Inclusive Education

International Policy & Practice

Ann Cheryl Armstrong, Derrick Armstrong, Ilektra Spandagou

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781446243121
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

What does inclusion really mean and what impact have inclusive approaches to education had on practice?

Bringing together issues of theory, research, policy and practice from both the countries of the South and the North, this ground-breaking book provides a critical discussion of recent developments in the field of inclusive education.

The authors consider developments, both in current thinking about the meaning of inclusion and in terms of policies and practices, in the context of education systems across the world and their differences and inter-relatedness. Topics covered include the increasing pressure on educators to develop a global policy agenda for inclusive education, the individual needs of children, the illusion of inclusivity and the importance of local contexts in determining policy. The book?s international perspective illuminates common successes, failures and concerns.

With case studies from Europe, the Caribbean and Australasia, the book also features chapter summaries, questions to facilitate critical thinking and discussion, case studies and suggestions for further reading.

An essential read for anyone studying inclusive education, special educational needs, disability studies, social policy and international and comparative education, this book will ignite debate and enable the reader to develop a deep understanding of the issues.

Ann Cheryl Armstrong is the Director of the Division of Professional Learning, Derrick Armstrong is Acting Deputy Vice Chancellor (Education) and Professor of Education and Ilektra Spandagou is a Lecturer in Inclusive Education. They are all based at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Section 1

History, Social Context and Key Ideas

In the first section of this book we discuss the history and social context of inclusive education and the relationship of this idea to systems of special education that grew up in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We also explore broader concerns and debates about social justice, the rights of disabled people and ‘education for all’ that gained ground in educational thinking in the latter part of the twentieth century. More recent theories and perspectives on inclusive education are introduced and critiqued.

1

Inclusive Education: Key Themes

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Chapter overview

This first chapter of our book sets out the central themes that we will be developing in later chapters. We pose the question: ‘Does the idea of inclusive education amount to anything more than the vacuous theorizations of postmodernism on the one hand or the reframing of traditional policies for the management of troublesome children on the other hand?’ In other words, is the idea of inclusive education an illusion? We argue that despite the idealism that characterized the origins of the inclusive education movement, its meaning in theory and policy is ambiguous and in practice its implementation has been limited. Yet, educational policy and practice are highly contested in different local contexts and it is in these contextualized struggles over the values and purposes of education that hope lies. We conclude by sketching out some ideas for rethinking the inclusive education project framed by the broader relationships between the contested values of education and the practical possibilities for making a difference.

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Setting the scene

Worldwide, social inclusion has become a major focus of the policies of governments. Education reform is generally seen as a key driver for achieving social integration and cohesion. Until fairly recently, the separation between ‘mainstream’ schooling and ‘special education’ rested upon the idea of separate kinds of education for different kinds of children. Increasingly these categorical distinctions have been challenged. In part, this challenge has arisen from growing recognition of the broad continuum of human needs and the inadequacy of models that constrain educational possibilities by imposing different systems of schooling on those who are in some sense believed to be ‘abnormal’ or, to use a euphemism, ‘special’ (even where the intention is ultimately to foster greater integration into the mainstream system of schooling and/or society). Opposition to traditional systems of special education has often been led by disabled people and their supporters who have argued that ‘special education’ restricts opportunities for disabled people as citizens because of the way in which it labels them as having intellectual, social and/or physical deficits. In addition to these arguments, education policy-makers have also become interested in wider issues of social inclusion and how education might play a significant role in promoting social cohesion in societies that are increasingly diverse, socially and culturally. These ideas are to be found not just in the developed countries of North America, Europe and Australasia. In the developing world, too, considerable interest has been shown in the idea of ‘inclusive education’. International agencies such as the United Nations and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), the World Bank and the UK’s Department for International Development have been powerful advocates of ‘inclusion’ as a core principle of schooling and education systems.

