Inclusive education policies: discourses of difference, diversity and deficit

Abstract

This paper provides an analysis of inclusive education policies across international, and Anglo-American national and provincial/state jurisdictions to reveal how policies discursively construct inclusion under current, increasingly neoliberal conditions. In making this case, the paper draws upon primary UNESCO and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development policies, and a selection of key policies in United States, Canada, England and Australia. To explore whether and how these policies discursively encourage inclusion under such conditions, the paper employs a broadly critical policy sociology approach. The research reveals a disparate array of approaches to issues of inclusion within and across specific policy contexts. Fostering more systematic and supportive inclusive policies is possible and essential for promoting conditions for more genuinely inclusive educational practices, but a lack of attention to issues of inclusion in policy settings also reveals how more neoliberal conditions have also influenced policy production processes.

Keywords:

• inclusion
• inclusive education
• critical policy analysis
• neoliberalism
• diversity

Notes on contributors

Ian Hardy is Senior Lecturer in Educational Studies at the School of Education, University of Queensland, Australia; e-mail: [email protected]. He researches education policy and practice, with a particular interest in the politics of teachers' learning and continuing professional development. He is author of The Politics of Teacher Professional Development: Policy, Research and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2012).

Stuart Woodcock is Senior Lecturer in Inclusive Education and Educational Psychology at Macquarie University, Australia; email: [email protected]. He researches inclusive education and educational psychology, particularly focusing on classroom and behaviour management, students with specific learning disabilities, teacher self-efficacy, and attribution theory.

Notes

1 We acknowledge that like inclusion, notions such as ‘disability’ are similarly contested and complex concepts subject to varied and sometimes contentious meanings.

2 Like the terms disability and inclusion, notions of ‘special educational needs’ are similarly contested. In some circumstances, and in efforts to deploy the term in a more holistic and encompassing fashion, the use of the term has come to be seen as a barrier to the provision of adequate services and educational supports for students with significant needs.

3 The Roeher Institute is an independent, non-profit organisation dedicated to enhancing conditions for people with intellectual and other disabilities.

4 Again, we recognise notions of ‘mainstreaming’ as deeply ambivalent and contested.