Global Directions in Inclusive Education

Conceptualizations, Practices, and Methodologies for the 21st Century

Matthew J. Schuelka, Suzanne Carrington, Matthew J. Schuelka, Suzanne Carrington

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000488432
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Global Directions in Inclusive Education pushes the conceptual boundaries of 'inclusive education' and explores new ways to research and envision inclusion and diversity in education for all children. This pioneering book problematizes 'inclusive education' as a global currency, as another form of deficit-thinking, and as a universal application.

The expert team of international contributors argue that much of the field of inclusive education needs a reinvigoration of new ideas, critical introspection, and ways of knowing that can overcome the well-worn deficit paths of inclusive education study, namely: 'barriers' to inclusion, teacher attitudes, policy-practice gaps, lack of resources, and lack of teacher training. Seeking diverse ways forward that represent new visions and innovations from around the world, this text features voices and ideas from both early career and established scholars, to enliven debate and promote a more positive and productive dialogue.

Global Directions in Inclusive Education is ideal for students, researchers, and scholars of inclusive education; development practitioners seeking new ideas; and practitioners seeking to gain a deeper and more global understanding of inclusive education both in theory and in practice.

1 INNOVATIVE AND GLOBAL DIRECTIONS FOR INCLUSIVE EDUCATION IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Matthew J. Schuelka and Suzanne Carrington

DOI: 10.4324/9781003091950-1

Introduction

With a history of thousands of years of varied formal education systems and institutions around the world, the notion that going to school and receiving a quality education as a right for everyone is actually a very recent phenomenon. While there were growing movements for formalized mass education – particularly in Europe and North America – beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries (Ramirez & Boli, 1987), it was not until the late 20th century that nation-states and national education systems began policies and initiatives to expand access to schooling for all children. The focus of these ‘inclusive’ policies and initiatives was particularly targeted towards students with ‘disabilities,’ as well as students with other socially marginalized characteristics. That there needed to be significant and somewhat radical educational reforms just to allow marginalized and disabled students to even access any form of schooling points to the fact that, for thousands of years, formal education was an elite societal institution that served a sliver of the general population. In most ways, we continue to grapple with this historical legacy as we shift our imperatives towards education systems for all children.

The proliferation of national and global policies supporting inclusive education – a somewhat abstract and contentious term, but at its core meaning a right to an education for all children at their local school – began perhaps most significantly with the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education in 1994. The Salamanca Statement was a result of the World Conference on Special Needs Education and was signed by over one hundred countries and international organizations. However, now with over 25 years of hindsight, the Salamanca Statement may not have been enough to truly challenge the entrenched elitism and exclusivity that education systems are built upon. It also maintained a ‘special’ conceptualization of marginalized and disabled children in the name of ‘inclusive’ education. The Salamanca Statement and the neoliberal education discourse of the late 20th century have placed the burden of inclusive education reform on schools rather than on national institutions, policies, and structures (Anderson & Boyle, 2019). In other words, Salamanca fostered a global discourse on inclusive education, but placed the onus of reform on local level practices rather than critically examine institutional, systemic, and conceptual issues at national and international levels.

