Ilektra Spandagou

Inclusion: By Choice or by Chance?.

This paper explores the development internationally of the inclusive education perspective. Inclusive education as a late modernity reform project is exemplified in the call for ‘Education for All’. Despite the simplicity of its message, inclusion is highly contestable. We argue in this paper that the key questions raised by the concept of inclusion are not definitional, despite of, or perhaps because of the difficulties of framing a meaningful definition, but are rather questions of practical political power which can only be meaningfully analysed with reference to the wider social relations of our increasingly globalised world. Inclusion is contested within and across educational systems and its implementation is problematic both in the countries of the North and of the South. Some of these contradictions are discussed in this paper, providing an analysis of national and international policy. In the countries of the North, despite the differences in the ways that inclusion is defined, its effectiveness is closely related to managing students by minimising disruption in regular classrooms and by regulating ‘failure’ within the education systems. In the countries of the South, the meaning of inclusive education is situated by post‐colonial social identities and policies for economic development that are frequently generated and financed by international organisations. This paper recognises the contested nature of inclusive education policies and practices in diverse national contexts. It is argued that the meaning of inclusion is significantly framed by different national and international contexts. For this reason the idea of inclusion continues to provide an opportunity in education and society in general, to identify and challenge discrimination and exclusion at an international, national and local level.

Inclusive discourse in Greece: strong voices, weak policies

This paper explores the inclusive discourse in Greece at a period characterized by change in policy and practice. The aim is to discuss critically the distance between the strong voices and weak practices that characterizes the Greek inclusive discourse. The first part focuses on disability and presents the ways that a ‘common sense’ understanding of disability is constructed in the public domain resulting in the de‐politicization of the inclusive discourse. The second part focuses on inclusive education, discussing the contradiction between the rhetoric of inclusive education and the reality of the expansion of special provision for an increasing number of students. It is argued that the fragmentation of the inclusive discourse and the emphasis on common sense assumptions about human and social rights reduce policies about inclusive education to an add‐on, peripheral element of the proposed educational reforms.

Teachers’ Perceptions of the Relationship between Inclusive Education and Distributed Leadership in two Primary Schools in Slovakia and New South Wales (Australia)

Abstract The academic literature on the practice of inclusive education presents diverse and at times contradictory perspectives in how it is connected to practices of distributed leadership. Depending on the approach, on the one hand, inclusive educational practice may enable distributed school leadership, while on the other hand, it may allow for hierarchical management styles if staff members do not implement inclusive practices. This paper explores how school staff members perceive and understand the relationship between practices of inclusive education and distributed leadership in two public primary schools: one in New South Wales (Australia) and one in Slovakia. These two schools were identified by external informants as good practice examples of inclusive education. Using qualitative research methods based on interviews, this paper identifies two main understandings of this relationship. First, although distributed leadership may encourage the goals of inclusive education, it may in some circumstances also hinder their achievement. Second, distributed leadership can be constructed as an indispensable component of inclusive education, and this has implications for how the target groups of inclusive education are conceptualised. This paper also discusses the wider social and political contexts of the two primary schools and how in each case context significantly constrained and shaped understandings and practices of inclusion and distributed leadership in the practice of teachers and principals.

A Long Journey: Disability and Inclusive Education in International Law

This chapter discusses the development of understandings of inclusive education in international policy. It begins with an overview of how disability and the education of students with disability have been addressed in UN Conventions and related documents. This is followed by a discussion of the Article 24: Education of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, which provides the normative content for States Parties to implement inclusive education. The third part of the chapter illustrates the complexities around the implementation of inclusive education with examples from Initial Reports submitted as part of the Convention’s reporting process. In the concluding section, the recent General Comment 4 is presented to demonstrate the practice implications for educational systems and schools.

The Elusive Search for Inclusive Education in a Comparative Study

I write this chapter ten years after I completed my PhD study and almost 16 years since I first started my doctoral studies. In the not so far past of the middle 1990s, the urgency for timely completion was much less than my students and I as a supervisor currently experience.