Mapping inclusive education within the discipline of Pedagogy. Comparative analysis of new study programmes in Slovenia

ABSTRACT

In the research in the field of inclusiveness it is often neglected how inclusiveness is constructed differently within the so-called Anglo-American and continental educational contexts. In Slovenia, the field of educational studies has historically developed within the continental, particularly German tradition, as a discipline called Pedagogy at the Faculty of Arts. Since Pedagogy is fundamentally theorising the processes of becoming a free human being and does not take a particular interest in the issues of vulnerable social groups, a complementary area of tertiary study emerged in today's Faculty of Education (e.g. Special needs Pedagogy). However, recently we can identify a trend of emerging new study programmes, the so-called inclusive education. Because of this separation between scientific fields, this paper is dealing with a question of which of the disciplines is offering a more convincing answers to the question of how to conceptualise and implement the inclusiveness. Using qualitative analyses of the concept of inclusiveness and content analyses of Slovenian study programmes and courses related to inclusive education, we attempt to show that discipline of Pedagogy provides a conceptualising of inclusiveness that is more complex through successfully interweaving the humanistic and social paradigm.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive education
• Anglo-American educational context
• continental educational context
• psycho-medical paradigm
• social paradigm
• humanistic paradigm

Acknowledgement

The author acknowledge the financial support from the Slovenian Research Agency (research core funding No. P5-0126).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Associate professor Irena Lesar is teaching and researching at the Faculty of Education, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, since 1998. In the last decade her research is focused on the conceptualisation of justice and inclusiveness, the status of various marginalised groups, in particular Roma (new) immigrants and the SEN pupil, in Slovenian schools through their social participation and academic achievement.

ORCID

Irena Lesar http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2896-9860

Notes

1. A concept of inclusive education has not yet been published at the national level in Slovenia, although a group of experts at the request of the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport prepared such a concept at the beginning of the previous year (2016).

2. Alexander (2009, 925–926) explained some nuances of the meaning of education in different countries:

[In] French public education […] éduquer means to bring up as well as formally to educate and that bien éduqué means well brought up or well-mannered rather than well-schooled (‘educate’ in English has both senses too, but the latter now predominates); or that the root of the Russian word for education, obrazovanie, means ‘form’ or ‘image’ rather than, as in our Latinate version, a ‘leading out’.

3. Pedagogy graduates in Slovenia are mainly employed in counseling services in kindergartens as well as in elementary and secondary schools. It is a specific arrangement in Slovenia (as well as in other countries of former Yugoslavia) that each school and kindergarten has its own counseling unit, where besides pedagogues also psychologists, special and social pedagogues, speech therapists, social workers and inclusive pedagogues can be employed. Such units are also established in boarding schools and educational institutions for behaviorally challenged youth.

4. With the programme streams: education of the blind – tiflopedagogics, education of the deaf – surdopedagogics, education of mentally retarded – oligofrenopedagogics, and vocational education of defective children (Janša Zorn 1997, 10).

5. With the programme streams: orthopedagogy, orthopedagogical education of children with behavioral and personality disorders, orthopedagogical education of physically disabled and ill children, surdopedagogics, speech therapy and tiflopedagogics (Janša Zorn 1997, 16).

6. With the programme streams: defectology for the mentally disabled, defectology for the blind and visually impaired, defectology for the hearing and speech impaired, defectology for the physically and chronically ill (Janša Zorn 1997, 25).

7. Universities are anonymised in the paper to avoid any possible negative effects to institutions.

8. The European Credit Transfer and Accumulation System (ECTS) was developed by the European Commission in order to provide common procedures to guarantee academic recognition of studies abroad. ECTS is a student-centred system based on the student workload required to achieve the objectives of a programme, objectives preferably specified in terms of the learning outcomes and competences to be acquired.