From Them to Us

An International Study of Inclusion in Education

Mel Ainscow, Tony Booth, Mel Ainscow, Tony Booth

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134770243
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Inclusive education has become a phrase with international currency shaping the content of conferences and national educational policies around the world. But what does it mean? Is it about including a special group of disabled learners or students seen to have 'special needs' (them) or is it concerned with making educational institutions inclusive, responsive to the diversity of all their students (us)?
In this unique comparative study, the editors have brought together an international team of researchers from eight countries to develop case-studies which explore the processes of inclusion and exclusion within a school or group of schools set in its local and national context. The study includes classroom observation, the experiences of the school day of students and interviews with staff, students, parents and school governors. Through an innovative juxtaposition of the case-studies and commentaries on them, differences of perspective within and between countries are revealed and analysed.
The study arose from a dissatisfaction with previous research, which presents 'national perspectives' or seeks findings that have global significance. This book avoids such simplification and draws attention to the problems of translation of practice across cultures. The editors start from an assumption of diversity of perspective which like the diversity of students within schools can be viewed as problematic or as a resource to be recognized and celebrated.

1
FROM THEM TO US: SETTING UP THE STUDY

Introduction

This book documents and analyses the perspectives on inclusion and exclusion revealed by researchers in eight countries in their studies of a school set in its national and local context. In this chapter we provide a background to our concerns and describe the process of creating the individual studies and our analyses of them.

The study arose from a dissatisfaction with much of the existing comparative education research. International studies, which seek findings that have global significance, indulge in oversimplification of educational processes and practices, and ignore problems of interpretation and translation. Alternatively, studies may assume the existence of a single national perspective, constructing an official version of events rather than reporting the conflicts of interest and points of view that arise in all countries. In these ways important differences between and within countries are omitted from study and debate.

We intend that the book should enhance an interest in the shaping effect of national and local policies and cultural and linguistic histories on educational practice. It extends existing comparative reviews of inclusion by making their viewpoints explicit through the illustration of practice in all its messiness (such reviews include OECD 1995, O’Hanlon 1993 and 1995; Meijer, Pijl and Hegarty 1994; Pijl, Meijer and Hegarty 1997; Wade and Moore 1992, as well as the regular ‘country briefings’ in the European Journal of Special Needs Education). It goes beyond them, too, by challenging the way notions of inclusion, exclusion and ‘inclusive education’ are interpreted through the lens of traditional special education.

Our interest in inclusion and exclusion is part of a long-standing involvement in understanding and attempting to resolve the barriers to learning experienced by students. We link these concerns to a commitment to increase the participation of students in, and reduce their exclusion from mainstream schools. Both of us have been critical of any narrow conception of the field of ‘special education’, concerning ourselves with the development of schools that are more responsive to the diversity of all learners rather than concentrating on a group of students categorised as having special needs or disabilities (e.g. Ainscow 1991 and 1995a; Booth 1983; Booth, Potts and Swann 1987). On this broader view, inclusion or exclusion are as much about participation and marginalisation in relation to race, class, gender, sexuality, poverty and unemployment as they are about traditional special education concerns with students categorised as low in attainment, disabled or deviant in behaviour. This book can be read as an exploration of the possibilities for redefining traditional special education around the notions of inclusion and exclusion, thereby providing a viable and productive area for further research.

The view that a concern with inclusion is primarily about the location of students assigned to a special education category can lead to the presentation of misleading statistics that imply that educational difficulties are to do with the numbers and placement of disabled students or others seen to have difficulties in learning (e.g. Csapo 1986 and 1987; Mittler 1993; Okyere 1994; Wiesinger 1986). This in turn leads to an assumption that solutions must focus on prevention, cure, or steps to make these students fit into an unreconstructed educational normality. Such statistics distract our attention from the ways in which attitudes, policies and institutions exclude or marginalise groups of children and young people (Stubbs 1995).

We do not attempt to identify ‘good practice’ and would stress the limitations of such a quest, particularly in a comparative study. Readers may use this book as a source of principles and practices to encourage and avoid but neither the researchers nor their schools were selected with the development of teaching and learning practice principally in mind. In any case, good practice is in the eye of the beholder. Even if we make explicit the world view in which our definition of good practice resides, the quest to represent it may encourage a distortion of reality, an avoidance of reports of the messiness and inconsistencies of real schools and real lives, and the swirling contradictions of particular cultures and minds. However, we regard the task of uncovering the nature of perspectives and the way they are culturally and politically constrained as an essential step in learning from the practice of others.

Our perspective and the perspectives of others

Our view of inclusion, then, which we repeat in chapter 16, the English casestudy, involves the processes of increasing the participation of students in, and reducing their exclusion from, mainstream curricula, cultures and communities. We link the notions of inclusion and exclusion together because the process of increasing the participation of students entails the reduction of pressures to exclusion. Further, the link encourages us to look at the various sources and types of pressure acting on different groups of students. We are also aware of a ‘comedy’ played out in some schools whereby some students, previously excluded and in special schools, are welcomed in through the front door while others are ushered out at the back. Others may have ‘a revolving door’ that allows students to come into a school with one label, such as ‘learning difficulty’, only to be relabelled and excluded with another such as ‘emotional and behavioural difficulty’.

