• Part I Setting the scene Politicising education and disability and exploring the need for radical inclusive pedagogy
• Introduction
• 1 Understanding Disability as a Political Phenomenon and Stressing the Need for a Dis-ability Perspective
• 2 Reading Schools through a Dis-ability Lens Arguing for the need to develop radical inclusive pedagogy
• 3 The Disabled People's Movement as a Site of Radical Inclusive Pedagogy Exploring critical pedagogy and new social movements
• Part II Envisaging radical inclusive pedagogy Knowledge, relationships and power
• 4 Rethinking Knowledge for Radical Inclusive Pedagogy Supporting access and conscientisation
• 5 Relations of Belonging Identity, difference and the ethics of care
• 6 Changing Power Relations in Education Developing relational autonomy and valuing resistance
• Bibliography
• Index