Beware of inclusion advocates bearing gifts of simplicity

On March 27th the inclusion research cluster (a group to which I belong) at the School of Education in the University of Southampton organised a one-day conference on Inclusion Research. The majority of the day was given over to our PhD students who gave presentations on their research. I was there to support two of my students, Jane Lapraik and George Roberts. Jane spoke of her plans to research the strategies that dyslexic learners at university use to revise for unseen exams. George gave an overview of his research into the role that a community IT centre plays in the lives of adult and continuing learners.

The day was kick started by a powerful talk from Professor Len Barton, an influential and key figure in inclusion research- and someone who I had always wanted to hear speak. Below are my notes from his powerful and engaging talk (not complete in the sense of representing a full picture of what Len said) Although Len is talking primarily about schools, I believe that many parallels can be drawn in the contexts in which I work: universities, adults with learning disabilties and digital inclusion. In the context of a digital inclusion forum I am convening for the TLRP research programme, I was particularly struck by two challenges that Len raised: the challenge to accept that digital inclusion is more complex than simply providing a box of technology (access) and the challenge to reconceptualise digital inclusion as a process as much as an outcome.

Len started off by saying: " Beware of those who bear gifts of simplicity"- inclusion is complex, it involves more than resource issues and there are no quick fixes.

Inclusion is underpinned by an informed conviction that something is wrong and needs urgent serious intervention and challenge.

Focusing exclusively on a school or a child is unhelpful if we view education in a social vacuum.

Good intentions, charity, ad-hoc interventions are inadequate to address the profundity of discrimination, therefore inclusion needs to be understood as a political issue. Inclusion is about the nature of decision-making: who is in, who is out, who gets what, how, why and what are the consequences?

Inclusion is political because it raises the important question, inclusion into what?

Inclusion requires a creative partnership between government, schools, and parents; but we need to be clearer about what schools cannot be expected to do- they cannot meet the challenges of inclusion alone.

If we are going to argue for inclusion, then we need zero tolerance to all forms of exclusion. We need "up in your face" activity against all forms of exclusion- this is not negative, it is essential for change.

Exlcusion does not have a single dimension, it is multi-faceted.

There is no such thing as an inclusive school; there are schools that show evidence of inclusive practice, but in those same schools exclusionary practice will exist. Inclusion and exclusion co-exists together.

we need transformative change- that involves more than attitudes, it is systemic.

Beware advocates that maintain inclusion is about placement or resources, it is about equity.

Beware advocates that emphasise exciting prospects without recognising that it is difficult.

Beware advocates who emphasise the importance of indiviudals without seeking to connect that to the wider social context.

Inclusion is not just about participationl, it is about continued participation.

Inclsuive education is not an end in itself, it is a means to and end.

Legislation is not sufficient, but it is a necessary factor in the process of change.

Change is challenging, it requires creative, persistent hard work.

Being inclsuive involves giving priority to challenging and important questions e.g What does inclusive education mean to participants in different contexts? What does change mean and involve? What constitutes exclusion in particular contexts?

In exploring voice we need to focus on context, content and purpose, consequences of indiviudals and society.

Researchers need a critical self awareness- it is essential that we consider the extent to which research itself can be part of barriers to inclusion.

Risk management and risk aversion: widening or reducing the digital divide?

I attended the ALT-C 2008 conference at Leeds. See: http://www.alt.ac.uk/altc2008/. The theme is re-thinking the digital divide; and whilst this is not a disability specific theme, I am naturally interested in attending those sessions that specifically talk about disabled learners and disadvantaged groups. Here I will reflect on the presentation I attended during day one of the conference (Tuesday).

Roy Smith: How is technology connecting with disadvantaged groups?

Roys' talk was focusing on individuals with little or no I.T skills and microbusinesses with less than 5 staff. Focusing on microbusinesses first he described an EQUAL Project called E-Learn2work, which was looking at reducing barriers in 5 business sectors. I was struck by the finding that "natural networks" played an important role, in that the project learnt to use the natural social networks that individuals within businesses to provide evidence and support for undertaking e-learning in the workplace. This resonates with the LEXDIS project that I am involved with, where disabled learners express a strong preference for getting help and support from friends and family; and also the Concepts of Access Project where access for people with learning disabilities can be facilitated by natural supports (e.g work colleagues). But my ears also pricked up when Roy talked about health and safety issues being a real barrier in terms of where a PC can be located in a small business. Top down risk management or risk aversion policies, which are very often wrapped up in health and safety policy frequently present access barriers that might (and I stress might, because I don't really believe the hype) protect certain people from insurance claims; but it's a kind of protection that acts as a straight-jacket rather than a safety blanket.

David Kay; Seb Schmoller and Kevin Donovan: Is connectivity connecting?

