Keynote speech

Talking Back To Power. The Politics of Educational Exclusion

Roger Slee

Introduction

The Manchester ISEC 2000, seems to be quite properly exerting leadership, positioning itself as an organising moment by using its title as an announcement: `Including the Excluded’. As a slogan, it seems self-evident and incontestable. Or, as one of my favourite British educational thinkers Basil Fawlty would say, “it’s a lesson in the bleeding obvious”. We are challenged to identify who has been excluded and get them back in.

However, I want to suggest that when it comes to talking about special education, educational disablement and inclusive schooling things are anything but obvious, anything but uncontested. Commonsense in the field of special education, I will argue, needs to be suspended in order that we develop a stipulative language of inclusion and exclusion. Failure to do this will result in this conference adding to the repeated practice of the uncritical acceptance and application of unexplained `self-explanatory’ terms. We sign up to the lexicon and later find that others here assembled have altogether different senses of, or meanings for what constitutes a default vocabulary. Terminology like special educational needs, integration and inclusion is indicative. Indeed, the word disability is also in need of deconstruction to make clear what it is we are arguing for when we speak of inclusion. Let me press this further to argue that the commonsense of special education represents a set of discursive practices (Foucault, 1974) founded upon unequal power relations that favour professionals pursuing good works for their needy clients. Moreover, the traditional special educational commonsense draws its legitimacy from an interdisciplinary bricolage that is based upon so-called scientific assumptions about individual pathological defectiveness (Corbett, 1996; Skidmore, 1996) that eschews the politics of disablement (Oliver, 1990). Whatever disciplinary apparel you dress it in, it still amounts to a form of what Jenny Corbett (1996) has described as `badmouthing’. Many of my colleagues including Sally Tomlinson, Len Barton, Mike Oliver, Jenny Corbett and Tony Booth in the United Kingdom and Tom Skrtic, Linda Ware, Doug Biklen, Dorothy Kerzner Lipsky, Alan Gartner, and Ellen Brantlinger in the United States have contributed to the foundation and elaboration of a sociology of special education that presents options for conceptualising and responding to educational exclusion and inclusion.

I know that as introductions go this is a particularly messy and confusing one, but I am unrepentant. My job now is to spend 25 minutes, explaining the messiness and laying out why we need to press this conversation about exclusion and inclusion forward with cautious haste. Let me quickly add that my caution is not borne of a political conservatism that invites delay in struggling against the routine denial of human rights for disabled students. Nor is it to surrender to the Kaufman and Hallahan (1995) charge that inclusion is an educationally bankrupt bandwagon. My anxiety comes from recognition that many practices, and their epistemological underpinnings, that gather under the banner of inclusive schooling add to institutionalised exclusion.

My theme for this keynote address is that inclusion for disabled students is fundamentally an issue of cultural politics. It is not an exclusively technical issue to be fixed by a new ensemble of policy, professionals and resources. Clarification of principle must be the precursor to the development of policy. We must be clear about the politics of identity and difference before moving to the second order questions about the logistics of policy.

Now how do I propose to do this? I will take up the first three themes of ISEC 2000 to organise my discussion:

• From Rights To Policy
• Listening To Different Voices
• Changing Roles

And there is an inevitable disclaimer; “time’s winged chariot” means that my comments will be introductory, indicative rather than exhaustive. Your work in the sessions may take up the themes and do greater justice to them.

1. From Rights to Policy

Following Keith Ballard (1999), Mel Ainscow (1999:218) has described inclusive education as `elusive’, a project that continues to struggle against processes and practices of schooling that erect barriers that compromise the participation of some students. Inclusive education is not just about disabled students or those we say have special educational needs. I come to my first proposition.

