European Perspectives on Inclusive Education in Canada

Critical Comparative Insights

Theodore Michael Christou, Robert Kruschel, Ian Alexander Matheson, Kerstin Merz-Atalik, Theodore Michael Christou, Robert Kruschel, Ian Alexander Matheson, Kerstin Merz-Atalik

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000592405
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Bildung
• Thema: Inklusive Bildung

Featuring leading voices in the field from across Canada and Europe, this edited collection offers empirical analyses of the historical, social, cultural, and legislative determinants of inclusive education in Canadian schools.

Covering four thematic areas including the structure, culture, and practices of inclusive education, the volume offers comparative insights from a European perspective, engaging critically with widely held views of Canada as a world leader in inclusive education. Providing rich comparisons with educational systems in Germany, Spain, and Finland, chapters explore in-depth the assessment structures and curricula specific to Canada, as well as educational policy, and explore attitudes and practices in relation to diverse student populations, including refugee and indigenous peoples, and students with special educational needs.

This volume will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in multicultural education, international and comparative education, as well as educational policy more specifically. Those involved with inclusion and special educational needs will also benefit from this volume.

1IntroductionInclusion in International “Dialogue”

Theodore Michael Christou, Robert Kruschel, Ian Alexander Matheson and Kerstin Merz-Atalik

DOI: 10.4324/​9781003204572-1

Ensuring equal access to education for all children, regardless of their race, ethnicity, language, ability, gender, and socio-economic background, is currently one of the central educational policy issues across the world. Since the ratification of the United Nations (UN) Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, by 2009 at the latest, inclusion has been central to educational reform and research internationally. The UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities calls upon States to “progressively adopt measures” to ensure that individuals with disabilities complete equitable and quality primary and secondary education and have access to affordable and quality tertiary education (2016).

One of the principal challenges faced by educationalists across the world is the unique history of educational institutions and structures. Reforming schools to foster inclusion means adapting and even sometimes changing the whole grammar (Tyack & Tobin, 1994) of existing frameworks, conceptual, and contextual to accommodate the heterogeneous needs of learners and address diversity with an inclusion-oriented concept. This is particularly relevant at the current moment in Europe, where the borders of countries and the union itself are being challenged by global forces, including migration, debates about statehood and the integrity of the nation-state, as well as questions regarding inclusive approaches towards social, linguistic, religious, cultural, and ethnic diversity.

Canada is of interest to scholars of inclusive education across Europe because its provincial and territorial control of education mirrors that of many European countries, where regions and provinces also have autonomy over educational policies and practice. Where states are entirely responsible for education, their populations and diversity are of like size to Canadian provinces. Apart from models of full inclusion (e.g., the Atlantic province of New Brunswick), the diverse, unique responses to inclusion can be seen as potential inspiring practices across Europe. Rather than ask Canadians to explore inclusion in their own contexts—a framing that might only be of interest to Canadians—this book engages international scholars to consider Canadian education comparatively.

Besides New Brunswick, Canada's two most populous Anglophone provinces, Ontario and Alberta, have distinct policies and statements on equity, which relate directly to demands of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations, 2006). Canada also has a long and unique history with core elements of inclusion, including co-operative learning and career counselling. Where Canada is unique, but of interest internationally, in its particular challenges relating to inclusion, its concept of a migrant society, and its unique relationship with Indigenous peoples and with linguistic diversity.

Educators in Canada share a common baseline understanding of what inclusion means, drawing on a social value that all individuals in a society deserve the opportunity to learn. This is an effect of the long tradition of inclusive policies, which at least some European countries are not sharing. Inclusion is one thing to define, another to operationalise. Upon further consideration, Canadians might identify historically marginalised groups, including individuals with disabilities; Black, Indigenous, and other people of colour (BIPOC); or members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Two-spirited plus (LGBTQ2+) community, among others. Perhaps their response would highlight that inclusion involves consideration of how our systems exclude these individuals, and how they need to change to provide equal access to all.

Canada has a history of multiculturalism and has been studied for decades as a space where schools have been challenged to include immigrant and refugee students, while also accounting for a history of exclusion with respect to Indigenous peoples and racialised students. Canada, which is constantly among the top group of PISA participating countries, has thus been a site of research on inclusion in schools since the mid-1980s, ranking among the leading countries in this respect. Canada's education system is also observing major shifts in the understanding of the past and values for the present and future. Recent and ongoing discoveries of the unmarked graves of Indigenous children on the sites of former Residential Schools have forced a long overdue confrontation with an ugly past with Indigenous peoples. Racial tensions appear to be at all-time highs with increases in anti-Asian hate crimes (e.g., in Canada), and religious tensions are no better with frequent acts of discrimination, including a targeted attack with a vehicle only months ago. Many countries worldwide are also facing challenges with the diversity caused by increased mobility of refugees. Though we have much work to do in support of inclusive education, there have been tremendous efforts towards realising inclusion in many Canadian schools in Canada, and other countries have taken notice.