David talked about four e-inclusion projects that he, Seb and Kevin had been evaluators for. He talked about the dilemma for those who work with specialist groups e..g Autism; looked after children. These are specialised fields, required personalised learning. But it means that practitioners working in these fields are isolated. e.g Those working in the field of autishm, don't learn with and from those working with looked after children. They are therefore isolated, and lack the critical mass to get anything done ; solve systemic problems and access value-added funding. David described how the "camel" methodology has been used to therefore bring these specialist groups together. Again; the importance of social networking is reflected in these experiences. Again, my ears pricks up when David described one project working with deeprived teenagers where they were issued with laptops. He talked about how with entitlement, you need to take risks and have trust i.e not assume that the young people would automatically sell their laptop on the bus, if you give them one. In one sense, the demonstration of trust could be as empowering as having access to a laptop.

BERA 2008: Reflection on TLRP symposium on capacity building

On the Friday of the BERA 2008 conference I attended a really useful symposium convened by Zoe Fowler and chaired by Andrew Pollard entitled: " Capacity Building evaluations, obstacles and initiatives: reflections from England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales".

With my role in the National Centre for Research Methods (NCRM) and my new responsibility of chairing the training and capacity building strategy group I was keen to hear how the TLRP conceptualised capacity building in research methods and learn what underpinned their strategy.

There were three key speakers, Zoe Fowler from TLRP; Susan Davies and Jane Salisbury from the Welsh Education Research Network (WERN); Adela Baird and Steve Baron from the Applied Educational Research Scheme (AERS)in Scotland.

Zoe stated that there was 10 years worth of evidence in capacity building in educational research and admitted that understanding "capacity" is problematic. Her key arguments in relation to strategy were:

You need a range of structures aimed at the diversity of the workforce; structures that promote networking; communtity building; identity formation; confidence building and access to a range of resources.

You need on the job and off the job training opportunities that validate practice and build identity, competence and confidence

There is a need for adequate time to engage with resources and this time needs to be strategised.

We also need to strategise for constructive relationships between researchers and key people or "catalysts" who can help researchers make links to relevant networks etc.

This strategy, which emphasises the socio-cultural or community building nature of capacity building; where learning about research methods is viewed as a social practice, was reflected in other talks where strategies included giving bursaries for people to work together (WERN) or were underpinned by a knowledge based approach as opposed to a competency based approach (AERS).

Questions from the audience focused on whether the projects highlighted were focused on building capacity in the traditional or standard areas (e.g qualitative as opposed to quantitative) thus perpetuating skills defecits and were also ingnoring building capacity in new or innovative research areas. A question that is highly relevant to NCRM and one which will focus my mind as I chair the first NCRM training and capacity building strategy group later on this year!

BERA 2008: Reflections on the Inclusion Strand

This week I attended the BERA 2008 conference at Heriot-Watt University. I was presenting two papers at the conference- one was a joint paper with Melanie Nind called "Developing a multiperspective conceptual understanding of access for people with learning difficulties". The other was a paper reflecting on the processes and outcomes of the PAIRS project, that I have described elsewhere- see for example: http://janekseale.blogspot.com/2008_07_01_archive.html When we have uploaded the papers to Education Online, I will create a link to the URL's.

I got a good response to the PAIRS paper, which I was pleased about; with several people agreeing with my argument that the participatory approach is a useful alternative to standard student evaluation methods in higher education.

BERA is a huge conference, so I decided to concentrate on the inclusion and social-justice themes. Here are just a few highlights of the presentations I attended.

Kristine Black-Hawkins, Lani Florian and Martyn Rouse gave an interesting talk entitled "Achievement and Inclusion in Schools and Classrooms: Participation and Pedagogy" in which they described research that aimed to explore meanings of achievement and inclusion through the study of inclusive schools. Some key phrases or ideas that struck me and that I wrote down while listening were:

" Inclusion is conditional (i.e passive); participation is a right (and more active)"

" Inclusive practices are the things that teachers do to give meaning to the concepts of inclusion"

"The relationship between a medical diagnosis and an educational intervention is pretty weak; there is no one strategy for a particular "difference" that will work"

"Schools took risks, but also safe-guarded the most vulnerable"

During question time, I raised the issue of "risk" with the presenters and asked something along the lines of: if risk-taking promotes inclusion, how can we encourage or create environments or climates where people are willing to take risks. One response by Kristine was where a School had a supportive Head who gave their staff "permission" take risks.