Inclusive schooling is a continuing movement against educational and ultimately social exclusion. To be sure, exclusion is not the random outcome of natural and meritocratic distribution as was argued by Hernstein and Murray (1994) in their `spectacular and ugly’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg, 1996) treatise on racial and class inferiority The Bell Curve, or in Robert Nozick’s (1994) grandiloquent defence of the Hayekian opposition to civic responsibility and concessions to distributive justice. The racialization of special educational provision as Tomlinson (1981 & 1982) argued almost two decades ago is not accidental. Nor is it a relic from the past as research on the exclusion of black pupils from schools in England confirms (Gillborn and Gipps, 1996; Gillborn, 1997; Parsons and Castle, 1997; Sewell, 1997; Wright, Weekes and McGlaughlin, 2000).

Zygmunt Bauman identifies the process of social othering where `all societies produce strangers … each kind of society producing its own strangers … in its own inimitable way’. These strangers `… are the people who do not fit the cognitive, moral or aesthetic map of the world’ (1997:17). Institutions such as schools become the cartographic police. Exclusion proceeds through deep structural and broad cultural mechanisms to invigilate a shifting spectrum of diversity. Generally speaking the boundaries in this sub-map of education are sharpest along the lines of disability, race, gender, class, ethnicity and bilingualism (Moore, 1999) and sexuality.

Knight (2000) recently suggested that inclusion must be incorporated in a general theory of education where ends and means are inseparable. Inclusive education is an assumed precondition of a democratic education.

“The principle of `Inclusion’ becomes a mean contributing to defined ends; `inclusion’ is not treated as an end in itself. Proposed here is a cognitive democratic theory of education that merges `inclusive education’ and social inclusion, within broader epistemological principles.”

(Knight, 2000:17)

Let me again turn to the first of the conference themes, From Rights To Policy, to unravel the messiness of exclusion and inclusion in education. There are a number of assumptions and tensions ensconced within this phrase. First, do we in special education recognize inclusion as a question of human rights akin to the exclusion of people on the grounds of race, gender, sexuality or social position (Slee, 1999)? Is it the cultural politics of identity and difference with which we engage? Or when we talk of rights, do we see our professional services as part of a humanitarian project to improve the lot of unfortunate and defective individuals? Perhaps we see this as a normalising project where we become technicians responsible for the assimilation of disabled students?

One way of assessing this is to consider the language and the practices that we employ. Previously I have spoken of `clauses of conditionality’ (Slee, 1996) wherein unequal power relations are deeply inscribed. Regulatory and legislative caveats such as `least restrictive environment’, `to the greatest extent possible’ or `most appropriate setting’ supported by cascade models (Deno, 1970) circumscribe and limit the roles of and possibilities for disabled students, their parents and their advocates. Who decides what is the `most appropriate’ or `least restrictive’? On what basis? To what end? Whose voices (Clough and Barton, 1995 & 1998; Moore, 2000) are included in decision-making and what hierarchy of value is ascribed to those present [or absent]? Such language is a sheer veneer stretched over a deeply exclusionary disposition. Why does this happen? Disabled researchers (Oliver, 19; Barnes; Morris, ) and their allies have contested the notion that what we do is in their best interest? Somebody must be benefiting (Tomlinson, 1996; Skrtic, 1990). We will pursue this in our discussion of the third theme, Changing Roles.

Second, the theme suggests linearity – a seamless progress from the acknowledgement to the giving of rights through the development of comprehensive policy that recognizes and protects those rights. Turning to my own state where we have just completed an evaluation of the Education Department of Western Australia’s Inclusion Programme (Tuetteman, Slee and Punch, 2000), rights, we observe, are incrementally dispensed. Five children were selected to form the pilot inclusion programme, with more being brought into the programme each year. In this case it would seem that rights are rhetorically acknowledged while bureaucratic logistics govern a restricted scope of practical acknowledgement.

Other states are not so straightforward. The Australian states of Queensland [we’ll never be brave enough to be a Republic!] and Victoria deployed a rights and equity discourse to frame integration and inclusion policies. In both places (see Fulcher, 1989 and Lewis, 1993 for a discussion of Victorian policy development and Keary, 1998 for Queensland) it may be argued that these policy operations slipped from commentary on rights and identity into crude renditions of distributive justice that adheres to traditional special educational positions, reinforcing the legitimacy of disablist schooling.

