Inclusive Education

International Voices on Disability and Justice

Keith Ballard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781135701208
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

The aim of this text is to convey the experience of excluded children, their parents, teachers and remaining classmates. Looking at all those involved, the book offers reflections on inclusion and exclusion in the context of schools that do not cater well for diversity. The contributors and issues raised are international, giving the reader everything necessary for considering concepts and practices across countries and cultures, and highlighting ways in which schools might bring down the barriers to participation and learning.

Chapter 1

International Voices: An Introduction

Keith Ballard

The idea of inclusive education has become part of the discussion on developments in education at an international level. Inclusive practices are a reality in at least some schools in many education systems. The present collection of studies is the third project of a research group that set out to examine inclusion in an international context. It was thought that looking at concepts and practices across countries and cultures might help identify common themes, suggest emerging concerns, and explore ways in which schools might teach all students in their communities, eliminating barriers to participation and learning.

The more inclusive a setting, the more it is challenged by diversity and difference. We have found this to be as true for our research group as it undoubtedly is for classrooms and schools. As Catherine Clark, Alan Dyson and Alan Millward (1995) noted in editing our first collection of studies, when we came together to look at what is happening in our various countries we were exposed to a greater range of meanings and activities said to represent inclusion than we see within our own national boundaries of geography, history, language and culture. At the same time, from our discussions and from our first two collaborative projects, it also became evident that within countries there are different views on what inclusion is, suggesting that complex influences are at work in the development of this field. For example, some researchers view inclusive education as an ongoing development of special education. Others believe, as I do, that what we refer to as inclusion is, and should be, derived from mainstream approaches to instruction and school organization, creating an alternative to special education knowledge and practices. From this latter perspective the idea of inclusion as a merger of special and regular education is seen as problematic because such an amalgamation appears likely to maintain a medical, curative model of education (Reger, 1972) that excludes those labelled as ‘special’ from the curriculum and from other experiences available to non-labelled students.

In New Zealand, as elsewhere, the notion of inclusion has grown out of the mainstreaming movement focused on disabled children.¹ These were students who were most obviously excluded from ordinary schools, classrooms and learning opportunities, and their integration was a project originated by their parents and extending across many years (Sonntag, 1994). It is also the case, as English researchers Tony Booth and Mel Ainscow (1998) suggest in the second of the books written by our research group, that an emphasis on inclusion for disabled students occurs because the people researching and writing about inclusion often come from a background in special education. Yet, as Booth and Ainscow so cogently remind us, the idea of inclusion cannot refer to just some students and not others. To be inclusive requires that we strive to identify and remove all barriers to learning for all children. This means that we must attend to increasing participation not just for disabled students but for all those experiencing disadvantage, whether this results from poverty, sexuality, minority ethnic status, or other characteristics assigned significance by the dominant culture in their society. To achieve this, say Booth and Ainscow, while working to understand inclusion we must give equal attention to understanding and removing the pressures for exclusion that exist within the cultures of our schools and society.

Booth and Ainscow (1998) refer to the difficulty of redefining the field from within. In editing the second collection of studies by the group they reported finding that the perspectives of the different researchers and research teams differed even more than might have been anticipated from the discussions at our meetings. Our own professional interests and paradigm commitments get in the way of achieving a common position. The same has proven true for this, the third project by the group, and it is clear that this research cannot be amalgamated in any cumulative, positivist way. What a diversity of work can achieve is to confront us with unfamiliar situations and ideas, and challenge us with interpretations that differ from our own. A lack of certainty is seen as one of the outcomes of creating diverse contexts, and as a stimulant to creativity and collaborative problem solving in inclusive schools (Skrtic, 1995). So too, perhaps, in the research arena (Reinharz, 1990). In any case, the fact that there is no easy summary or resolution may be no bad thing, given the potential importance of the issues involved in inclusive education. As Clark, Dyson and Millward (1995) suggested, to end discriminatory practices and to teach all children well would seem to require that we do not disengage from alternative positions that may help to clarify our purpose and how we are to proceed. The present text, then, offers further material for ongoing debate.

In the meantime, children who are excluded should not have to wait for more discussion or research to determine their fate, and we might elect to see inclusion as a ‘value to be followed’ rather than as an ‘experiment to be tested’ (Ferguson and Asch, 1989, p. 137). I think that we should proceed from this position because injustice, in this case state funded public education designed for some of the children in a society but excluding others, is inconsistent with human rights and democratic society. We might proceed with the understanding that, in any case, research may not offer clear evidence of a knowledge base for ‘best practice’ that could apply across settings, and that such a goal may be neither achievable nor desirable. Teaching is a complex process located within culture, place and the interactions of particular teachers and students. It is not a fixed, static enterprise, and specifying how to proceed may hide the messy reality of classrooms and limit the flexibility needed for ongoing problem solving.