Picking up on the notion of risk, which is also a strong theme in the "concepts of access" work that I have been doing with Melanie Nind, I was also interested to hear the talk given by Linda Dunne in which she explored discourses of inclusion with a sample of teachers and other key stakeholders. She identifed three discourses: a policy discourse; an othering discourse and a discourse of self. Linda defined the policy discourse as one that focuses on prevailing needs and keeping children safe. I was struck by the diagram that one study participant had drawn in which the child was in the centre of a circle and the word "protection" was written around the circumference of the circle. In my notes I wrote: A circle that encloses rather than connects" and "where is the discourse about potential and children's abilities". This safety or risk-averse discourse views people with disabilities as vulnerable and lacking abilities or resilience.

In giving example sof the discourse of self, Linda talked about the participants who viewed happiness and self-esteem as an educational goal and who judged some children as vulnerable and at risk because they felt they had low self-esteem. Linda commented that this was akin to a therapeutic discourse (my therapist friends might disagree, but I understand what she was trying to say- in that she was questioning whether low self-esteem was a "new" deficiency" that had to be remedied or treated.

Marie Huxtable talked about her role in supporting schools to develop inclusive practices at a time when schools have been encouraged to create what she considered to be devisive lists of gifted and talented youth. Maries' talk stimulated me to think about my daughters experience of being singled out as gifted and talented at Maths. She was made a member of the National Gifted and Talented Academy" and was invited to join online discussion forums etc. She chose to ignore the invitations as they seemed irrelevant and pointless to her. The point being, that whilst she was good at Maths, her passion was art- something her School completely misjudged. Central to my daughters identity was her art- and it meant nothing to her to be listed as gifted in Maths. This experience merely served to distance my daugher from her School and she has since left it to study A levels somewhere else. Something designed to include- served to exclude in a sense.

Participatory approaches to inclusion related staff development: reflections on processes and outcomes

On June 25th I co-presented a paper with Fani Theodorou ( a PAIRS participant) at the Instiutional Research Conference, hosted by Solent University. Fani and I offered our reflections on the success and value of the participatory evaluation project- PAIRS. Our slides can be found at this website: http://www.solent.ac.uk/irconference/resources/Sealeetal.ppt.

In terms of my own reflections on the value of participatory projects to evaluate the student learning experience in higher education I offered the following reflections:

1. The identified issues were no surprise

• Other evaluation methods had picked these up
• Rather disappointing in a sense that the participatory did not reveal anything new or unexpected

2. What was surprising was the evidence about the impact of identified issues on students:

• Self-esteem, confidence, identity
• Academic AND home lives

Finding out more about this IMPACT has made the project worthwhile for me.

The audience responded well to our presentation. Fani did a fantastic job of presenting her material. I also learnt that she had tried to volunteer to take part in other research projects in the university only to be told that they only wanted native English speakers. It got be thinking about how exclusionary exclusion criteria for research projects are, in terms of how they make prospective participants feel when they are barred from participating. This is something I think is underestimated in research. For the LEXDIS project, we thought very carefully about this and tried hard to put recruitment procedures in place that did not make disabled students feel excluded or rejected.

Theorising Inclusion and the dogma of accessibility

On Wednesday 2nd July I attended a seminar hosted by the Southampton University School of Education and the BERA Inclusive Education Special Interest Group. The theme was theorising inclusion and the two speakers were Julie Allan and Roger Slee. Both talks gave me much food for thought in relation to my own research and practice.

Julie Allan's talk developed an argument that four philsophers of difference had the potential to rescue inclusion from the "spot of bother" it was in at the moment. The philsophers she chose to focus on were:

Deleuze & Guatarri- deterritorialization, rhizomic learning and difference
Foucault: practices of the self & transgression
Derrida: aporias & deconstruction

Rhizomic learning is offered as an alternative to the structured aboretal learning borne of rigid spaces. Rhizomic learning is about lines of flight rather than safe spaces. Learning through wandering produces maps rather than knowledge and what is learnt is unseen and unpredicted by us. In terms of inclusion, if such learning is encouraged then there will be less emphasis on marking learners out as different depending on what they do or don't know. Deterritorializing is about smoothing out rigid spaces ( Allan applied this concept to teacher education) by breaking rules. By asking questions that challenge thinking, that make you a foreigner in your own land. Allan gave an example by suggesting that rather than ask " what is inclusion?" we should ask "what does inclusion do?". Allan argues further that we don't need to refer to the groups we work in to gain approval or collective ownership of an idea, we just need to get on and do it (take a risk, be creative).

Aporias are two paths or two ways forward. Arguing against the dogma of inclusion that forces us to choose one path, Allan argues that inclusion is not about either/or; it is about also/and. There are times when it might be useful to hold two things in our mind (e.g deficit and social model re dyslexia). She argues that when we are forced to choose one path we can create injustices (e.g choosing which student to support over another). Derrida argued that we need to practice the art of deconstructing dogma- "reading a text twice"- looking behind a text (e.g inclusion policy) and seeing how it gets itself into trouble. Allan argued that we need to teach trainee teachers to see the undecidabilities of inclusion and how inlcusion texts close them down. Texts construct passive, dull and regulated teachers. This argument has real resonance for me when thinking about how accessibility guidelines closes down practice and how people fail to read the texts of "universal design" twice in order to see that it does not necessarily equate to a "one size fits all" approach to the provision of accessible technologies for disabled learners.

