Young people with health conditions and the inclusive education problematic

Abstract

This article revisits debates about inclusive education from the perspective of the Keeping Connected project, a qualitative longitudinal research project focusing on young people with health-related disrupted experiences of schooling. Drawing on findings from this project, three main arguments are advanced and illustrated in relation to inclusive education. First, voice and subjectivity are not identical for these young people, and inclusive education should be concerned with both. Second, a generic orientation to difference and heterogeneity is an insufficient approach to inclusive education; the specificities of how marginalisation and lack of opportunity is produced for this particular group need attention. Third, schooling is a social institution working and producing effects as a process over time, and this has implications for inclusive education perspectives. The article argues that Osberg and Biesta's proposed framework for inclusive curriculum does not avoid the conundrum it identifies in other inclusive education frameworks, and under-theorises the social, curriculum and subjectivity.

Keywords:

• inclusive education
• curriculum and instruction
• education policy

Acknowledgements

The Keeping Connected project http://www.education.unimelb.edu.au/keepingconnected/ was co-funded by the Australian Research Council and the Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute as an ARC Linkage Project (LP0669735). The research team included Lyn Yates, Julianne Moss, Trevor Hay, Pam St Leger, Peter Ferguson, Sarah Drew, Julie White, Mary Dixon; Lyndal Bond, Julie Green, Tony Potas, Margaret Robertson, Hannah Walker, Ria Hanewald, Katie Wright and Amy Basile.

I thank the anonymous reviewer of an earlier version of this article for their helpful comments.

Notes on contributor

Lyn Yates is Professor of Curriculum at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests are in identities, knowledge, inequalities and education policy. She is co-author (with Julie McLeod) of Making modern lives: Subjectivity, schooling and social change (SUNY 2006), and with Madeleine Grumet edited the 2011 Routledge World Yearbook of Education on Curriculum in today's world: Configuring knowledge, identities, work and politics.

Notes

1. However they do want to retain a distinction, which I agree with (Yates in press), that ‘education’ should not simply mean socialisation, but encompass some normative sense of direction and betterment.

2. I am not dealing directly in this article with how the content of curriculum or the hidden curriculum of a particular school culture also has important social outcomes for young people, as the Keeping Connected project was less well directed to answering those questions, which I have been concerned with in other projects (cf Yates and McLeod 2000; McLeod and Yates 2006; Young 2008; Yates and Collins 2010). But I think lack of attention to this area, that the content of the curriculum or of a school culture in forming or failing to form knowledge, skills and capabilities can be powerful or destructive in ways of which students may be quite unaware, is another weakness in Osberg and Biesta's argument.