A concern with overcoming barriers to the participation of all in education is captured, for some, by the notion of ‘inclusive education’. This term has acquired increasing international currency, which poses the danger that wishful thinking about the way it is used or applied may distract people from exploring the realities of practice. As we will discuss in detail in the study that we wrote with Alan Dyson, in England the concept of ‘inclusive education’— that is, increasing the participation of all students in a neighbourhood in their local school—cannot sensibly be separated from ideas of community ‘comprehensive’ education.

The idea of inclusive education was given impetus by two conferences set up under the auspices of the United Nations. The first of these, held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, promoted the idea of ‘education for all’; this was followed in 1994 by a UNESCO conference in Salamanca, Spain, which led to a Statement that is being used in many countries to review their education policies. The Salamanca Statement proposes that the development of schools with an ‘inclusive’ orientation is the most effective means of improving the efficiency and ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system.

However, there is a long way to go if the rhetoric of ‘education for all’ is to be made real. In poor countries, millions of children are still denied their right to basic education. Considerable concern has also been expressed about the quality of teaching offered to children in some of these countries (Lockheed and Levin 1993). Meanwhile, in richer nations, where sufficient school places are usually available, the participation of many students may be limited by the way schools and classrooms are organised.

The International Journal of Inclusive Education, established in 1997, encourages the same broad conception of ‘inclusive education’ as ourselves, involving an examination of all the processes of inclusion and exclusion in education. However, some people continue to think of ‘inclusive education’ as a new name for ‘special education’ and limit their concern to students who are categorised as having ‘special educational needs’ because they are identified as low in attainment, deviant in behaviour or as disabled.

Most contributors to this book have a professional background in ‘special education’ but they differ considerably in the extent to which they derive their notions of inclusion and exclusion in a traditional way from this field. The book reflects the difficulties of redefining a field from within, the professional interests that stand in the way, and hence, our own ambivalence about making substantial realignments. Perhaps we should see this as ‘a coming of age’ book. In such a project a transition to adulthood requires us to define concepts and pursue studies according to their academic fertility rather than their institutional kinship.

It might seem that the assumptions we brought to the study would have created a circular process; that we would have communicated them to other researchers and that the case-studies produced would be neat reflections of our views. As we describe below, we made considerable efforts to avoid such circularity, stressing that we wanted to understand the perspectives of others. As will become apparent, far from managing to draw views together, the perspectives of research teams differed far more than we had anticipated.

Our title for the book, From Them to Us, alludes to some of the contrasts in perspective between and within chapters. Most clearly, it is related to the extent to which the chapters concentrate on a group of students identified as ‘abnormal’ or ‘deviant’: as ‘them’. It is also linked in a slightly less transparent way to the significance we give to recognising and valuing difference, not as a contrast to a normal, right way of being and thinking but as a resource for our learning. ‘From them to us’, therefore, indicates the careful unravelling of the gifts we create for ourselves when we acknowledge the separateness of other people and other worlds. It is about an approach to comparative research that retains this exchange.

Approaching comparative study

Even if we did not step outside the borders of our own country, we already possess extensive knowledge of the existence of differences in perspective on issues of inclusion and exclusion between and within schools, between parents and professionals, between disabled people and the creators of legislation about disability, amongst disabled people themselves, within and between a variety of cultural groups and amongst academics and researchers (for example, in England see Armstrong 1995; Armstrong and Galloway 1992; Booth 1995; Corbett 1996; Debenham and Trotter 1992; Goody 1992; Morris 1992; Oliver 1990; Rieser and Mason 1990). This knowledge of differences in view should ensure that we avoid two pitfalls of comparative research: the idea that there is a single national perspective on inclusion or exclusion, and the notion that practice can be generalised across countries without attention to local contexts and meanings.

Yet some writers present reports of their own or other countries as if they were monocultures (e.g. Mazurek and Winzer 1994; Mittler et al. 1993). What is called a national perspective is often an official view. In the case of the UK this can be particularly problematic, given the divergence of the education systems and their basis in legislation of Scotland, Northern Ireland and England and Wales (see, for example, Allan 1994; Booth 1996). We hope that this book will contribute to an end to attempts to treat countries as having a uniform approach.

The tendency to present single national perspectives is often matched by a failure to describe the way practice is to be understood in its local and national context (e.g. Ward 1993; Alban-Metcalfe 1996). This lack is part of a positivistic view of social science in which research in one country can be amalgamated and summed with that of another. Given the volume of research published in the USA this may have the effect of treating all people in the world as if the largest part of their make-up is American. The problem is compounded by differences of meaning of concepts, which is of particular significance in relation to categories of inability and disability. Yet, for example, in the special issue of the European Journal of Special Needs Education the review of European research on ‘integration’ is conducted as if all countries share the use of a category system used in England and Wales (Evans 1993).