Since Salamanca in 1994, there has been a progression of global initiatives that promote at least equal access to education for all children such as Education for All (EFA), the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), and now the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). We will discuss these further in the next section. However, in many ways, the same challenges remain for inclusive education as they did in 1994, despite a steady progression of inclusive education discourse, aspirational statements, and research. It is true that if you look at any available global education longitudinal statistic, the overall trends have been positive in terms of educational participation and access (Roser & Ortiz-Ospina, 2016). However, these general statistical trends only tell part of the story. Explore inside these statistics and there remain significant disparities between and within countries, and there are significant challenges in school progression, drop-out, and outcomes. In other words, more children are being given access to education, but educational quality and educational socio-economic utility still continue to mitigate positive trends. There has been a significant focus on the inequality of educational access, without proper attention to the inequality of educational outcomes, and, indeed, the inequality of quality in education. The 2015 Global Education Monitoring Report acknowledged this in suggesting that the push for the right to educational access has overshadowed the right to a quality education once access has been gained (UNESCO, 2015). This can be read in two ways. First, one could view this as a natural progression: now that we have asserted the right to education for all, we can begin the work of making the education system better for all. Second, however, is that one could view this as a failure: pushing more children into schools without accompanying reforms – quality, increase in resources, rethinking how teachers are prepared, and innovations in how schooling can be structured – has led to an increase in marginalization and disparity in educational outcomes. Indeed, the second scenario has become more prevalent and inclusive education has experienced more resistance. For example, the number of children in special schools in England has been exponentially rising since 2006 (Black, 2019), whereas once England was an early model of inclusive education. Mary Warnock (2005), a famous early proponent of inclusive education in England, backed away from her earlier assertions against segregated schooling. There is a similar trend occurring in Ireland as well, in which ‘inclusive education’ merely replaced ‘special’ and segregated education policy, without much consideration as to what reforms and resources are needed to truly be inclusive (Shevlin & Banks, 2021). Imray and Colley boldly declared Inclusion Is Dead, Long Live Inclusion (2017), to which Slee wrote his rebuttal Inclusive Education Isn’t Dead, It Just Smells Funny (2018).

We agree with Slee that the notion of inclusive education itself is not over or flawed in its root directive to provide all children with a quality education alongside their peers. Indeed, as Slee (2018) avers, inclusive education is the cornerstone of the modern democratic state. Therefore, we challenge all researchers, practitioners, education professionals, and policymakers to move inclusive education to the center of the meaning of education in society itself. This is the argument made by Schuelka, Johnstone, Thomas, and Artiles (2019) to move beyond the term ‘inclusive education’ – and the unhelpful discourse of trying to define and redefine it – and embrace the notion of inclusion and diversity in education. They argue:

Children in classrooms around the world want to experience a positive sense of belonging, identity, safety, learning, and societal contribution and … could not care less what adults call it. Many scholars of inclusive education frame these desires within a framework of inclusion dilemmas, but to us it is very simple: We advocate moving beyond the term ‘inclusive education’, as well as beyond the terms ‘special education’, ‘special needs’, and ‘integration’. Rather, what we seek is an expanded definition of what we simply refer to as quality education.

(p. xxxvi)

One of the reasons that we argue for a similar conceptual shift towards inclusion and diversity in education is that too often ‘inclusive education’ has been a palimpsest for ‘special education’ and has lost its critical and radical intent for rethinking entire educational systems (Armstrong, Armstrong & Spandagou, 2010). In this regard, ‘inclusive education’ is often conceptualized entirely as pertaining to students with ‘disabilities,’ and semantically this implies that ‘disability’ exists outside of the conceptualization of what and who education is for. It is the paradox of inclusion – or sometimes framed as a ‘dilemma of difference’ (Minow, 1990; Norwich, 2008) – in that education systems must first define who it is for, before deciding who it is not for but should be included anyway. Imagine sitting in a park and a stranger walks up to you and congratulates you for being ‘included.’ This is a surprise to you. Part of you may be happy to be affirmed, but there will always be another part of you wondering whether you could be un-included at any moment; in what manner your inclusion in the park is conditional; and by whose rules you are deemed to be included or excluded. All of the sudden, the park has become reconceptualized as a place where it cannot be assumed that you belong.

