Time to Ring the Death Knell for Agency and Resilience? Some Sociological Rethinkings of Inclusive Education

ABSTRACT

Decades of developments in inclusive education have seen the waning of deficit discourse towards children with special needs, but exclusion has not yet left the scene. In response to this persistent problem, the Special Issue ‘Destroying the Trojan Horse of “lazy inclusivism”’ collects the wit of Chinese children, parents, and educators to promote inclusion. In this concluding paper, I engage with some sociological analyses of exclusion and inclusion followed by some sociological rethinkings of the notions of agency and resilience. My intention here is not to portray a panorama of the Special Issue or provide a summary of the knowledge built and lessons learnt throughout the articles included in the Special Issue. As these articles are empirically complex and contextually rich, it would be presumptuous to reduce those profound ideas to this concluding article. The concluding article therefore aims to question the perennial, conservative reproduction of structural problems that have long perturbed inclusive education; propose some sociological reworkings to force structural problems to retreat; and spark some debates and critiques among sociologists of education and colleagues of inclusive education.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• China
• inclusive education
• lazy inclusivism
• Learning in Regular Classroom; psychology of resilience
• sociology of resilience
• structural constraints

Acknowledgment

I thank the Editor, Robyn M. Gillies, for making this Special Issue possible. Each article in the issue received external reviews in addition to my review as Guest Editor. I therefore thank all the reviewers for their thoughtful work.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council [DE180100107].