Inclusive education: ‘making up’ the normal and deviant pupil

Abstract

Inclusion entered the discourse of education in order to challenge the conceptions of the normal and the deviant pupil. A socially oriented inclusive discourse implies that schools should not focus their attention on certain defined groups of pupils but instead on how educational institutions themselves are able to meet the needs of all learners. Drawing on philosopher Ian Hacking, this article focuses on the category ‘intellectual disability’ and how those categorised as such construct themselves, their behaviour and actions in relation to the descriptions available to them in their surroundings. Based on empirical data gathered from a boy (Bruno) diagnosed as intellectually disabled, this article discusses how an education that meets learners with high ambitions and expectations in relation to their educational potential may affect the pupil in ways that are enabling in relation to normative demands of education and society at large.

Keywords:

• Inclusion
• intellectual disability
• normality
• deviance
• human kinds
• second-order kinds

Acknowledgements

This article is part of a 3-year Ph.D. project at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences and is supervised by Rune Haustätter and Anne Stine Dolva.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Hacking applies the term object in a broad sense referring to both physical objects as well as more abstract phenomena and ideas.

2 In Hackings terminology the term institutions mainly refers to established institutions, i.e. schools, and not the broad definition that includes practices and customs (Hacking, 2007, 288–289).