Often it is the school as a cultural institution that defines inclusion and exclusion, which has implications for the type of society it reflexively produces. In Schuelka’s ethnographic work on inclusion and schooling in Bhutan, he found that the culture and institution of formal schooling itself produced and constructed disabilities (Schuelka, 2018). This was happening not just in Bhutan, of course, and is observed in other contexts as well. McDermott’s (1993) pioneering work in the United States laid bare the socio-cultural institutions of schooling ready to predeterminately marginalize and sort children by ability. In Bhutan, it was evident that the socio-cultural structures of schooling were not conducive to including a heterogenous student population – knowledge was fixed, the curriculum was rigid, pedagogy was authoritative, and failure and drop-out was prevalent. This was easily observed in Bhutan because the entire formal school system itself was so new, as was the idea of ‘inclusive education.’ Students go to school in Bhutan primarily for human capital socio-economic advancement in a newly formed market economy. Thus, a modern formal education system in Bhutan serves as a novel social institution that sorts the population into those that ‘can’ and those that ‘cannot’ through the construction of educational achievement as a measure of overall ability. The Bhutan case is illustrative and resonates because it affirms the historical purpose of schooling as “providing access and advantage, promoting equality and inequality” (Labaree, 2010, p. 3). Bhutan is not being singled out here, but rather demonstrates that educational systems around the world have not done nearly enough to move past their elitist roots, nor critically examined the historical legacies of the educational systems from which they are referencing and borrowing, nor re-imagining themselves as socially embedded institutions for the common good of all. Education for children labelled with a disability began as a charitable and ‘extra’ – or, of course, ‘special’ – feature of education systems (Richardson & Powell, 2011). This begs the question; how much has really changed with the emphasis today on inclusive education? An educational system that features failure, expulsion, age and ability grouping, and a one-size-fits-all curricular and pedagogical structure, was never designed to educate all children.

In this introductory chapter, and throughout the edited book, we will return to this context, history, and paradox of inclusion and how this can be turned towards the notion of ‘inclusion and diversity in education.’ The chapter authors in this book were given these considerations as well. We argue that as we move firmly into the 21st century, it is increasingly apparent that our understanding about inclusivity and access to education needs to be refreshed and reconsidered in light of shifting social and economic situations and new evidence. We also argue that research should move beyond the work of school access and into new spaces of educational quality, utility, and social opportunity. This book considers international perspectives on schooling, culture, systems, teacher preparation and practice, school leadership, and policy incentives. In many ways, we push on the conceptual boundaries of ‘inclusive education’ and explore new ways to research and conceptualize inclusion and diversity in education for all children. The aim of this book is to problematize ‘inclusive education’: as a global currency, as another form of deficit-thinking, and as a universal application. However, in this book we also seek new and diverse ways forward that represent new visions and innovations from around the world.

This book acknowledges that ‘inclusion’ does not only refer to students with disabilities, but also to race, ethnicity, religion, socio-economic status, and many other factors. In other words, we explore how we can better create educational spaces that are designed and meant for all to use. This necessitates some radical thinking in terms of questioning and understanding how schooling is currently structured. For example, what is the purpose of grades and marks and failure? Why should classrooms be organized by age? Why should children be in classrooms at all? We wanted to approach this book with an openness to new ideas and a blank slate in terms of our assumptions of the way things are or should be. That being said, some of the chapters are more specific to a disability-inclusion perspective but are sufficiently broad enough to discuss ‘inclusion’ from a more systemic perspective. For example, the chapter by Cooper and colleagues discusses specifically the deaf and hard of hearing community within the inclusive education agenda, which serves as a reminder of the dilemmas of language and communication in trying to create educational spaces that are inclusive to all. The chapter written by Avagyan and colleagues critically examines assumptions within global inclusive education discourse, such as the universality of universal design for learning.

This book, and the remainder of the introductory chapter, are divided into three broad themes: conceptual innovation, pragmatic innovation, and methodological innovation. Conceptual innovation refers to a critical exploration of inclusive education conventional wisdom and practice; and rethinking how we understand culture(s), structures, systems, and policies. Pragmatic innovation refers to a critical exploration of current inclusive education models, practices, policies, and new ways of knowing and understanding ‘inclusion’ in education. Methodological innovation refers to new ways of researching, understanding, and studying ‘inclusion’ in education.

As the reader can already detect, there is a general mixing of terminology in the book – referring to ‘inclusion,’ ‘inclusive education,’ and ‘inclusion and diversity in education’ in equal measure. While we do argue that ‘inclusive education’ as a term has become a mere replacement of ‘special education’ in many ways – particularly in p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsement Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• 1 Innovative and global directions for inclusive education in the 21st century
• PART I Conceptual innovation
• PART II Pragmatic innovation
• PART III Methodological innovation
• Index