All of this is in marked contrast to studies where there is a deliberate attempt to draw out nuances of the meaning of practice (e.g. Armstrong 1995). An important contribution here is provided by the work of Susan Peters (1993 and 1995). Speaking as both a disabled person and a professional, she argues that concepts such as disability and education are culturally and context bound. Similarly, Miles and Miles (1993) draw on their experiences in Pakistan to outline how concepts such as childhood differ substantially between cultures, a view reinforced by Stubbs (1995) who reports accounts that indicate ‘childhood’ does not exist under Lesotho law. Rather, the population is divided into ‘majors and minors’, the latter being unmarried males and females who are not heads of families. As a result, in Lesothan primary schools pupils may be in their late teens or even early twenties, having spent their younger years herding animals.

Such careful analyses of differences in perspective, context and meaning enhance rather than reduce the contribution that an examination of unfamiliar contexts can make to local practice, though it invalidates any attempt at simple imitation (Fuller and Clarke 1994). The power of comparison for the development of practice involves using the stimulus of more exotic environments to reconsider thinking and practice in familiar settings (Delamont 1992). It is about making what is strange familiar and what is familiar strange, like seeing your own town in a new light when showing a visitor around. Features that are normally ignored become clearer, possibilities that have been overlooked are reconsidered, and things that have been taken for granted are subject to new scrutiny.

If written accounts of other countries provide sufficient information to make practice transparent they can present some of the opportunities afforded to travellers. But being there is no guarantee of learning. Without an understanding of the rules of particular educational, cultural and political systems it is very difficult to make sense of what is in front of one’s eyes. Visiting classrooms can be a disappointing experience in the most favourable circumstances since most of what is interesting about what is going on is locked away in the heads of teachers and students.

Classroom encounters

Some brief observations may help to make clearer some of the dilemmas of comparative research. First of all, picture a primary school classroom in Inner Mongolia, China. There are approximately seventy-five children, sitting in rows of desks packed into a long, rather bleak room. The teacher stands at one end of the room on a narrow stage in front of a blackboard. In the back row of the classroom there are some students who look older than the rest. These turn out to be children who started school late, or are repeating a failed grade. Lessons are forty minutes long and although each subject is taught by a different teacher, there is a common pattern: the teacher controls the lesson, talking or reading, and frequently questioning the students to stimulate choral or individual responses from the class. Throughout the lesson the pace is fast and the engagement of students seems intense. Afterwards, the teacher explains how she tries to help those who experience difficulties by directing many more questions to them and by encouraging their classmates to go over the lesson content with them during the break-times.

What does a foreign observer make of such an experience? Does it suggest patterns of practice that might be relevant to teachers in their country? In England for example, despite much smaller class sizes, it is not uncommon to encounter students in classes whose participation is marginal, to say the least. Why are these Chinese students so quiet and obedient through a day of lessons that to an outsider can seem repetitive? It would be easy to jump to simple conclusions that might appear to offer strategies that could be exported. Yet many influences help to shape the events observed in the classroom. We are told that teachers are held in high esteem in Chinese society but that this is changing as economic reforms disrupt status patterns (Bond 1991). There is great pressure for success at school in families. These and other factors that require a detailed knowledge of local circumstances need to be examined before the practice can be understood or conclusions drawn.

A second example comes from Ghana, West Africa. In a primary school in a rural district, class sizes are much more manageable than those observed in the Chinese school. Typically there are fifty or so children in each class. On the other hand the physical resources are noticeably poorer. Many of the children arrive in the morning carrying a stool on their heads. It seems that this is the equivalent, in richer countries, of bringing a pen and a ruler from home. Each evening the stools are returned home for domestic use, or in some cases there may be a reluctance to leave them at school where they might be stolen, since the classrooms have few walls. One of the teachers explains that the biggest problem is the lack of textbooks. For most lessons he only has one copy of the book and frequently copies text onto the black-board. There are a number of disabled students present in classes. The headteacher explains that he has responsibility to admit all children in the district, asking ‘where else would they go?’.

What sets of cultural or personal beliefs shape the views of the head-teacher in the school in Ghana? This inclusion, taken for granted, c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 From Them to Us: Setting up the Study
• 2 USA: I Kind of Wonder if We’re Fooling Ourselves
• 3 USA Response: Liberating Voices?
• 4 Scotland: Mainstreaming at the Margins
• 5 Scotland Response: Professionals at the Centre?
• 6 New Zealand: Inclusive School, Inclusive Philosophy?
• 7 New Zealand Response: One Philosophy or Two?
• 8 Norway: Adapted Education for All?
• 9 Norway Response: Adapted Education for Some?
• 10 The Netherlands: A Springboard for Other Initiatives
• 11 The Netherlands Response: Plunging into Inclusion?
• 12 Ireland: Integration as Appropriate, Segregation Where Necessary
• 13 Ireland Response: Limited Resources for Inclusion?
• 14 Australia: Inclusion Through Categorisation?
• Appendix: Teachers’ Perceptions of the Effects of the Education of Students with ADHD in Ordinary Classrooms
• 15 Australia Response: Paying Attention to Disorder?
• 16 England: Inclusion and Exclusion in a Competitive System
• 17 England Response: We Wonder if We’re Fooling Ourselves
• 18 Making Comparisons: Drawing Conclusions
• Bibliography