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Inclusive Pedagogy and Knowledge in Special Education

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Inclusive Pedagogy and Knowledge in Special Education TIED1044203 Techset Composition India (P) Ltd., Bangalore and Chennai, India 5/6/2015 International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13603116.2015.1044203 5 Inclusive pedagogy and knowledge in special education: addressing the tension ∗ Joseph Mintz and Dominic Wyse 10 Department of Early Years and Primary Education, Institute of Education, University College London, 120 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AL, UK AQ2 ¶ (Received 8 July 2014; accepted 3 March 2015) 15 There has been an increasing focus in policy and practice on adopting inclusive pedagogy as a way of reconceptualising how schools work with children with special educational needs (SEN). The paper considers the split between knowledge and pedagogy inherent in some dominant strains of inclusive pedagogy. Drawing on the ‘knowledge turn’ in curriculum studies, we argue that although an analytical distinction between knowledge and pedagogy may be 20 useful, too strong a delineation between the two fails to best serve the needs of children with special needs. Specific implications for teacher education in relation to SEN in England are considered. Keywords: inclusion; special educational needs; pedagogy; inclusive pedagogy 25 Inclusive pedagogy and knowledge: addressing the tension AQ3 ¶ In the modern classroom, children’s needs are diverse, complex and recognised as such; yet, progressive and neo-liberal conceptions of the purpose of activity in the classroom often have an uneasy coexistence both in the structures of the school and in the mind of 30 the teacher. The tension between instrumentalist approaches to the role of the teacher, and alternative, broader conceptualizations of the purposes of education are often most CE: KRK QA: Coll: clearly seen when classrooms contain children perceived as differing from the norm. Children with diagnostic labels such as autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder (ADD), or children without a label who simply do not respond in a straightforward 35 way to teaching, present challenges for the development and enactment of pedagogy, curriculum and assessment. If high-stakes test results are seen as the primary driver of an education system, then these children with perceived special educational needs (SEN) can often be seen as an impediment to achieving the tightly defined outcomes, in terms of academic progress, that the curriculum and the assessment framework are 40 supposed to engender. Such anxieties, whether directly or indirectly expressed in the classroom, can frequently lead to the children to whom such labels are applied feeling marginalised and devalued (see Daniels et al. 2003; Daniels and Porter 2007). The increasingly dominant trend in dealing with difference in the classroom is the adoption of an inclusive pedagogy approach. This exists in a variety of expressions, but 45 an influential variety, certainly in the UK, has been the formulation of Florian and Black-Hawkins (2011). Their work adopts an approach to teaching based on two key AQ4 ¶ ∗Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] # 2015 Taylor & Francis 2 J. Mintz and D. Wyse 50 propositions. The first is that each child is valued equally by the teacher and the school. The second is that the process of adaptation of the delivery of the curriculum to meet the needs of each child is done from the perspective of all children in the class. Thus, rather than considering the needs of children with special needs as an ‘add on’, after catering for the needs of the ‘median’ child, the process of planning and delivery of teaching in 55 the classroom reflects the proposition that all children are of equal value. This is not meant to imply that children have equal needs, nor to deny that there may be (often sig- nificant) variation in levels of attention and resource required for different children, rather it is an ideological position, and one that is clearly rooted in sociological critiques of special education, particularly those derived from Foucault (1975, 1977), first 60 expressed in disability studies and then in the more specific movement towards inclusion in the education system (see, e.g. Barton 1988; Oliver 1990). This location of inclusive pedagogy as part of a tradition of sociological critique of how difference is conceived of and treated in society is critical for the argument that will be developed in this paper. We will argue that although such critiques have had, and continue to have, 65 a centrally important role in highlighting for teachers the dangers associated with a socially conservative approach to education which ignores difference, they also them- selves pose a danger in terms of how knowledge is conceived of and applied in the work of teachers in relation to their work with children with SEN. This is particularly relevant for our focus in this paper on how we should consider the place of knowledge in teacher 70 education in relation to SEN. Thinking about knowledge In