In this edited collection, Inclusion in Education: European and Canadian Perspectives of Diverse Learners in School, contributors from across Europe examine inclusionary educational practices within Canadian educational spaces of teaching and learning. This project permits Canadian scholars, educational practitioners, teacher educators, and students to examine the ways that inclusion is seen, studied, and understood outside of Canada. The rationale for this project is that it creates a space to have critical discussions about a context widely considered as an example of high-quality inclusive practices, without the barrier of language that would normally limit scholarly discussions to remain within a language. Further, it addresses an international audience of scholars who have conducted and are involved in research throughout Canada.

Impetus for This Book

The background to this book goes back to a tradition of the German integration movement that reaches back to the 1980s. In the early days of integrative schools, the excursions of scientists, educators, and politicians through Europe and the rest of the world to be inspired and irritated by the different ways and understandings of common schooling were an important political argumentation support in the dispute about the establishment of integrative education. This travel trend is sometimes described as a kind of “integration tourism” (Deppe-Wolfinger, 1990, p. 18).

Then as now, such trips also serve as opportunities for reflection to critically observe the establishing structures and practices in one's own country and to receive new impulses for thought. Following this tradition, a group of 5 staff members and 15 students from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg, led by David Jahr and Robert Kruschel, travelled to Canada in September 2016 to the multicultural metropolis of Toronto as well as to the rural province of New Brunswick in order to explore school and out-of-school inclusion on site (see Boban et al., 2018). In European discourse, Canada is one of the frequently mentioned pioneers of inclusive education systems, along with northern European countries. For example, the country is often mentioned as a whole and together with other countries as a counter-model to the exclusive school systems of German-speaking countries (e.g., Powell, 2018, p. 129; Tillmann, 2007, p. 4) or references to specific areas of inclusive pedagogy in Canada can be found (e.g., Löser, 2014). For this reason, the country has long been a model for inclusive developments in the discourse around inclusion. With the foundational work published by Porter and Richler (1991) titled Changing Canadian schools: Perspectives on disability and inclusion, Sander (2003) considered Canada as the “birthplace” (p. 314) of inclusive schools. Hinz (2006) ennobles Canada as the north star for inclusion.

It is therefore not surprising that the group from Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg chose this country as a destination to delve deeper into the question of inclusive system design. In preparation for the excursion, basic principles of inclusion in Canada and Germany were discussed in a seminar and exploratory research projects were designed, which the fellow travellers then pursued on site. The excursion of the German group to Canada focused on the questions of how human rights-based education can be designed, which contradictions are dealt with in which form, and which particularities are visible in the Canadian discourse on inclusion.

The results of the trip can be found in individual publications (see Doleschal & Welslau, 2019; Ingenerf & Zimmermann, 2019; Röder & Schweizer, 2019) and in an anthology (Jahr & Kruschel, 2019). The numerous, inspiring contacts and impressions on site were the trigger for the creation of the anthology. During the field trip, experienced Canadian scientists and practitioners agreed to support the project with their contributions. Researchers in Germany were also won over to contribute their external perspectives and previous experiences on phenomena of inclusion in Canada. The book was thus both a product of an internationally exchanged discussion about inclusion and part of this ongoing mutual understanding about inclusive education.

Aims of This Volume

Following the 2019 book, this anthology maintains the focus on Canada, but contributors speak from a range of educational settings in different countries within Europe. This is the first English anthology to examine Canadian inclusion from international perspectives, concentrating on the European continent, where there is tremendous interest in studying Canadian inclusion (e.g., Hinz, 2006; Jahr & Kruschel, 2019; Köpfer, 2013; Köpfer & Óskarsdóttir, 2019; Sliwka, 2016; Sliwka et al., 2017; Stein, 2011). This book consists of four sections: Authors unpack the context and discourses of inclusion in Canada, identify examples and types of structures upon which the delivery of inclusive education depends, discuss the layered cultures that permeate inclusion in education, and discuss how inclusion is practiced in many forms.

Within these sections, Canadian authors contextualise and unpack themes offered by international colleagues. In response to the identification of factors that influence inclusion in Canadian schools (Merz-Atalik), considering identity and action (Polat), and the acknowledgement of multiple discourses related to inclusion (Schroeder), Specht and Thompson suggest the importance of thinking about intersectionality rather than difference and in focusing our efforts on doing better within our own contexts rather than drawing satisfaction from doing better than others. Sider recognises the importance of examining inclusive education in regions limited by population and resources (Jahnukainen et al.) and questioning the scope of inclusive pedagogy beyond schools (Jahr & Kruschel, 2019), before offering insight about his own experiences with the relationship between visible (e.g., documentation of supports) and invisible (e.g., beliefs about inclusion) structures, and providing direction for further research in inclusive education. In response Herold's chapter focusing on the challenges of changing a culturally insensitive school system to offer a more ...