Elsewhere I have referred to this as a calculus of equity (Slee, 1996). Whereby procedurally the trick is to measure the degree of the student’s disability and then in the manner of an actuary calculate the resource loading to accompany the student at the school. Mathematically it would read: Equity [E ] is achieved when you add Additional Resources [AR] to the Disabled Student [D].

This is an incomplete accounting. To be sure, many students require all manner of physical and human resource support in order to be able to operate successfully in our school classrooms. Resources alone do not equity make! Inclusion should be working from a much larger agenda that addresses profound cultural changes within schools. The first question is does the student have a right to be in the school? In other words, who’s in and who’s out? It seems that we often provide the answers without being honest about the questions. The next question is how do we change school culture to enable rather than disable the child (Oliver, 1990). School culture is articulated through curriculum – what is being taught [I’ll address this later], through pedagogy – how it’s being taught [including assessment] and through the organisation and ethos of the school – which includes elements as diverse as the physical layout of the schoolyard and the classrooms through to the letters home to parents. Providing an enabling education means that we work on all of these fronts. Here we can draw on the experience, research and writing of feminist educators’ struggle for girl friendly schooling.

A distressing irony of the policy in Victoria was that many schools discovered relief from difficult students already in their classrooms by having them formally diagnosed as socially-emotionally disturbed. One might be tempted to speculate whether this `net widening trend’, as criminologists describe it, was a forewarning of impending patterns of referral for ADHD. The pecuniary outcome for Victoria’s integration policy between 1984 and 1993 was that while funding for integration rose from a base of nil to $63million, spending on segregated special education continued to grow through that period (Slee, 1997). I now offer proposition 2:

At least two lessons may be drawn from these examples. Always interrogate policy discourse, which includes text and operating procedures, to determine whether it connotes a signing on to an agenda for cultural work (hooks, 1995; McLaren, 1996) or liberal assimilation (Troyna, 1993). And, never underestimate the resilience of the traditional form of special education and educational psychology and the capacity of the industry to appropriate new turf.

Let me make a third observation about the problematic within the theme, From Rights To Policy. There is a tendency towards dissembled as opposed to joined up thinking in special education and education psychology. [And here I am generalising according to some dominant voices in the Australian literature (Ashman & Elkins, 1998; Jenkinson, 1996).] The dissembling takes two major forms. Initially there is the conception of disability as a characteristic of individual pathology. I will take this error up in consideration of the second theme. However in accepting disability as a case of personal tragedy rather than as a social issue (Wright Mills, 1965), there is a disconnection between the inclusion of disabled students and the broad arena of education and social policy. As a result we seem not to be interrogating the fact that while some of us may be saying let’s force open the door of the school for the disabled child, there is a steady flow of problem students being ejected out of the back and side doors. People in England would not want me to rehearse data on permanent exclusions, nor mention the amounts of money – recently increased – spent by the treasury on Pupil Referral Units. Basil’s comments about blood and recognition ring in our ears.

He’s right, this is obvious. It goes deeper. Other aspects of policy ought to be subject to our gaze in this discussion. The national curriculum in England has not been a testament to diversity, a celebration of difference, recognition of the differential requirements for a range of pupils. Stephen Ball has more appropriately referred to the National Curriculum in England and Wales as the `curriculum of the dead’ or curriculum as museum (1994). Learning narrows within the restricted confines of traditional academic disciplines according to antiquarian notions of stages of development. Add to this national testing, published league tables, the commodification or marketization of schooling and a pernicious inspection regime which itself has led an assault on academic research which has anything but obvious connection to skills transmission and the formation of a national Initial Teacher Education curriculum dedicated to monolithic pedagogical form and you have a very powerful cocktail for exclusion. The end result has certainly been choice and diversity. Unfortunately the choice has been that of schools as they screen diverse student pools for those who will drag them up the league table.

There is more that we could say but I did warn you; indicative rather than exhaustive. Let us move to the second theme.