highlighting what we conceive these dangers to be, we draw on the ‘knowledge turn’ 75 in curriculum studies. This turn, particularly stimulated by the work of Young (2008) and others (Young and Muller 2010; Rata 2012), involves a reframing of the relation- ship between knowledge, curriculum and pedagogy. We argue that the literature in this area can potentially illuminate some of the current debates about how we should best prepare teachers for working with children with SEN. 80 The knowledge turn focuses on what social realism can tell us about the place of theoretical and expert knowledge in teaching and learning. Young and Muller argue that we can conceive of knowledge as ‘sets of systematically related concepts and methods for their empirical exploration’ (2010, 5). Following Durkheim, these are seen as emergent from, but at the same time not reducible to their historical content. 85 This irreducibility implies both the existence of boundaries between sets of concepts and the possibility of objective standards of judgement about the validity of knowledge based on the pursuit of the scientific method. Although not always directly addressed in the literature, we would argue that in terms of typification, the knowledge that the knowledge turn refers to is primarily propositional knowledge, in Ryle’s terms, ‘knowl- 90 edge that’ (1945). This might also be referred to as expert or theoretical knowledge (Higgs 2008). Young and Muller make a distinction between ‘under socialised’ and ‘over socia- lised’ approaches to knowledge. They are particularly critical of the latter, in that it ‘reduces epistemology to “who knows” and the identification of knowers and their 95 practices’ (2010, 5). Rata notes that the dangers of the ‘ ...relativist idea that knowl- edge is constructed within the social relations and language of distinct socio-cultural groups’ (2012, 106). Rata particularly points to the dangers of such a focus on ‘social knowledge’ denying the benefits of knowledge derived from the rational International Journal of Inclusive Education 3 thinking of the Enlightenment to socially disadvantaged groups who in fact stand most 100 to benefit from it. Young and Muller (2010) reject ‘post-modernist’ approaches to knowledge in favour of a structurally conservative realism, which maintains both the boundaries between disciplines and the necessary objectivity of knowledge, and which in a broad sense can and does tell us independently ‘true’ things about the world, They 105 make this argument for both the ‘hard’ and the human sciences. However, their appli- cation of the argument to the latter is constrained by a simultaneous rejection of a socially conservative approach to knowledge which maintains educational and societal structures which restrict the availability of this ‘powerful’ knowledge to the elites within society (2010,7) 110 Such a social realist approach presents a rebuttal of conceptions of knowledge about human beings based on Foucault’s work, as they are expressed in disability studies, as both the product of particular social and historical events and as constituting modes of objectification through which the human subject becomes known and knows itself. Whilst the social realist formulation accepts that social and historical contexts 115 present a mask which can obscure real differences between individuals (i.e. the accep- tance of critique of social conservatism), it implicitly rejects a discursive approach to conceptualising knowledge. Epistemology, in the knowledge turn, is very definitely not based on ‘who knows’. It is this critique that we feel also has important implications for teacher education about SEN. 120 Knowledge and curriculum The knowledge turn is primarily designed, on an instrumental level, as a critique of cur- riculum design in schools. Young and Muller (2010) do not argue that skills and context 125 are unimportant, but that their importance does not outweigh that of empirically derived concepts and methods associated with particular disciplines. Yet, their approach to the place of theoretical knowledge about the human subject is not restricted in its formu- lation to school curriculum design, and we argue that it can and should be applied to other contexts of teaching and learning. In particular, it could be applied, to the position 130 of theoretical knowledge in the curriculum for teacher education in relation to what tea- chers need to know about children with SEN. In this context, we will specifically address the contention of Lewis and Norwich (2005), highly influential in terms of practice in teacher education in England, that whilst there may be, in at least some cases, specialist knowledge about SEN, there is no special pedagogy. 135 Theoretical and tacit knowledge In applying the knowledge turn, designed as a critique of the school curriculum, to the ‘curriculum’ for teacher education for SEN, we recognise that there is a significant 140 extant literature on teacher thinking and teacher research which considers the place of theoretical and expert knowledge in the work of teachers in the classroom and approaches to teacher education (e.g.
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