Reconsidering Inclusion

Sustaining and building inclusive practices in schools

Alison Ekins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134798933
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Informed by research undertaken on the reality of developing inclusive practices in schools, and years of practitioner experience in the field of education, Reconsidering Inclusion shows how staff's social and emotional relationships can sustain and build inclusive practices. Providing engaging discussion of key findings and themes central to the practitioner, encouraging them to critically engage in developing inclusive practices in their schools, readers will find reflective questions about their practice and examples of key competing perspectives to enhance deeper understanding. Ekins presents authentic accounts and discussions of the reality of developing inclusive practices, as experienced and explained by teachers faced with the responsibility of enacting those practices. The book concludes with a discussion on achievable implications for practice both at a personal and professional level. Reconsidering Inclusion is suitable for all those interested in inclusive practice and provides a much needed critical insight into inclusive practices in schools

1

INTRODUCTION

Exposing the critical issues and critical questions

This chapter considers

•Developing inclusive practices and the purposes of education.

•‘Making the familiar unfamiliar’ (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995).

•The definition of inclusion that underpins this book.

•The structure of the book.

Understanding the development of inclusive practices in schools is a complex issue, involving consideration of inclusion, equity and school development, all of which are contested, contextual and interpretable constructs. Having worked as a teacher, SENCO (Special Educational Needs Coordinator), SEN Advisor/Consultant and university lecturer in SEN and Inclusion in England for 20 years, I decided to find a way, through research, to re-examine and reconsider these often taken-for-granted constructs through the reality and experience of practice. This book documents the journey that was taken, with the discussions about key themes that arose centrally grounded in the unique data and understandings that I uncovered.

From the outset, I must be clear: this is not a book with simplistic ‘recipes’ or strategies for success. Rather, the purpose, initially of the research, and now for this book, is to present authentic accounts and discussions of the reality of developing inclusive practices, as experienced and explained by teachers faced with the responsibility of enacting those practices. As Chapter 2 will set out, rather than striving for large-scale replicable data sets, the research focused on a principled approach to gathering rich data and stories or accounts of the experience of practice through which to illuminate understandings and reconsiderations of the issues.

Developing inclusive practices and the purpose of education

For some time, the importance of understanding and developing inclusive practice within educational systems has been understood as a global agenda (Pijl et al., 1997; Artilles et al., 2011; Goransson et al., 2013). It is seen as an essential catalyst in the movement for wholescale school transformation (Savolainen et al., 2012), with ‘Inclusion and equity in education’ being identified as the ‘“best long-term instrument we have in order to secure economic progress, as well as democracy and social stability” Norwegian Minister of Education, Oslo, 2009’ (Precey and Mazurkiewicz, 2013: 105). Yet, the journey towards developing and embedding inclusive education is still seen as a ‘continuous struggle’ (Waitoller and Kozleski, 2013: 35).

Thus, ‘despite the impressive growth in interest and enthusiasm around inclusive education throughout the world, how it is defined and implemented, and for whose benefit, remains at best incompletely understood’ (Kozleski et al., 2011: 2). This is significant and will clearly have an impact upon how inclusive education is understood by practitioners, researchers and policy makers across the world. Rather than understanding inclusion as an accepted and agreed construct, we therefore need to be constantly aware that approaches to inclusive education are mediated by a number of different factors including the

1.Official and implicit purposes and goals of public education;

2.Access to intellectual, human and material resources;

3.Collective understandings and educational responses to socio-cultural differences.

(Kozleski et al., 2011: 2)

Indeed, this first factor, around the purposes and goals of education, is a particularly important consideration. Considerations of inclusion and inclusive education cannot be simple technical discussions of specific strategies or interventions, but instead must draw practitioners, researchers and policy makers into fundamental discussions about the purpose of education more broadly. Fundamentally, the aim of inclusive education is to eliminate all forms of social exclusion (Ainscow and Sandill, 2010). In this, education is seen as a basic human right.

Yet, exclusionary practices and processes continue to be perpetuated through society and through education, with ‘many exclusionary factors embedded in systems, structures and practice [which lead] directly to the marginalization, non-recognition and “othering” of certain “groups” of students in schools’ (Ruairc, 2013: 15). Thus, we need to fundamentally question and examine how, and in which ways, schools and education systems may simply ‘reproduce’ (Ottesen, 2013) or breed inequality. Indeed, if education is seen as a basic human right, then we need to step back and critically reconsider who actually benefits from existing education systems, and who it is that remains marginalised within the systems that we currently use to promote diversity and inclusion (ibid.). Chapter 4 therefore considers the concept of who the socially marginalised actually are in different political and cultural contexts.

