Actively Seeking Inclusion

Pupils with Special Needs in Mainstream Schools

Julie Allan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135711702
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

First Published in 2004. Research on special education has tended to focus on technical and professional aspects of provision and matters of placement. The voice of the pupil with special educational needs has tended to be silenced by professional discourses, reducing him or her to a passive recipient of specialist provision. This book attempts to undo some of this. This book is about 11 pupils with special needs, who were actively seeking inclusion in mainstream schools. The voices of the pupils and their mainstream peers are foregrounded and read alongside those of other interested parties—teachers, other professionals and parents—as well as the more formal discourses of special needs.

Chapter 1
Wandering Voices and Shifting Identities

Special education discourses function like rationalized myths about the actions taking place (Haug, 1998), and the positivistic orientation of researchers and the absence of rigorous theorizing about special education have served to reinforce certain ‘truths’ while negating others. One conviction has been that moves towards integration and inclusion represent significant progress and improvement in the lives of children with special needs. As a consequence of this mythologizing process, the schooling of pupils with special needs has been allowed to continue as ‘a perverse form of prohibition in which desire as human agency is not permitted to explore its own constitutive possibilities’ (McLaren, 1995: 233). This chapter begins by mapping out the discourses which shape special education, then examines the kind of research and theorizing about special needs which has taken place, questioning their contribution to understanding children's identities and experiences. It explores how the discourses of research have helped to mythologize a sense of progress in the education of pupils with special needs, helped to preserve the mystique of special education (Tomlinson, 1982) and enabled it to ‘reinvent itself in order to stake its claim in the so-called era of inclusion’ (Slee, 1998:126). The failure of researchers to ask the right questions (or worse still their dogged determination to ask the wrong ones), their theoretical intransigence and their unwillingness to alter the social relations of research production is scrutinized. There are some grounds for optimism, however, and the chapter ends by exploring some of the more challenging critiques, theoretical perspectives and relations of research production, which may reverse the ‘rip off (Oliver, 1997:15) which disabled people have been forced to endure.

Discourses that Shape Special Needs

Discourse is important because it ‘worlds the world’ (Lather, 1993:675), framing the ways in which we know and act within contested spaces. Fulcher (1989) reminds us that discourses have uses rather than inherent meanings, that is, they serve particular interests, and Foucault argues that ‘discourse may seem of little account, but the prohibitions to which it is subject reveal soon enough its links with desire and power’ (1971:11–12). Discourses also construct individuals as objects of particular kinds of knowledge: ‘we do not speak the discourse. The discourse speaks us’ (Ball, 1990a:18). Medical, charity and rights discourses construct disabled peoples’ identities and experiences, and Fulcher has suggested that lay and corporate discourses also have an important role in this process. Within education, a market discourse has emerged recently, shaping the experiences of teachers and pupils. A powerful new aesthetic discourse has been developed by disabled people; this particular discourse is discussed in the final chapter in the context of the work that disabled people have done on themselves. These discourses do not function independently of each other, but interact, often in a subversive way, making the construction of the identities and experiences of disabled people a complex and contradictory process.

Medical Discourse

A medical discourse defines individuals by their deficits, rather than by external factors (Fulcher, 1989; Sandow, 1993). It is criticized for being heavily patriarchal (Corbett, 1993) and dismissing disabled people under a single metaphysical category, which buries personalities (Brisenden, 1986). Fulcher (1989) suggests that medical discourse also individualizes disabilities as attributes and professionalizes them by making them part of a person's technical trouble. Medical discourse, through its language of ‘body, patient, help need, cure, rehabilitation, and its politics that the doctor knows best’ (Fulcher, 1989:27) has dominated special educational practices (Tomlinson, 1982) and Oliver highlights the irony of the ‘rehabilitation enterprise’ (1996:104). He suggests that the pursuit of walking and the restoration of the ability to walk is elevated to a millenarium movement in which walking is achieved by miraculous means (Abercrombie, Hill and Turner, 1988). Charities which support ‘chronic and crippling diseases’ (Oliver, 1996:101) exist for the promotion of cures which are extremely rare. Oliver also suggests that the practice of conductive education on children with cerebral palsy could be likened to Nazism (1989). He contends that if able bodied children were removed from their communities, sent abroad and ‘forced to undertake physical exercise for all their waking hours’ (1996:107), it would amount to child abuse and ‘would rapidly come to the attention of the child protection mafia’ (ibid.). As far as disabled children are concerned, however, ‘anything goes as long as you call it therapeutic’ (ibid.) and Oliver suggests that ‘if it wasn't so sad it would be funny’ (1989:197). French warns against ignoring the experience of pain among disabled people while acknowledging that the routine linkage of disability with illness and disease has been ‘extremely damaging’ (1993:19). Corbett (1993) argues for a reconstruction, rather than abandonment, of medical discourse, giving disabled people power over their own bodies and health care.