In this book we examine the development of these new ideas about ‘inclusive education’ and their relationship to broader social policies aimed at promoting social inclusion. We argue in particular that:

• the idea of ‘inclusive education’, although historically closely related to debates and reforms in the field of special education, actually goes well beyond special education in its approach to social integration;
• inclusive education should be understood in the context of an approach to the ‘problems’ of social diversity which are the outcome of social changes since the end of the Second World War and which include the end of colonialism, the increase of labour-force mobility, and the tension between global and local cultures;
• there are continuing contradictions between policy and practice as education systems attempt to manage the social and economic complexities of national and cultural identity in societies that are highly diversified internally and yet globally interconnected;
• the growth of ‘inclusive education’ in the developing world in part reflects the attempt of these countries to promote the social and educational advantages of access to schooling and educational resources, and in part reflects the export of first-world thinking to countries which reinforces dependency and what Paulo Friere called ‘the culture of silence’.

What is meant by ‘inclusion’?

The meaning of ‘inclusion’ is by no means clear and perhaps conveniently blurs the edges of social policy with a feel-good rhetoric that no one could be opposed to. What does it really mean to have an education system that is ‘inclusive’? Who is thought to be in need of inclusion and why? If education should be inclusive, then what practices is it contesting, what common values is it advocating, and by what criteria should its successes be judged? The introduction of these policies to education systems both in the countries of the North and in the ‘developing countries’ of post-colonial globalization is underpinned by a complex and contested process of social change. While social policy is dominated by the rhetoric of inclusion, the reality for many remains one of exclusion and the panacea of ‘inclusion’ masks many sins.

Inclusion and the politics of disability

The history of special education in Europe, North America and Australasia throughout the twentieth century was a history of expansion: growth in the number of children identified as having special educational needs, growth in the number of categories of ‘handicap’ or ‘impairment’ and growth in the number of schools outside the mainstream for children whose needs were seen as different to those of ‘normal’ children. In these countries, however, the concept of special educational needs was never simply synonymous with ‘impairment’. Few children identified as having ‘special educational needs’ would later as adults be recognized as being ‘disabled’ and the terms ‘impairment’ and ‘disability’ were hardly ones that would resonate with the experiences of most children in special schools. There is little overlap between educational categories of special education need and generally much more narrow categories of disability or impairment used in the management of resources and identities in the adult world. Most children in special education have tended to be labelled as having learning difficulties or behavioural problems but these are labels with little scientific, let alone educational, credibility.

Nonetheless, the label of special educational needs plays a significant role in extending to a much greater number of people an educational rationale for failure within the educational system and the subsequent social marginalization and denial of opportunities that follows for those who are unsuccessful within the ordinary school system. In this way the disability discourse is seen by Fulcher as deflecting attention ‘from the fact that it is failure in the education apparatus by those whose concern it should be to provide an inclusive curriculum, and to provide teachers with a sense of competence in such a curriculum, which constructs the politics of integration’ (Fulcher, 1989: 276).

The concept of special educational needs is embedded in the trinity of social class, gender and race. The importance of these factors and indeed the social processes implicated in their application, have been well described by sociologists from at least the 1970s onwards (for example, Tomlinson, 1981, 1982). Yet the label continues to be used in ways that mask the intersection and operation of these factors in the identification of those with special educational needs in the daily decision-making of policy-makers and practitioners across the world. As many writers have argued it is only by examining these wider social relationships that insight is possible into the role of special educational needs as a discourse of power and its abuses.

In the developed world, the idea of ‘inclusive education’ is one that has challenged the traditional view and role of special education. This challenge has been significantly driven by the disabled people’s movement in the UK, the USA and in Europe. It has fundamentally questioned policies and practices that have promoted segregation and ‘human improvement’, which have their origins in the eugenics movement and the social Darwinism of the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. In place of eugenics, the disability movement has advanced a model of ‘inclusive education’ that is linked to a broader campaign for social justice and human rights.

That policy in this area continues to be contested is evident in the experience of a number of developed countries. In the UK, for example, the policy of inclusion has become a central plank of government reform since 1997. On the other hand, the radical ideas about social justice that characterized the development of inclusion as a political agitation by the disabled people’s movement have largely been lost within the technical approaches to inclusive education that framed those policy applications in the UK in the narrower terms of ‘school improvement’, diversity of provision for different needs and academic achievement (Armstrong, 2005).

