Overlooking entitlement

Abstract

This article investigates why young people with significant and continuing health conditions can easily be overlooked in education. The Keeping Connected study from Australia revealed much about the complicated lives of young people with chronic illness, and several unanticipated ways that health conditions impacted on education are reported here. However, the effect of global education policy also provides some indication that there is a broader explanation that might explain exclusionary practices. The argument that social inclusion policy bears little relation to either social justice or inclusive education is developed. Informed by what young people and their parents reported in this study and by identification of policy conveniences and silences, this article offers some explanation for how the interests of this invisible cohort of young people are not well served. In light of this, it is appropriate to ask whether current understandings of inclusion could be problematised and further developed so that the entitlement of these young people to accommodation and success in education is more generally acknowledged.

Keywords:

• chronic illness
• inclusive education
• social justice
• social inclusion
• policy
• neoliberalism

Notes on contributor

Julie White is a researcher at the Faculty of Education at La Trobe University in Australia where she supervises a large number of PhD students. Her research interests include identity, social justice, pedagogy, curriculum and higher education. She is co-editor of two international journals: Qualitative Research Journal (QRJ) and Creative Approaches to Research (CAR). She serves as an executive member of the Association of Qualitative Research (AQR) that organizes the annual Discourse, Power, Resistance (Down Under) conference. She is also the 2013–2015 Chair for the Australian Association of Research in Education (AARE) Conference. Her recent book Hard Labour? Academic Work and the Changing Landscape of Higher Education (co-authored with Tanya Fitzgerald and Helen Gunter) was published by Emerald in January 2012.