Charity Discourse

Within a charity discourse, disabled people become tragic figures who need help (Llewellyn, 1983), and Shapiro notes that individuals usually become defined either as objects of pity or sources of inspiration. He argues that both are oppressive, since they do not reflect the ‘day-to-day reality of most disabled people, who struggle constantly with smaller challenges, such as finding a bus with a wheelchair lift’ (1993:17). Several writers (for example Goffman, 1963; Nietzsche, 1961; Sinason, 1992) have suggested that pity is a way of overcoming fear or guilt towards individuals or of masking aggression (Lacan, 1977). Morris describes her experience of the charity discourse as she experienced it, first from a doctor:

I remember feeling outraged that the doctor who sat down at my bedside with a gloomy face, to tell me that I was permanently paralysed, should talk about how tragicit was. I felt that there was only one person who could say it was a tragedy and that was me—and I wasn't prepared to say that. (1991:2, original emphasis)

and then from others, who began to see her as a source of inspiration:

During the years following my accident, I have on countless occasions been told by both strangers and acquaintances how wonderfulthey think I am. It took a while to realise why this kind of remark provoked such anger in me. After all, those who say it seem to think that they are praising me for struggling against the difficulties which physical disability brings. When I eventually unpeeled the layers of patronising nonsense I realised that at the heart of such remarks lay the judgement that being disabled must be awful, indeed intolerable. It is very undermining to recognise that people look at me and see an existence, an experience, which they would do everything to avoid for themselves. (1991:15, original emphasis)

Hevey invokes the ‘tragedy principle’ (1993:116) to explain how the gaze of disability representation is a dynamic between the impaired body and social barriers. As a result, he argues, ‘disablement means impairment and impairment means flaw’ (1993:117). The ‘benevolent humanitarianism’ (Tomlinson, 1982:5) surrounding special education relates to both medical and charity discourses (Fulcher, 1989) and conceals the most selfish interests: ‘…whoever dreams of finding a fine situation for himself in the new schools never speaks of children without tears in his eyes. This is the everlasting comedy’ (Binet and Simon, 1914:10). The problem for special education, argues Tomlinson (ibid.), is that it is difficult to criticize.

Rights Discourse

A rights discourse, characterized by ‘self reliance, independence, and consumer wants (rather than needs)’ (Fulcher, 1989:30) is explicitly political, although not always adversarial. Indeed, a rights discourse for some may reflect little more than discomfort over the unequal treatment of disabled people. The diversity within rights discourses, according to Oliver and Zarb (1989), undermines their political strength and disabled activists have called for greater solidarity within ‘the movement’ (Hasler, 1993:284), suppressing difference in favour of ‘marching to the beat of a single drum’ (Shakespeare and Watson, 1997:299). Organizations such as People First or Scope have set out to subvert medical and charity discourses and their negative portrayal of disabled people. As well as trying to educate the public, for example, through poster campaigns, some disabled rights activists have protested against charity events, such as Children in Need. Others, such as those involved in the campaign for a national disability income, have been more concerned with addressing material disadvantage. A rights discourse has as its theoretical basis the social model of disability, developed by disabled people.

Lay and Corporate Discourses

Fulcher (1989) specifies an additional lay discourse, which, she suggests, is informed by medical and charity discourses as well as fear and prejudice. Although this discourse may reveal some aspects of the stereotyping of disabled people, it appears to lack the depth offered by an analysis of medical and charity discourses. There is, however, a further discourse which Fulcher suggests is emerging and which appears central to the ‘rules that constitute the meaning of disability’ (Shapiro, 1981:87). Fulcher refers to this as a corporate discourse, which is concerned with ‘managing disability’ (1981:26). Within education, the most significant discourse to develop in the 1990s relates to marketization, in which special needs labels have been commodified and have become a key to additional resources.

