Global Concerns and Local Realities

Inclusive Education as an International Trend

Inclusive education has become a worldwide trend, and countries internationally are grappling with what it means to make education more inclusive. Many authors contend that inclusive education will be conceived and implemented differently in different countries and contexts (Armstrong, Armstrong, & Spandagou, 2011; Florian, 2012). This view acknowledges the reality of different contextual restraints and possibilities, including historical, cultural, and socioeconomic realities that influence educational inclusion and exclusion. Results of this emphasis on differences among countries include the potential to survey international inclusion policies and practices without critique and to treat challenges as unique. While comprehensive international surveys appraise the reach and limits of inclusive education—for example, Alur and Timmons (2009) and Artiles, Kozleski, and Waitoller (2011)—this column reports on an international conference on inclusive education held in Johannesburg, South Africa. First, it provides some background to the conference, and then, with reference to the abstracts of the conference presenters, shows that five themes emerge as being important in making education inclusive both in southern Africa and internationally. The conclusion suggests that contexts and challenges are not so idiosyncratic that learning cannot happen across contexts and that international collaboration and critique are needed to realize inclusion in education.

Making Education Inclusive: The Johannesburg Conference

The Southern African Association of Learning and Education Differences (SAALED) is a nongovernment organization committed to enabling teachers to teach diverse learners in order to realize inclusive education (www.saaled.org.za). SAALED organizes a biennial professional development conference and, in 2013, partnered with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization Chair in Teacher Education for Diversity and Development at the School of Education, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, to add a research symposium to the conference program. Sixty of the abstracts submitted in response to the call for abstracts were selected for inclusion in the conference program, with a final 43 papers presented by delegates from both developed and developing countries. The collection of abstracts provides a useful insight into what concerns teachers, students, and academics in the field of inclusive education. A thematic analysis (Bryman, 2012) of the collection of abstracts was done by first identifying the core issue of the abstract and then clustering these according to their similarities. Five clusters of issues emerged, each identified as a concern in making education inclusive. These concerns are global yet expressed with different nuances depending on local realities. In the section that follows, each concern in making education inclusive is discussed, with mention made of the contextual issues raised by delegates.

Concerns in Inclusive Education

Listening to Understand Inclusion, Exclusion, and Marginalization

There is a growing concern internationally to seek out insider perspectives (Messiou, 2006) in the quest for greater inclusivity in education. This requires researchers to listen to the voices of students, parents, and teachers and to engage in research with, rather than on, others. Slee (2011) argues that inclusive education requires that “we seek understandings of exclusion from the perspectives of those who are devalued and rendered marginal or surplus by the dominant culture of the regular school” (p. 107). To this end, there were papers presented in the conference by South African postgraduate researchers (Combrink, Dolowitz, Geyer, Kimani, & Phillips, 2013; Rembach, 2013) and a researcher from England (Messiou, 2013). In addition to traditional interview-type data collection methods, the value of a variety of visual and digital media was explored, all with the potential to hear from students themselves how they experience schools and schooling. If teachers and policy makers are willing to listen, this information has the potential to promote inclusive practices in schools (Ainscow & Kaplan, 2004). Not only are the perspectives of students valuable, but parents/guardians can also provide insight into exclusionary pressures that impact students. A paper presented by a Swedish delegate focused on parent/guardian perspectives on children with disabilities in rural Kenya (Barow & Muchiri, 2013). Finally, the voices of teachers can be harnessed to identify systemic barriers to the implementation of inclusive education, and a paper from South Africa documented the problems that kindergarten teachers perceive in this regard (Mahlo, 2013). One such problem is inadequate teacher preparation, and this is suggested as the third concern of the conference.