2. Listening To Different Voices.

In his book No Pity Joseph Shapiro (1993) concludes, `Non-disabled Americans just do not understand disabled ones’. His conclusion is a seasoned commuter. The impetus behind my collection, Is There A Desk With My Name On It? (Slee, 1993) came from two sources. A student of mine, herself a teacher, told me a poignant story about her daughter Sharon, a child with a rich repertoire of interests and talents who also had Down syndrome. `Included’ in her local primary school, Sharon rehearsed with her classmates for the school concert. Her parents shared in her excitement as she told of the progress of the production and they did what parents do, they made her costume. On the evening of the concert the class teacher kept her off the stage in the wings. Challenged by the parents the teacher responded, “I didn’t want Sharon to feel bad about looking different”.

The second influence came from stories a trainee teacher, Becky Walsh, told me of her schooling in a special school for visually impaired students. Becky went to a regular primary school until she experienced the onset of macular degeneration. The school then thought it had to decide whether to integrate her now that she had become disabled or whether she would be better in a special school for visually disabled students. Yes, you haven’t misheard me, the question for the school was, would Becky with her rapidly diminishing eyesight be better off – be better included - in unfamiliar surroundings with strangers? To assist with their decision the school called upon a school psychologist who had Becky take an intelligence test. In the tradition of the French theatre of the absurd, the test was sight based. She also spoke incisively about life in the special school. She and her mother kept pushing against expert advice that she do a more restricted curriculum in order that she could cope. Becky and her mother wanted her to engage with the broadest possible curriculum. They believed that Becky would have to be better than others in order to be able to compete in the labour market. Their belief was that special school curriculum based upon lowered expectations serves to further disable their students. Moreover, they wanted a place at the decision-making table where their beliefs could be registered.

Let’s return to Joseph Shapiro (1993:3-4):

Non-disabled Americans do not understand disabled ones.

That was clear to me at the memorial service for Timothy Cook, when long-time friends got up to pay him heartfelt tribute. “He never seemed disabled to me”, said one. “He was the least disabled person I ever met”, pronounced another. It was the highest praise these nondisabled friends could think to give a disabled attorney who, at thirty-eight years old, had won land-mark disability rights cases, including one to force public transit systems to equip their buses with wheelchair lifts. But more than a few heads in the crowded chapel bowed with an uneasy embarrassment at the supposed compliment. It was as if someone had tried to compliment a black man by saying, “You’re the least black person I ever met”, as false as telling a Jew, “I never think of you as Jewish”, as clumsy as seeking to flatter a woman with, “You don’t act like a woman”.

Here in this memorial chapel was a small clash between the reality of disabled people and the understanding of their lives by others. It was the type of collision that disabled people experience daily. Yet any discordancy went unnoticed even to the well-meaning friends of a disability rights fighter like Cook.

Elsewhere I have written about similar collisions in the chambers of the Australian federal parliament during the readings of the Disability Discrimination Bills, about pile-ups in the corridors of education as teachers, school administrators and civil servants faux pas their way towards inclusive education. What language reveals and simultaneously conceals (Foucault, 1972) is the epistemic foundations from which exclusion or inclusion proceeds. In other words exclusion commences with the formation of meaning. A range of epistemologies, and their composites, is on offer when it comes to knowing disability. Some of these stories advance the rights of those upon whom the status of stranger has been conferred, others continue to impede rights and exclude them from active citizenship. How do we come to know disability? What do we know about disability?

The answer, for most of us, to the first question is, from a distance and through the powerful professional expert knowledge, practices and discourses of others. These discursive practices establish the field of knowledge from which we piece together our understandings and thenceforth reactions to that knowledge. For Foucault (1997:11), discursive practices are:

…characterized by the demarcation of a field of objects, by the definition of a legitimate perspective for a subject of knowledge, by the setting of norms for elaborating concepts and theories. Hence each of them presupposes a play of prescriptions that govern exclusions and selections … A discursive practice brings together various disciplines or sciences, or it passes through a number of them and gathers several of their areas into a sometimes inconspicuous cluster.