Market Discourse

Riddell and Brown (1994) have observed how Warnock has entered the market place, extending the language of competition and choice to special needs and creating a climate of accountability which Ball refers to as the ‘discourse of derision’ (1990a: 18). Within this ‘new discursive regime’ (ibid.) the words spoken by professionals have been displaced by ‘abstract mechanisms and technologies of truthand rationality—parental choice, the market, efficiency and management’ (ibid., original emphasis). Barton (1993a; 1997) argues that government policies, such as the delegation of resources to schools, opting out and the publication of exam results undermine justice and equality by creating winners and losers and increasing the impetus for exclusion and segregation. One effect of this has been to reinforce perceptions of individual deficits and to encourage parents and teachers to seek formal acknowledgment of these, leading to a dramatic increase in requests for statements or Records of Needs (Evans et al., 1994; Riddell, Brown and Duffield, 1994). In an article in The Guardian(Berliner, 1993), Baroness Warnock confessed that she had been naïve not to anticipate that the system of statementing would be used in this way (Chapter 6). Armstrong and Galloway have noted a tendency of teachers to reconstruct children with emotional or behavioural difficulties as ‘disturbed’ (1994:179), with the implication that these are outside the responsibilities of mainstream classroom teachers. Others have observed the ‘epidemics’ (Slee, 1996:107) of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and specific learning difficulties (Riddell et al., 1994; Clark et al., 1997). Slee suggests that the emergence of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in Australia and the United States, is an effect of a ‘disciplinary technology of surveillance and control’ (1996: 108) to which children are willingly submitted by parents and teachers. The category provides respectability for parents—‘better to be seen as pathologically impaired than as bad’ (ibid.)—and avoids difficult questions about pedagogy, curriculum and school organization for teachers. Slee argues, however, that pathologies should focus, not on individual children, but on schools and professional practices.

Research and the Myth of Progress

Researchers and commentators on special education have helped to sustain the myth of progress and reinforce the notion that ‘disability is intrinsic to the child. Schools and teachers are not included in the diagnostic gaze’ (Slee, 1996:105). Skrtic (1995) points out that the functionalist orientation of knowledge production in special education reinforces assumptions about organizational rationality and individual pathologies, allowing school failure to be characterized as inherent in individuals. The view of special education as a euphemism for school failure (Barton, 1989; Slee, 1998) is obscured by researchers pursuing innocent knowing (Lather, 1996) of individuals and of the practice of special education upon them. The reductionist discourses of special educational research have focused on documenting the nature or causes of pupils’ difficulties (Barton and Tomlinson, 1981) or in making integration or inclusion an ‘actuarial quest’ (Slee, 1996:105), a mere matter of redistribution of resources. Barton and Tomlinson have criticized the descriptive nature of special education research for failing to examine critically the inherent assumptions and contradictions, which they argue are ‘…a product of complex social, economic and political considerations which may relate more to the needsof the wider society, the whole education system and professionals working within the system, rather than simply to the needsof individual children’ (1984:65, original emphasis). The needs of individuals, determined on the basis of professionals’ logic of confidence (Meyer and Rowan, 1978; Skrtic, 1995), are privileged over their desires and interests, reducing pleasure to a concession or a diversion (Battaille, 1985).

There is agreement among many writers that the Warnock report (DES, 1978) represents a significant and positive watershed for special education (Gipps, Gross and Goldstein, 1987; Visser, 1993; Wedell, 1990). Hinson argues that the report brought ‘beneficial consequences’ (1991:12), claiming that ‘the cause of special education advanced steadily during the 1980s’ (ibid.). Fish points to ‘profound changes in thinking and practice’ (1990:219), precipitated by the Warnock report, that have not, however, ‘been generally recognised and accepted’ (ibid.). Fish also reflects on the importance of the Warnock report in reversing a trend which was ‘outward’ in the sense that special education provision was considered optimum. Warnock, he argues, was salutary in forcing the trend ‘inward’ and encouraging ordinary schools to meet special needs. Now, however, he suggests that ‘limitations of all kinds placed on schools, together with increased expectations, may be expected to reverse the trend again…to an outward movement of children from primary and secondary schools’ (Fish, 1990:226–7, original emphasis).