Teacher Education for Inclusive Education

A lack of teacher preparation for inclusive classrooms is a well-worn complaint in the literature on inclusive education. Rather than rehearsing this complaint, a number of conference presentations reported on various initiatives at both preservice and in-service levels to provide teacher education for inclusive education. Academics in South Africa are grappling with the challenges of providing conceptually coherent and pedagogically appropriate initial teacher education courses in inclusive education. In the midst of competing demands for space in the curriculum, they seek to balance the needs of the context with research-based practices reported in the literature. Two presentations dealt with ways in which inclusive education is being taught in South African universities (Pienaar & Raymond, 2013; Rusznyak & Walton, 2013). A New Zealand presentation (Dharan, 2013) showed concern with initial teacher education but emphasized the challenges experienced by novice teachers as they transition into the classroom. This perspective is important, as research tends to focus on either preservice or in-service teacher education for inclusion but not on the transitional stage. A number of presenters at the conference were concerned with the professional development of teachers to enable them to be pedagogically responsive to diverse students in various contexts. These included remote rural schools in northern Finland (Vayrynen, 2013) and inclusive schools in South Africa (Fourie, Hooijer, & Homan, 2013; Jez, 2013; Nel & Walton, 2013). The importance of identifying the professional competencies required for the various contexts was identified, as was the need to find professional learning opportunities that employ situated learning approaches. Collaboration emerged as a skill and orientation that South African teachers should develop, with various papers suggesting innovative and sustainable approaches to collaborative practices in schools (Laas, 2013; Nel, Romm, & Tlale, 2013). In addition, emphasis was placed on the need for South African teachers to learn to use solution-focused and asset-based approaches when teaching diverse students (Olivier & Mavuso, 2013; von Cziffra-Bergs & Watson, 2013; Watson & von Cziffra-Bergs, 2013). These approaches disrupt the traditional deficit orientations to students who experience barriers to learning that are embedded in many teachers’ philosophy and practice (Naicker, 2005).

Issues in Research in Inclusive Education

A variety of paradigms and methodologies were employed in generating the knowledge about inclusive education that was presented at the conference. Some have been alluded to in the discussion above, but four aspects are worth foregrounding. The first concerns one South African research project (Nel et al., 2013) in which the focus group interviews segued into participatory collaborative groups, with researchers needing to shift their roles to become facilitators of these groups. The second is a project in England where students are engaged as co-researchers, thus making the research not just about inclusion but inclusionary in its design and execution (Messiou, 2013). Third, a review of published literature on inclusive education in South Africa was presented (Amod & Vorster, 2013). Literature reviews provide a useful synthesis of trends in an area and can serve to identify lacunae in theory, research, and practice in inclusive education. Finally, the keynote speaker at the conference, Professor Linda Graham, promoted “policy oriented research as intellectual activism” (Graham, 2013), which emphasized the role of researchers in exposing the marginalizing and exclusionary consequences of educational practices. The results of research, she argued, need dissemination beyond academic texts to influence policies and budgetary allocations and, ultimately, achieve inclusion for all students.

Systemwide Implementation and Evaluation

The final conference concern was with systemic aspects of the implementation of inclusive education. Here, presenters were less concerned with inclusive education at the micro level of the student in the classroom than with the identification of systemic enablers and constraints. They offered a broad sweep of their country’s policies regarding aspects of inclusive education and suggested predictors of success or failure of the inclusive endeavor. In Zimbabwe, disability and inclusion awareness campaigns were identified as an important precursor of the implementation of inclusive education (Chataika & Chakuchichi, 2013). In South Africa, presenters expressed concern about the paradoxical role of special education within inclusive education, systemic legacies of racism, and the challenges of implementation on the ground (Gumede & Mdikana, 2013; Makoelle, 2013). A potential lever for inclusion in South Africa is the National Strategy for Screening, Identification, Assessment, and Support (Department of Basic Education, 2008), which promises an assessment protocol that departs from a medical/deficit categorization of students (Schoeman, 2013). In Lesotho, multiple systemic impediments to the implementation of inclusive education were acknowledged (Mosia, 2013), including inadequate knowledge about inclusive education and a paucity of resources. In each of these contexts, the constraints posed by the developing state with a multitude of demands on the treasury threaten the entrenchment of inclusion in education.

Reflections and Conclusions

Wider applicability of the concerns identified in this conference cannot be claimed. The conference offered a relatively small number of papers (although the delegate contingent was much larger), and these can, by no stretch of the imagination, be deemed representative of all global or even local concerns regarding inclusive education. Fully cognizant of this, one can draw three conclusions from the analysis of conference abstracts. The first is that broad concerns and challenges in the field are global. As has been shown, none of the concerns is unique to one country, and few are the exclusive prerequisite of either developing or developed countries. This is important to encourage international conversations and collaborations with a view to learning from each other and strengthening inclusive education in the respective contexts. The second is that local realities do need to be acknowledged in cross-contextual conversations, and the global research community needs to be concerned with generating knowledge that is at a level of sufficient abstraction for it to be recruitable across contexts but draw on the enactment of practice in particular contexts. Finally, in a desire to be respectful of each other’s contexts, critique should not be avoided. To those immersed in a particular context, the “way we do things” seems the natural order, and the perspective of the outsider who asks the difficult questions and compels revision of policies and practices should be embraced. International conferences offer a valuable space to engage with these issues and provide the impetus toward making education more inclusive in our respective countries.