Discursive practices have established the legitimate perspective for the constructed category, official knowledge and treatment of the disabled or special educational needs student. This discourse of special educational needs in turn became a very powerful knowledge (Usher, 1998) that draws together and is used to map, regulate and govern (Rose, 1989), a fragmented and unruly population of `strangers’ with less than docile bodies. Our official knowledge certainly meets the needs of complex organisations and bureaucracies, but in so doing simultaneously essentialize those for whom and about whom we speak. Multidimensional human beings are reduced to their mono-dimensional signifiers. They become their label; Down syndrome, attention disordered, physically disabled, learning disabled, and thenceforth official social interaction is governed according to the official knowledge of that label.

While we smile at a nurse’s reference to `the appendix’ in bed four or the doctor’s orders about `the vasectomy’ in the day room, we show an astonishing incapacity for reflexivity in our own professional settings. I once heard a deputy headmaster over a school public address system requesting the inclusion children to meet him at recess.

Returning to my point, for many of us what we learn about disability is done at considerable distance; systematic exclusion has ensured that. We are then inducted into professional knowledge making wherein the voices of disabled people are silent. We stumble from an education in social stupidity (Pearl, 1988) to professional knowledge where people become objects of study and manipulation. The end result is at best a partial understanding that continues to exclude people from decision-making about their lives.

Hitherto the voice of the professional expert has prevailed in the field of special education. The voices of teachers, educational psychologists, special educators, educational administrators and bureaucrats, together with medical practitioners, a range of therapists and traditional special educational academics have formed an ensemble of voices, the end product we see in the forms of exclusion and inclusion in our schools today. Changing this requires new voices working from a new score. Herein lies my third and fourth propositions.

Inclusive schooling is not a process of making different kids fit into exclusionary schools with a minimum of disruption to institutional equilibrium. It is not about the same voices choreographing new steps for an old educational dance.

Many have `voiced difficulty’ (Clough and Barton, 1995) both with the substance and effect of their knowledge and the manner of deployment of special educational expertise. Notwithstanding our inclusive rhetoric, many of us continue to operate from the presupposition that disablement is a reflection of defective individual pathology. As disabled researchers and activists such as Michael Oliver (1996) tell us, there are a number of different stories produced to explain disability of which the hegemonic psycho-medical story about impaired individual pathology is but one. It seems that too few of us have engaged with interdisciplinary disability studies where disability is deconstructed and located as a historical and cultural artefact (Abberley, 1987), an outcome of specific modes of production and social relations.

Different voices have found spaces and become louder (Goodley, 1998; Swain and French, 1998; Thomas, 1999; Corker and French, 1999; Moore, 2000). In this country the Centre for Studies in Inclusive Education, together with activists and disability and inclusive education research centres in universities such as Manchester, Sheffield, Newcastle and Leeds [how’s that for fuelling the north south struggle?] support the potential for different voices to reconstruct the agenda for more inclusive forms of schooling. The same is true for other countries.

Just as we accepted, some reluctantly, that the damaging impact of patriarchy on schools was most acutely understood by feminists, by women, so too for working towards the right to civic inclusion for disabled people. We need to reassess and reconstruct social and educational relationships. This means the overhaul of institutions such as schools and it means fundamental changes for the way we think about our professional work and how we do it. We arrive at the third conference theme.

3. Changing Roles.

Some years ago a colleague told me that she offended an obstetrician when on his first consultation she informed him that he was being interviewed for a job. A reassessment of who is working for whom, whose interests are we best serving remains on the table at ISEC 2000? This is my fifth proposition.

Clearly the demand by parents of disabled students through litigation, appeals against ascertainment or statement outcomes, the formation of support networks and the sponsoring of an alternative educational research literature has threatened traditional professional interests in special educational provision. It also issues a fundamental challenge to the assumptions behind traditional special educational research.

We have witnessed profound changes in professional practice, in school organisation, curriculum and teaching, and academic research. Many of the papers at this congress will no doubt exemplify the impact of this civic reform movement as professionals work with their communities towards inclusion. There has been a simultaneous expansion of a new traditionalism in special educational practice as education systems around the world have struggled to keep up with the call for the inclusion of students who represent a range of identities and differences. What I refer to here is a process of structural tinkering and renaming in order to hold the institutional line. Let me provide an example.