The implications of this, he suggests, are serious, moving special education once again from the centre to the periphery. This outward movement could be read in Foucauldian terms as an example of ‘dividing practices’ (Rabinow, 1984:8), similar to those which incarcerated lepers during the Middle Ages or confined the poor, the insane and vagabonds in a single hospital in the seventeenth century. Wedell argues that recent legislative and policy changes, such as the 1988 Education Act in England and Wales, have interrupted progress in understanding needs and making provision, casting ‘a pall of doubt…as to whether the advances which have been achieved can be maintained, let alone furthered’ (1990:17).

Analysis of the failure to achieve the Warnock ideals has focused on technical or administrative problems arising from a lack of resourcing (Fletcher-Campbell with Hall, 1993; Lunt and Evans, 1994); a failure to adopt the ‘whole school approach’ (Clark et al., 1997:34); the singular or collective inadequacies of teachers (Galloway and Goodwin, 1987; Hegarty, 1982) or a lack of commitment to integration (Booth, 1988). Implicit in each of these critiques is the notion that once these problems are resolved, progress can continue unabated. Yet, even Warnock herself has come to question the rationality of the Committee's recommendations (1991; 1992; 1997). Some of her regrets concern the ‘horror of the present situation’ (1997:13) in which confrontation arises over provision (Chapter 6), but she also claims never to have enthused over the idea of integration:

I was never very keen on integration—I was probably the least keen of all the Warnock Committee. What I was interested in was children with special needs who were already in the mainstream. I was not particularly keen on importing pupils with special needs from special schools because I could see the difficulties the mainstream would have. As I think we said rather carefully, integration can mean so many different things. If it only means having a unit for deaf children attached to a school, that's no good, but I am all in favour of a huge campus with everything together, providing the environment is friendly. But if it means integration in the classroom, I don't think so—although it is very difficult to generalise. (Warnock, 1997:12)

Some commentators have questioned claims that the Warnock watershed represented progress, noting little change in terms of justice and equality (Barton and Landeman, 1993), although others, in criticizing the behavioural objectives approach within the Warnock report (Swann, 1983; Wood and Shears, 1986), imply that it was retrogressive, offering ‘more opportunities for a process of segregation than for the reverse’ (Swann, 1983:121). Corbett suggests that the voice of enlightened modernity with which we celebrate progress is a voice of ‘power, status and a confident authority’ (1996:15), which restricts thinking and justifies the continuation of patronage.

Attempts to give the pupils a voice have sought to provide an authentic reading of what it is like to have special needs. Cheston (1994), for example, explored pupils’ explanations for being in special education, and Cooper (1993) asked pupils about their experience of being labelled as disaffected. Others have measured the self-esteem of individuals with special needs (Gibbons, 1985; Harvey and Greenway, 1984; Resnick and Hutton, 1987) or investigated their ability to cope in a mainstream school (Lynas, 1986b; Sheldon, 1991). Research on mainstream pupils (see Hegarty and Pocklington, 1981; Kyle and Davies, 1991; Lynas, 1986a) has produced superficial accounts of attitude towards, or acceptance of, pupils with special needs as some kind of generalized other, while ignoring what pupils say and do to each other. These essentialist perspectives construct pupils with special needs as objects upon which integration or inclusion is to be exercised.

The drive for representational clarity in educational research has ensured that the quest to rescue the researched from epistemic violence always fails (Lather, 1996; Stronach and Maclure, 1997). For pupils with special needs, this violence amounts to entrenching them as passive objects of research and ‘excommunicating’ them (Fulcher, 1995:6) through a process in which ‘researchers have benefitted by taking the experience of disability, rendering a faithful account of it and then moving on to better things while the disabled subjects remain in exactly the same social situation they did before the research began’ (Oliver, 1992a:109).

Stronach and Maclure's version of educational research as a ‘strategic act of interruption of the methodological will to certainty and clarity of vision’ (1997:4) appears to be a much more relevant project for special education. It requires, however, asking a diff...