Driven to the Margins: Disabled students, inclusive schooling and the politics of possibility

Abstract

This paper takes up Touraine's (2000) call for situating schools at the front of social democratisation to place inclusive schooling as a conceptual and strategic subset of the broader democratic project. In this respect the work of Bernstein (1996) and Knight (2000) become particularly helpful in providing a conceptual platform for critique of traditional forms of special education as hindrances to the extension of democratic schooling to that profoundly dispossessed people who are captured within the discursive net of special educational needs .