`Co-location’ of regular and special schools can be examples of both a trend towards inclusion or the affirmation of segregated provision. How can that be? I have observed neighbourhood schools where the local special school has moved in. There is a principal of the special unit as well as the regular school principal. The disabled students attend some classes with their non-disabled peers and other intensive support classes in the unit. At best the special unit ought to be a base camp, a whole school resource that gives support to teachers and students in all classrooms. The unit may then be used for a range of disabled and non-disabled students in supporting activities. At worst this arrangement resembles what Biklen (1985) referred to as `islands in the mainstream’. The defence of their separation from non-disabled students for intensive work typically is mounted from an educational stance. My observation of the work being done by students in a number of these schools reveals a resemblance to old forms of behaviourism, albeit dressed up in new technology, where students still do undemanding tasks requiring more colouring in than thinking.

This too is complex and messy. Disadvantaged cultural groups have actively sought separation from or supplementary education away from those schools that have presided over their exclusion. Mirza and Reay (2000) have demonstrated the cultural and educational importance of supplementary schools for black children. Here black culture, history and languages are celebrated, children are schooled in their identity and made aware of the antecedents of racist curriculum and schooling. So too for Aboriginal education in Australia and Canada, African American, Latino and Native American education in North America and Maori education in New Zealand. Why not further deaf identity through dedicated schooling? I suspect that the answer revolves around questions of choice and power. Who makes the decisions here?

This is clearly different from using traditional special educational knowledge and practice to support holding the line for schooling systems that eject more and more of its so-called difficult students. Have we allowed ourselves to be enlisted to support the collateral damage of league tables, inspection regimes and inappropriate curriculum for the twenty first century and beyond?

I suspect that my colleague Allan Luke best identifies the requirements for our changing role when he said that the most important lesson for academics is knowing when to shut up and listen. Knowledge for new times he argues is pursued through attention to new voices. So too for us.

Conclusion – Enough From Me.

Perhaps the basic problem for inclusive schooling is that we have failed to recognise that we are working from an oxymoron. Schools were never meant for all comers. Special education and the unskilled labour market colluded with schools to conceal their failure to meet the needs of all comers. Crisis in the unskilled labour market, together with greater levels of population mobility [globalisation] has expanded the numbers and ranges of students in our classrooms. Exclusion and special educational descriptors [the production of disability] have simultaneously expanded to deal with this social and educational crisis.

We have a deeply systemic problem. Some communities and their schools have achieved local settlements to become more inclusive. This is to be celebrated and protected through our work towards a general educational reconstruction. I have no doubt that this can be done through finding spaces and moments from within to effect change. Indexes of inclusion are one strategic device, a reform of initial teacher education and professional development is another. A re-education of the helping professions so that they are helpful is still another. As cultural workers to change education for disabled students we have to become obsessed with listening and in forging new partnerships. Who knows we may achieve the definition of guerrilla warfare as established by a Year 10 student of mine, Sylvie. Guerrilla warfare, she wrote, is where you trick the enemy by winning.

References

Barton, L. (Ed.) The Politics of Special Educational Needs, Lewes, Falmer Press.

Brantlinger, E. (1997) Using Ideology: Cases of Nonrecognition of the Politics of Research and Practice in Special Education, Review of Educational Research, 67(4): 425 – 459.

Gillborn, D. (1997) Young, black and failed by school: the market, education reform and black students, International Journal of Inclusive Education, 1(1): 65 – 87.

Kauffman, J.M. & Hallahan, D.P. (eds.) (1995) The Illusion of Full Inclusion: A Comprehensive Critique of a Current Special Education Bandwagon, Austin, Pro-Ed.

Oliver, M. (1990) The Politics of Disablement, London, Macmillan.

Oliver, M. (1996) Understanding Disability. From Policy to Practice. London, Macmillan.

Index