Rethinking agency as an assemblage from change management to collaborative work

ABSTRACT

The movement towards inclusion comes together with a neoliberal audit mentality whereby individuals are held responsible for the transformations. The Special Educational Needs Coordinators (SENCOs) are seen as ‘change agents’ whose task it is, to support teachers in adapting their approach to optimise the chances for children with special needs in regular schools. In this paper, we want to problematise the ‘responsibility-blame discourse’ and look differently at agency. By using a diffractive methodology based on collaborative work, in which we have used material images of the workplace of the SENCO, and read-the-data-while-thinking-with-theory, we deconstruct the individualisation of agency. The SENCOs are no longer seen as separate individual humanist subjects where agency is solely lodged in the body of an individual agent [Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press] but the SENCOs are part of the intra-active entanglement of multiple agencies, of an assemblage. This re-conceptualisation of agency leads to a different approach to inclusion, in which the participants in any encounter can work as part of the assemblage to develop communities capable of re-thinking practice and transforming it into a place where children with special needs become legitimate members of the school.

KEYWORDS:

• Special educational needs coordinator
• inclusion
• agency
• assemblage
• new materialism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Inge Van de Putte supports children, parents and schools in the processes of inclusive education. Support of teachers and the position of special needs coordinators are the topics in her current PhD research project in the field of Disability Studies at Ghent University. In her research and publications, she finds the transfer to practice very important.

Elisabeth De Schauwer is working in the field of disability studies at Ghent University. Her PhD was around the inclusion processes of children with severe communicative difficulties. She works closely together with children, parents and schools in the praxis of inclusive education. For her, activism, research and teaching go hand in hand.

Geert Van Hove is Professor in Disability Studies and Inclusive Education at Ghent University and Endowed Chair holder in Disability Studies at the Free University of Amsterdam. He is teaching and doing research about Disability Studies from a direct link with the persons and situations he is involving in the research and teaching processes. In 2013, he received Gunnar Dybwad Award winner of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and in 2017 the Steven Taylor Emerged Scholar Award.

Bronwyn Davies is an independent scholar, a professorial fellow at the University of Melbourne and an Emeritus Professor at Western Sydney University. She is a writer, scholar and teacher and has been a visiting professor in the last few years in the USA, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, Finland and the UK. She is well known for her work using collective biography, her work on gender, literacy and pedagogy, and for her critique of neoliberalism as it impacts on university work. More details of her work can be found on her website at bronwyndavies.com.au

ORCID

Inge Van de Putte http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0587-3455

Elisabeth De Schauwer http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4030-8515

Geert Van Hove http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3266-0524

Notes

1. Compulsory education in Flanders starts when children turn six. Most children start at the age of 2.5 years in kindergarten/ infant school.

2. Differentiation is the practice of distinguishing multiple differences among people according to their category memberships, while differenciation refers to the ongoing emergence of difference, emphasizing continuous change.