Whilst taking a critical look at the purpose of education and schools is central, we do, however, also need to critically reflect upon the impact and implications of schools’ positioning in society today. Ruairc (2013), for example, suggests that the current notion that schools are solely responsible for the delivery of inclusive education, and that schools can do it all alone and solve all of society’s problems, is contestable. So, although more may need to be done across educational policy contexts and structures to prioritise inclusive principles and practices, we also need to recognise the challenge of only using education systems which ‘both mirro[r] and shap[e] society’ (Precey and Mazurkiewicz, 2013: 108) to lead the development of inclusive practices. We therefore need to seek creative solutions to understanding and addressing the principles of inclusion across society as a whole rather than only from an educational perspective.

To do this, inclusion and inclusive education need to be seen as ‘more than a set of strategies to merely place students in ordinary classrooms and schools’ (Artilles et al., 2011: 4). Inclusion, therefore, is not just a structural issue, but an ethical concept to do with the purpose of education (Reindal, 2010), needing to be understood as a principled approach to a number of central constructs, including equity, equality, democracy, social justice, values, vision and emotion. In this way, inclusion can be seen more as a philosophy and a philosophical undertaking than the mechanical implementation of a narrow strategy or educational approach (Grenier, 2010).

This book seeks to support readers to understand more deeply the issues and implications of what simple terms such as inclusion or inclusive education actually mean, in order to better understand and be positioned to respond to the continuous struggle that such an endeavour encompasses. Tinkering around the edges of existing systems is not enough; the global priority around inclusion requires fundamental rather than incremental change (Avissar, 2012: 47). This book, and the research shared within it, provides one perspective through which this philosophical issue can be re-examined and understood in different ways.

Critical issues and questions embedded in discussions about inclusion

To be able to better understand and evaluate discussions relating to inclusive practices and inclusion as a concept, we need to consider a number of broad critical questions. Indeed, as we shall explore throughout the book as a whole, it is only by stopping and asking critical questions about taken-for-granted concepts and practices that we will be able to develop effective approaches to meet the needs of all within changing education systems and societies. In each chapter, critical questions relating to the chapter theme are therefore posed. As a starting point, a few broad questions have been suggested here. These can be used to start a process of critical thinking and reflection and can be added to reflect differing political, cultural, educational and social contexts:

•What is meant by the term inclusion?

•What is understood by the phrase developing inclusive practices?

•How, and in what ways, do definitions of inclusion vary?

•Do political and cultural contexts impact upon the definition and practice of inclusive education?

•Is inclusion a technical or a philosophical endeavour?

•What is an inclusive culture?

•How can an inclusive culture be created and sustained?

•Is inclusion a state of being or a process?

•Is there a relationship between inclusive cultures and leadership approaches?

•Is there such a thing as inclusive leadership?

•What might this look like?

•How do relationships impact on the development and experience of inclusive practices?

‘Making the familiar unfamiliar’ (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995)

To be able to really engage with these critical issues and questions, there is a need to find ways to look again at the taken-for-granted assumptions and structures embedded within our current experiences of inclusive education and school settings. We need to recognise that currently, there is an inherent

failure of proponents to acknowledge and address the historical sediments of oppression that are layered within institutions. And because of the cultural perspectives and understandings of how ethnicity, race, gender, language, citizenship and other markers of difference are conflated with ability, examining these power questions is laced with the blindness and unconsciousness of familiarity.

(Artilles et al., 2011: 5)

It is this ‘blindness and unconsciousness of familiarity’ which therefore needs to be perpetually challenged. Unfortunately, many education systems are now so pressurised and challenging, with increased external accountability and inspection regimes, that time and space to reflect on the critical issues and questions guiding education have been lost. In England, where the research shared in this book is set, national directives and policies increasingly took over control of decisions about teaching and learning, with the period 1997–2010 marked by intense prescription from the government. This impacted upon the ability and potential for professionals to really question existing and emerging practices. With schools sometimes becoming so focused on the act of ‘doing’, precious time and space for thinking and reflection was increasingly lost or reduced. The implications of this are to an extent still being felt. Finding simple strategies to ‘make the familiar unfamiliar’ (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995) and provide principled interruptions to practice, in order to raise, question and reflect upon critical issues, including the perpetuation of taken-for-granted terminology and practices, are therefore essential.

The research that I undertook and am sharing in this book was my way, as a practitioner deeply entrenched within a particular system of education operating within South East England, to find ways to ‘make the familiar unfamiliar’ (Delamont and Atkinson, 1995). This is a concept that I have borrowed from Delamont and Atkinson (1995) to define the important process of finding new ways to look again at familiar practices in order to understand them in different ways, exposing underlying assumptions and ways that they can impact upon the development of fully inclusive practices.

As researcher, by going into two different schools over a prolonged period and engaging in reflective discussions with practitioners actually experiencing the reality of developing inclusive practices, with all of the challenges and rewards that come with this, I was provided with a ...