A guidebook for educators, policy-makers and practitioners advancing the journey to inclusive education.
Review of: Inclusive Education for the 21st Century (2nd Edition)
Editor: Linda J Graham
Reviewed by David Towell
This year marks the 30th anniversary of an important world conference at Salamanca, hosted by the Spanish government and UNESCO. The Salamanca Statement defined inclusive education as the way ahead for special education, working towards the end of segregated school provision. Subsequently this vision has received high level reaffirmation, notably in the 2006 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (Article 24) and the 2015 UN Sustainable Development Goals. SDG 4 puts quality, equity and inclusion at the heart of improving education.
National responses to these global aspirations have since been disappointingly mixed. Some countries have made great strides forward, notably in Europe, Italy (which passed a law in 1977 closing all special schools) and Portugal which now has a comprehensive legal framework for inclusion. In Federal countries, education is often mainly a responsibility of provincial government. Since the 1980s, for example, the Canadian province of New Brunswick has been a global pioneer. More recently, the Argentine province of La Pampa has been following in these footsteps.
This new collection (37 contributors, 19 chapters) aspires to help educators, both policy-makers and practitioners, advance the journey to inclusive education more widely. It's editor, Linda Graham, is Director of the Centre for Inclusive Education (C4IE) at the Queensland University of Technology. The majority of contributors are also Australian.
The chapters are organised into three main parts, respectively exploring:
Four chapters are devoted to the first question in all of which Linda Graham is a co- author. For her answer, she draws heavily on the Committee on the UNCRPD'S 2016 General Comment (GC4). Ten years after the Convention was published, GC4 seeks to correct various misinterpretations of Article 24 and offer an authoritative definition of the student's right to inclusive education which Graham quotes in full. In considering the barriers to student inclusion, she also explains the 'social model' of disability - directing our attention to what it is in the school or wider environment that makes learning difficult and steering us away from ways of thinking that see difficulties as deficits within the student. This is helpful although the four chapters overlap quite a lot and could have been better integrated. More important, if this book reaches a third edition, it would benefit from a chapter exploring what is meant by education: 'inclusive education' is two words and it is not sufficient to define only the adjective!
Two other chapters in this foundational part identify relevant anti-discrimination laws in the Australian context and Kate de Bruin provides an original review of the evidence available on the effectiveness of inclusive education for both students with disabilities and their non-disabled peers. In short, where inclusion is done well (for example, the diversity in classrooms reflects that of the wider community; instructional practices are based on inclusive pedagogies and learning is collaborative), all students, especially students with disabilities including those with 'complex learning profiles', gain both socially and academically, compared with more segregated arrangements.
One more general point. The authors here claim that approaching inclusive education through a focus on students with disabilities is legitimate: first, because it is precisely these students who historically have most been subject to discrimination; and second, because what it takes to promote their inclusion can inform the welcome given to others encountering barriers to learning. I sometimes use these arguments myself but now I am less convinced: there are many kinds of diversity in modern societies and these are often inter-related, as suggested in the concept of 'intersectionality'. Inclusive education aspires to include all students in diverse classrooms and this requires sensitivity to the multiple barriers that arise from societal attitudes towards class, sex, race, disability, gender identity etc.
There are six chapters in the second part, addressed to achieving systemic educational reform. Clearly the vision articulated in the first part is transformational: it requires radical change at all levels from the classroom to the Ministry and beyond.
This part starts with an excellent (although too brief) overview of experience in three places - Italy, Portugal and New Brunswick - where there has been radical change, sustained over decades. The authors here identify the national or provincial strategies adopted in these places and what both enabled and undermined success. In all three, this remains work in progress.
The other five chapters address some particular issues in this transformation....but more as fragments that somehow need to be incorporated in these system-wide strategies. For example, what is involved in improving teacher's instructional practices? How can students with complex learning profiles be included in modified aspects of the standard curriculum for their age? And what does it take to include students for whom English is, or is becoming, an additional language to their preferred language? These are important questions and some of the answers here are technically complex. I know that C4IE is an important resource to education in Queensland: I am wondering if the University can find ways of helping the state integrate issues like this into a coherent strategy for change in the whole education system.
The third part of this book is focused at the level of the school, of course where inclusive education mainly happens. It is headlined as an exploration of the development of inclusive school culture. Most of the seven chapters examine key roles and relationships, in each case identifying evidence-based interventions that can strengthen the school as an inclusive community. For example, successive chapters explore: what it takes to ensure that all students are 'active citizens' in the school with voices that are listened to; the importance for student success of the feeling that they belong and have significant peer relationships; the development of trusting relationships between students and teachers....and of better partnerships between teachers and parents; and the need to rethink the contribution of teaching assistants if they are to supplement the work of the classroom teacher, not become a barrier to student participation in lessons. All useful commentaries.
The concept of culture is drawn from social anthropology: it refers to the collective patterns of ideas, norms and social behaviours that constitute ordinary life in small societies, in this case the school and its community. I would argue that the key link between (visionary) policy and (inclusive) practice in the sub-title to this book is leadership: leadership for the whole system as we see, for example in New Brunswick; and especially, leadership for the school as an institution - defining positive goals, supporting teachers in improving pedagogical practice and engaging the school community in plotting the often lengthy journeys to school improvement. Hopefully the next edition of this important book will give stronger representation to the holistic strategies required to achieve school transformation and what these require of school-level leadership.
The publisher is Routledge.
Inclusive Education for the 21st Century (2nd Edition) © Linda J Graham 2024
Review: Inclusive Education: Theory, Policy and Practice © David Towell 2024
education, Inclusion, Inclusive Education, Australia, England, Reviews
