What about Chantel? From inside out: an insider's experience of exclusion

Abstract

We do not presume to understand fully our places insociety, nor the secrets which lead to the privileging of our voices as teachers and researchers over those who experience education as a process of social and moral exclusion. However, we are not mere observers; we are, as teachers and parents, involved in personal, professional and political struggles about the kind of society we want to live in and which we want for our children. This paper considers the experience of exclusion from the perspective of one of its authors (Chantel) and how this occurred within a system explicitly concerned with identifying and meeting her ‘special educational needs’. Our aim in considering decisions made about Chantel is to move away from what Grace (1991) has called ‘policy science’, which excludes consideration of wider contextual relations, and towards an examination of the social character of the policy process and its outcomes. It is argued that in different ways each of us has experienced the discriminatory effects of institutionalized competition and selection and that these common experiences are important in framing an analysis of exclusionary processes.