1,721,006 research outputs found
Diversity training, inclusive education and our inevitable lament
No full textAs education systems the world over acknowledge the significance of supporting students with disabilities and related conditions to maintain school enrolment, building the capacity of educators to fulfil an inclusive ambition is frequently promoted through activities like awareness training. Here, the intention is to potentially change how people living with disability are understood and related to. Traditionally, awareness raising work relies on psychological interventions targeting human being’s cognitive-behavioural triumvirate – thoughts, feelings and behaviours, nudging public policy and individual attitudes to sustain such changes. Yet, an inevitable lament typically befalls researchers and practitioners when inclusive ideals are not reached through the promotion of human rights, individualised support and positive attitudes. Advancing a conceptual approach to orientating to difference resourced by theory from critical psychology, critical disability and affirmative ethics, our discussion seeks to question the validity of current orientations to awareness training in favour of engaging difference differently. The discussion is relevant to education policy makers and practitioners seeking to reduce inequities, particularly among students living diverse ways of being within mainstream populations, so they might engage difference differently to reduce school exclusion
Ontologies of inclusion and teacher education
No full textIn the complex of marginalizing theories, policies, and practices, bot h in the academy and education more broadly, the design of inclusive e ducation scholarship is intentionally relational. The purpose of this chapter is to examine how theories affecting inclusion direct the remi t of teacher educators. In particular, attention is directed at interd isciplinary scholarly practice arising from individual and institution al values that can and do go by uncritically questioned. The chapter d escribes the development of a program of inclusive education scholarsh ip within teacher education that emphasizes ontological scrutiny. Lear ning outcomes are made explicit promoting advanced understandings abou t the application of theory, policy, curriculum design, resources, and pedagogy to differentiate teaching programs in ways that are accessib le to learners with diverse interests, needs, and backgrounds. Graduat es are anticipated to meet challenging conditions of resistance to inc lusion and be able to work in and against these with conviction
Commentary on Part 1:: Messing with inclusive education
No full textThis chapter attends to the messy work of conceptualising inclusive education in three main ways: through the lament of ineffective implementation of inclusive policy; rights-based discourse; and through the presence of paradoxes. We consider work from New Zealand (by Carol Hamilton), Poland (by Eugeiusz Świtała) and The Netherlands (by Wiel Veugelers and Yvonne Leeman). Core to our argument is that the theoretical resources used to conceptualise inclusive education frequently set in place parameters that perpetuate segregation. To this end we advance tussling with anomalies – exploring how paradoxes present in the everyday orientate our commitment to relationalities
Normative power in higher education: the ghost of inherent requirements
No full textThis paper presents an analysis of two surveys that were conducted in an Australian university’s School of Education, investigating how students and staff understood the inherent requirements of their courses. The survey results highlight that despite there being no explicit written inherent requirement statements for these courses both staff and students believed they had a deep understanding of the nature and potential effects of inherent requirements. The longer the students and staff were connected with the School, the more likely they were to feel aware of the culturally structured inherent requirements of these courses. Overwhelmingly, staff and students drew upon a hegemonic doxa that normalised exclusion on the basis of the assumed limitations of individual students or potential course applicants. The authors propose a shift in policy and practice from inherency focused on the assumed student deficits towards coherency premised on the teacher workforce, better resembling the intent of inclusion of education and of society more generally
Teacher education students’ experiences navigating inherent requirements within their courses of study
No full textInherent requirements define core competencies that all students must demonstrate to be accepted, progress, and successfully complete professionally accredited programmes such as teaching. This paper presents research that examines how students of teacher education navigate supposed abilities to teach through their courses of study, to inform the development of a statement of inherent requirements for a large school of education in an Australian university. Drawing on critical disability perspectives, we present results from a survey conducted with students enrolled in teacher education courses. This analysis demonstrates that inherent requirements have little affect for students whose bodily capacities align with preconceived notions of abilities to teach. Yet, students with disabilities will likely experience impose barriers to their success within teacher education because of perceived inherent requirements to practice, which is not easily addressed through disclosure and reasonable adjustments. The paper concludes with a discussion addressing how when seeking to expand their impact in support of inclusive local and global communities, universities must necessarily start by paying close attention to the ways that they frame competency in relation to equity. Here we draw from concerns raised by students in the present study, and critical disability theory, to support an institutional transposition from inherency to coherency, reframing how ability to teach can align with contemporary policy aspirations and inclusive practices. The paper is unique for drawing on student experiences to inform the development of knowledge in the field of teacher education along with critical disability perspectives with which to analyse them.</p
Teaching standards and inclusion: beyond educating the same way
No full textIn the context of international systemic reforms promoting professional standards for teachers and inclusivity of diverse students in schools, this paper presents and demonstrates conceptual means by which educators can critically respond to the uncomfortable couplet of standardisation and difference. This is primarily achieved by theorising alternative ways of making sense of difference. Core to the argument is that standards can become more than prescriptions for educating in the same way when teachers recognise their positionality, examine the socio-cultural context of their work, and take action to ensure equality or equity of opportunity within the classroom. The paper is presented in three sections. The first section addresses the use of teaching standards in the United States and Australia, examining various ways inclusive education is articulated as a standard for practice. The second section engages theory from critical disability studies as a fillip to thinking differently about disability. The final section creates conceptual space for educators to move effectively between different intentions–their own as practitioners, the profession’s standards, and socio-material conditions involving ethics and accountability. On the whole, conveyed throughout the paper is the necessity for teachers to orientate towards contextual sense-making of professional standards to support inclusive practice.</p
Making inherent requirements coherent: anticipating a means to inclusive education
No full textInherent requirements (Australia), competence standards (UK) or essential functions (US) are often tied to notions of higher education academic integrity and linked to professional standards in practice-based professions like teaching. They are used to define and categorise core competencies students must demonstrate to prove proficiency, for example, with verbal capacity, behavioural regulation, physical dexterity or cognitive skill. The purpose of this discussion is to think with theory not commonly deployed in research related to inclusive higher education. Theoretical resources from critical disability studies and critical educational psychology are advanced to challenge the often fixed, universal, and deficit-oriented constraints used in inherent requirement applications. Responses from a 20-item survey involving academic staff in teacher training courses at an Australian university are considered through these orientations. The discussion is not intended to produce standard survey results so much as it offers ways of anticipating pragmatic means to inclusive education
Paradoxes in inclusive education: a necessary condition of relationality?
No full textLife’s paradoxes present across the varied landscapes we traverse in e ducation and serve as formidable barriers in attempts to secure ethica l consistency in practice. The presence of paradox invites educational researchers and practitioners to diligently examine our available cho ices, particularly when fixed by dominant ways of knowing/being. This too is especially consequential as these resources work for or against what we hold to be fundamental to our practice. This quandary is resp onded to here in three parts. The first section steps through a parado xical psychosocial assemblage created in Australian educational practi ce through the National Assessment Program–Literacy And Numeracy (NAPL AN). The second section then suggests possibilities for challenging pa radoxes around the status quo by reflecting on ways professionals from a range of countries in the Asia/Pacific region can reexamine their o wn practice as part of theoretically informed postgraduate research. T he third section discusses how paradoxes have persisted in Australian policy responses to disability, which evade substantiated ways of bein g and knowing inclusion. The relationships paradox invites us to are e ntangled and complex but in opening ourselves to prospects inherent in contradiction we challenge ourselves to explicating preferred ideals
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