Allan then went on to use Foucault's notion of self practice or ethical work to arge that inclusion starts with ourselves- we are more in control of inclusion than we think we are and we need to make an analysis of where we are. She concluded by arguing that we can invent inclusion as something better than we've had before, but we need to re-frame inclusion as ethical and political. We should not be trying to pin inclusion down, but to open it up and out. This thing called inclusion won't come about through grand revolt, but through tiny ruptures which open up possibilities.

The audience discussion raised some interesting questions and issues:

1. Is it dangerous to smooth out the spaces (i.e danger of blandness and sameness)? Julie responded by agreeing that difference is interesting and the danger is in fact in re-territorialization or re-inscribing.
2. Does everyone have the credentials needed to cross the space?
3. When student support services and others are required to construct a case for inclusion- this inevitably pathologises universities and students.
4. Inclusion can be viewed as "tethering"- tethering people to particular streams of provision.

Roger Slee started off with an interesting metaphor in relation to "rescuing inclusion": Is it about throwing out the lifeboats of inclusion or draining the pool?

Roger agreed with Julie that inclusion starts with ourselves- examing our discomforts around inclusion.

Roger argued that inclusion was born in a particular moment in time (politicallly, culturally and historically). As it has travelled it has lost its insurrectionary force. Instead of insurrection we now get orhodoxy we now imposed thought and forced adherence. Inclusion has therefore lost its effectiveness. Inclusion therefore, is political. It is about who is in, who is out and who decides. The history of inclusion ought to be the subject of interrogation. When Roger said this, it reminded me of the archeology metaphor I used in my book when I argued that learning technologists needed to dig deeper into the history of accessibility in order to understand where approaches to accessibility were derived.

According to Roger, inclusive education is a series of related "projects" and separating them is dangerous. Inclusion is about policy work, research work and ground work. Separation of these projects allows us to do analytical work, but they are related.

Inclusive education is:

• not about indicators of inclusion, but about recognising exclusion;
• a political undertaking;
• a cultural then technical undertaking;
• about all students ;
• straighforward and complex ;
• a project designed to bother- it therefore is always going to run into resistance .
  

Finally, Roger concluded: we are not straight about inclusion being complex- it can't be boiled down to specific techniques or tools.

I wish I could say something really clever now about how these talks have influenced by thinking, but the truth is I can't. At the moment all I know is that my thinking has been influenced, but in what way I can't yet say. Watch this space though because I think I might be about to go on a rhizomic learning journey- reflecting on how these ideas might help me develop my thinking about the development of accessibility practices in higher education. I certainly believe the dogma of accessibility needs to be deconstructed.

Research Methods Festival 2008: privilege and control

This week, with my NCRM hat on I attended the Research Methods Festival (see the programme and presentations slides at this website: http://www.ncrm.ac.uk/RMF2008/festival/programme/index.php).

It's the first time I've been to the Festival, (which is held every two years) and so I did not know what to expect. I am pleased to report that I learnt a lot, and so I just wanted to share some highlights for you- focusing particularly on my interests in participatory research.

On Thursday I attended a session convened by Caroline Bryson called "Research with children-what are we still overlooking"? I attended the session because I wanted to see how different participatory research with children is, compared to participatory research with adults who have learning disabilities. One person in the audience asked: is research with children so different to any other kind of research? The panel replied yes. I would concur- in that what seemed to preoccupy the audience were issues of confidentiality- particularly what to do if a child revealed something sensitive and whether or not it should be passed on to a statutory agency such as social services. If the session had been about participatory research with people who have learning disabilities I suspect the audience would have been preoccupied with issues surrounding how much control the participants are actually given over the research (and the tensions between participatory and emancipatory research).

Despite the differences I observed, my ears pricked up at the following comments which I think do have resonance for learning disability research:

1. Talking about the method of encouraging children to participate through creative activities such as drawing and then writing about our interpretations of these drawings Kay Tisdall asked a number of hard to answer questions : Why are we so fixated about translating the non-written into written text? Are we privileging "voice" and articulation and marginalising those who use other communication methods? Kay went on to suggest that perhaps we are getting distracted by the tools of participatory research (e.g. drawings) and losing focus on the participation.
2. Talking about the role of ethics committees in participatory research, Jo Moran-Ellis an audience member argued that we need to challenge ethics committees who require us to see children as vulnerable with little capacity or resilience. When children are abused, control is taken away from them- when ethics committees make decisions for children- control is also taken away from them.