We might also proceed to support efforts towards inclusive education from the position that, although not offering detailed guidelines, research has shown inclusive practice to be supported in schools where there is a culture and philosophy of inclusion (Booth and Ainscow, 1998). In part this seems to involve teachers believing that ‘the education of each student is equally important’ (Biklen, 1987, p. i; Giangreco, 1997), and understanding that seeing students such as the disabled as ‘other’ creates the discrimination of ‘them’ and ‘us’, valued and not so valued, that is a basis for exclusion. It is also evident that inclusion is enacted within wider social and ideological contexts. This means for many of us that we may need to be explicit about our motives and goals where there is pressure to trade off equity and justice for disabled and other minority students against teacher comfort and school rankings on standardized tests.

The Present Study

The present study set out to further explore these and related issues, and to do so by listening to the voices of those who have direct experience of inclusion and exclusion. Some of these voices, we believed, were rarely evident in the literature, and yet may have much to say on what happens to them at present and what they would wish for the future. In part we were motivated by an awareness that the voice of disabled people was largely excluded from discussion on education, and that disabled students and adults have been defined and categorized by professionals (such as ourselves) whose labels have dominated their lives, hiding their history and identity (Clough and Barton, 1995). Some chapters in this book include the voice of disabled people. Others record the experiences of parents of disabled children, while in other chapters teachers, students and researchers talk of what inclusion and exclusion mean to them in the context of schools that do not cater well for diversity and that, therefore, help create and sustain social and cultural divisions. From this work inclusive education is about confronting all forms of discrimination as part of a concern to develop an inclusive society based on ‘social justice, equity and democratic participation’ (Barton, 1997, p. 233).

In setting up this, the third project we had collaborated on as a research group, the 16 researchers from seven countries—Scotland, England, America, Norway, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand—agreed on a general goal, to attend to ‘voices from the inside’, focusing on ‘the lived experience of people involved in and affected by inclusion’. (It will be evident that, as the person who wrote that statement, I had not, at the time we began this work early in 1996, seen the significance of explicitly attending to the issue of exclusion.) As in our previous collaboration we agreed that people should interpret the research task in their own way. We expected that this might result in a diverse range of studies, given the open-ended option regarding who might be included as participants and that people held different views on the kind of research method that should be applied.

Most of us met together in Auckland, New Zealand, in September 1996 to present our work for group discussion and critique (a report of the meeting was sent to those unable to attend).² We asked questions and made suggestions that we thought might help each study communicate its findings and interpretations to a wider audience through our intended publication of this book. Although we meet infrequently, from our previous work and through correspondence we have some idea of our various beliefs and preferences. Nevertheless, as Tony Booth and Mel Ainscow (1998) recorded from our second project, our different and strongly held views on the field of study and on the research methods most appropriate for its investigation meant that in our writing we would continue to represent a diversity of work rather than achieve a more closely coordinated set of chapters, easily related, one to another. I think this is a strength rather than a weakness. Our beliefs and convictions mean that we may not always hear what is being said by others, at least not at the time. Hence my own advocacy-oriented focus on inclusion and disability did not let me see the point that Tony and Mel made at our meeting in Auckland about the importance of attending to pressures for exclusion. But even if we had tried for conformity in approach, it is still yet another person, the person using the research, the listener or reader, who interprets and transforms what we present through the lens of their own experiences, passions and preferences, and may see or not see what the writers intended (Wolcott, 1994). What we might have thought of as being coordinated and interrelated, another may read as material that has been forced to conform to predetermined parameters of study and to conventions of research writing that some of it, at least, does not fit.

A further challenge was that of context. Would the reader need to know about the cultural, political, legislative and organizational arrangements of the people who speak in these studies? If so, in how much detail, and what of the local and even individual translations and transformations of policies and practices? I agree that context is important to understanding, and the reader will find in each chapter a country’s social and political circumstances presented either in an outline of legislation, structures and belief systems or indirectly through the comments of participants. But I take responsibility for not requiring more detailed information for the present studies. People might include it if they wished, but it seemed to me that the additional material could extend the length of a report unreasonably and test the reader’s attention. I wanted the focus to be on people in schools and other settings talking about the reality for them of inclusion and exclusion. To the extent that we make their voices dominant in this text, we might decrease our construction of them as the objects of research (Fulcher, 1995). If readers want information on the school systems in our various countries then, where this is absent, I must refer them to our group’s two earlier publications, or they might consult other literature on such issues.