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Case study

Greece: a policy case study

In Greece, the renaming of ‘special classes’ to ‘inclusive classes’ was one of the ways that education policy responded to the impetus of inclusion (Law 2817/2000). In the same legislation that introduced the name of ‘inclusive classes’, a complex bureaucratic assessment and evaluation process for the identification of students with a disability was put into place. This process reinforced the dominance of the ‘medical model’ in the education system by requiring children and young people to be ‘labelled’ with one of the recognized categories of disability before educational provision in the form of resources, additional support and instructional differentiation could become available. In practice, inclusive classes have continued in most cases to perform their role as ‘withdrawn rooms’ were students spend significant periods of their school time. This model ‘regulates’ the management of a part of the school population and ‘avoids “contaminating” the mainstream educational praxis with “special education intervention or differentiation”’ (Zoniou-Sideri et al., 2006: 285).

The dominance of a ‘deficit model’ in the Greek context is reinforced in the new Law. Despite the recognition that ‘disability constitutes a natural part of the human condition’ (Law 3699/2008, article 1, point 1), the dominance of a deficit approach is evident in the statement that ‘the type and degree of special educational needs defines the form, kind and category of Special Education provision’ (Law 3699/2008, article 2, point 1).

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In the developing world as in the developed world inclusive education is used in quite different ways that mean different things. Sometimes it is framed in terms of social justice, such as where it is directly linked to the UNESCO’s Education for All policy. In this reading an advocacy position is at the heart of the inclusive model. Translated into particular national settings within the developing world, inclusive education may in practice be a useful policy option that is less resource intensive than other approaches to the provision of services for disabled children. A more wide-ranging critique, however, might point to the context of exceptionally low achievement and the failure of educational systems in the developing world to address adequately the needs of the majority of a country’s population. In this respect the language of ‘inclusion’ mirrors the role of the language of special education in Europe and North America from the late eighteenth century onwards as those systems sought to manage the ‘flotsam and jetsam’ created by a system of mass schooling. On the other hand, it is important to examine the reasons for system failure as these are often related to a combination of limited resources and the external manipulation of educational policy by external funding agencies pursuing agendas arising in the developed world. This places the notion of inclusion in highly contested political territory.

The politics of inclusive education

To appreciate the complex history that underpins the development of inclusive education, as both a political and a policy/practice discourse, a discussion of the meaning and significance of ‘inclusion’ in global educational practice today must be made concrete. For instance, in the newly globalizing discourse of inclusion, its radical humanistic philosophical premises should be placed in the more sobering context of the intersection between colonial histories and post-colonial contexts of countries in the developed and developing world (for example, by contrasting its rhetorical stance towards social cohesion with its practical limitations, or even complicity, in the management of diversity and, in particular, racial and cultural diversity in the interests of social hegemony, both nationally and internationally).

Similarly, the technological advances of the twenty-first century, the globalization of economic markets and the penetration of ‘first-world’ knowledge and policy solutions into the developing world all may be understood as spreading an evangelical belief in the inclusion of diversity. Alternatively globalization and its impact on conceptualizations of inclusion may be understood in terms of a technical rationalism which has separated social practice from ethical thinking in the management of global social inequality. The precarious position of developing country economies, starved of investment, historically constrained (internally as well as externally) by the baggage of colonialism, and economically disenfranchised by the political dominance of first-world countries, their donor agencies and the interests of multinational companies, is commonly reflected in both the need to develop human capital alongside economic investment and the inability of these countries to lift themselves out of disadvantages that are structural, global and embedded in the historical and cultural legacy of colonialism. Within this context, the exhortations of first-world aid agencies and international donors for cou...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Section 1 History, Social Context and Key Ideas
• Section 2 Policy Case Studies
• Section 3 From Policy to Practice
• Section 4 Conclusions and Reflections
• References
• Index