Allan, J. (2005) Actively Seeking Inclusion: Pupils with Special Needs in Mainstream Schools. Taylor & Francis Group
Introduction
“Teachers were told that the views of pupils with special needs and mainstream pupils on integration were being sought confidentially, but this did not prevent them from assuming a right to be told what the pupils had said” (p. 2).
“The ethical work we do on ourselves should enable us to shape our conduct according to how it will be experienced by others. Is each of us recognizes the need for work of this kind, inclusion could become much positive and creative, but not utopian, created both by and for everyone.” (p. 6)
Wandering voices and Shifting Identities
“Discourses also construct individuals as objects of particular kinds of knowledge: ‘we do not speak the discourse. The discourse speaks us'” (Ball, 1990a: 18, in p. 7)
“It also implies that there is no binarist artefact, the included child, since everyone is included a nd, more importantly, no-one is excluded” (p. 14)
“Research on inclusion requires significant epistemological shifts in order to understand pupils’ experiences as partial and fragmented and to challenge the foundationalist basis of special educational knowledge” (p. 14).
Foucalt’s ‘box of tools’
“Provision for children with special needs in maintream schools has elements of this kind of surveillance. Children placed in a mainstream classroom are usually under constant and close observation. This supervision is hierarchical in the sense that many pupils are accompanied in mainstream classrooms by special needs auxiliaries or teachers; learning support specialists devise and oversee their programme of work and monitor how the mainstream teachers are coping” (p. 20)
“This holds exciting prospects for pupils with special needs who no longer need to be viewed as passively constructed objects, but as active agents who can challenge the limits imposed upon them and pursue alternative identities and experiences” (p. 24)
Mainstream Pupils: I(clusion Gatekeepers