For these reasons the reader will find in this book chapters that vary in approach and style. For some of the researchers, to understand people’s experiences of inclusion and exclusion meant the use of statistical procedures in support of a belief that objective information on the phenomena under study was reported. For others, a case study approach provided material to be analysed from theoretical positions that might expose underlying assumptions and suggest alternative meanings and implications. The reader is even more central in a third type of study. Here, some experiences of inclusion and exclusion are presented and what they mean is largely for the reader to determine. These accounts invite a personal, emotional engagement with lives affected by powerful attitudes and structures within their respective societies. They require the reader to ask if they recognize these in themselves and in their own culture and communities, and what that might imply.

The Notion of Voice

We acknowledge in this work that the notion of ‘voice’ is problematic. Our underlying concern is with power and politics in education, yet the ability to scrutinize, to gaze on another, is itself premised on power (Shakespeare, 1994), and it is the researcher’s voice that is dominant in the present accounts. There is the problem that recording the individual voice and experiences of participants might reduce attention to the wider economic and other material circumstances that are the basis of disablism and other forms of oppression (Shakespeare, 1994). There is also the problem that some voices might be heard in ways that assert their authority and interests over those who cannot easily access a position to be heard. This might be the case for those who lack a clearly identifiable disability or group membership, or those whose voice is deemed to be outside the range that is considered to be authentic or valid (Barnes and Mercer, 1996; Dyson, 1996). In addition, a research text might silence a voice, or at least some of what is said. This might be done to protect a contributor’s identity or because the researcher was not aware of the meaning or significance of what they were told (Clandinin and Connelly, 1994). Although we undertook our work with such challenges in mind, the reader is encouraged to look critically at what we have achieved in terms of our relationships with the people we worked with and how we have addressed political issues in our education systems and societies.

The idea of an ‘authentic’ voice also warrants a critical perspective. ‘Insider’ accounts are not necessarily ‘true’ or ‘valid’ in a realist or absolute sense. In reporting their experiences, people reconstruct what happened to them and what this meant. They may need to translate events and contextual frameworks into terms that will be understood by researchers and others who have not lived the experiences that they talk of. Although clearly open to critical analysis, such voices are, nevertheless, seen by Guba and Lincoln (1994, p. 114) to have ‘educative authenticity’ where they enhance our understanding of another person and what happens to them, and ‘catalytic authenticity’ should they stimulate the reader to action.

Our studies present a diversity of voices contributing to an ongoing international debate on inclusion and related concerns. As part of this project we decided to make explicit the voice of the researcher. This acknowledges that the account of each interview and the writing of each study is a reflection of the researchers’ beliefs, preferred investigative strategies, and the concepts and constructions that they bring to the interpretation of their data. Both the researchers and those they study with, or focus on, have various motivations and understandings about what it is they set out to do in the name of research. The complexity and ambiguity of language and communication between researcher and participant are not in some final way brought under control by procedures such as statistical summaries, triangulation or collaboration (Scheurich, 1995). What we present, therefore, is made by us, and so we thought it important for the reader to know something about who we are, to include ourselves in our text. In each case, how to do that was left over to the writers, and it will be seen that people have various ideas about how they are part of their work.

Introducing the Chapters

The chapters involve a focus on different units of study, from the experiences of teachers, parents and students, to investigation of how a particular school works and what happens beyond school in the provision of services for young people. I have presented the chapters in this order. The reader may start by listening to some teachers, providing an insight into the kinds of issues that parents, students and others, influenced by what goes on in classrooms, also address, but the sequence is not an essential one.

Ysbrand Pijl, Sip Pijl and Kees van den Bos present in Chapter 2 an analysis of interviews in which teachers in the Netherlands were asked why they referred children for placement out of the regular classroom and into the separate special school system. Once placed in special schools, children rarely return to the mainstream, and Ysbrand and his colleagues record that in their country there is growing public concern that segregation in education may have gone too far. Because it is usually the regular school teachers who initiate referral, understanding their assumptions and motives is seen in this research as central to the task of making education more responsive to students experiencing...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Tables
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Chapter 1 International Voices: An Introduction
• Chapter 2 Teachers’ Motives for Referring Students to Special Education
• Chapter 3 Parent Voices on Advocacy, Education, Disability and Justice
• Chapter 4 My Kid, and Kids Kinda Like Him
• Chapter 5 I Don’t Need This: Acts of Transgression by Students with Special Educational Needs
• Chapter 6 The Impact of Hospitalization on School Inclusion: The Experiences of Two Students with Chronic Illness
• Chapter 7 Disability, Inclusion and Exclusion: Some Insider Accounts and Interpretations
• Chapter 8 Three Voices from the First Generation of Integration Students in Norway
• Chapter 9 Tordis? She is just Tordis!
• Chapter 10 Inclusion and Exclusion in Schools: Listening to Some Hidden Voices
• Chapter 11 Falling Down the Interfaces: From Inclusive Schools to an Exclusive Society
• Chapter 12 Concluding Thoughts
• Notes on Contributors
• Index