Session Information
04 SES 09B, Teacher's Meaning Making
Paper Session
Time:
2008-09-12
10:30-12:00
Room:
AK2 135
Chair:
Panayota Korilaki
Contribution
Background to Paper:
This paper stems from my doctoral research aiming to understand and re-present cultures of mainstream primary schools in England. This research focused on perspectives of teaching and non-teaching staff with regard to including disabled children, often labelled children with special educational needs, in mainstream settings. Located within the broader field of narrative inquiry, this study aimed to give a voice to key stakeholders who do not ordinarily enter the academic or political arenas in which inclusion is being debated.
Method
The study was conducted in two phases. In the first phase I carried out a survey of teaching and non-teaching staff views with regard to inclusive education for disabled children. 1,723 questionnaires were posted to all teaching and learning support staff in 82 primary schools of one Local Authority. 330 questionnaires were returned from 47 schools (53% of schools, 5-65% of staff in each school). High response and level of engagement are noteworthy: additional information of up to three pages was volunteered, including one poem. I used both quantitative (SPSS) and qualitative (NVivo) software packages to make sense of this data.
Phase two was a qualitative inquiry comprising a close-up exploration of staff views in two mainstream infant schools, selected on the basis of survey responses. Every member of teaching and support staff was invited to an individual 30-minute interview to discuss experiences and thoughts on inclusive education (22 interviews conducted). I also became a regular visitor/helper in one class for at least half a day a week over a five-month period attempting to share, as much as possible, the lived experience of mainstream school staff. Interviews were fully transcribed and coded (NVivo) into categories that emerged from the data. Keen to pursue joint interpretation of findings, I revisited one of the focus schools one year later and discussed research findings during a staff meeting.
Expected Outcomes
Throughout this research project I sought to engage with practitioners' perspectives, in order to understand and re-present these. I proposed employing "kaleidoscopic understanding", appraising a position in relation to the standpoint from which it is being held, in the expectation that this can enhance awareness of apparently conflicting perspectives. In this paper I shall focus on a range of perceptions of the nature and significance of “the needs of the child”, as these emerged from survey and interview data. Through making reference to relevant literature (for example Clough and Barton, 1995; Corbett, 1996; Benjamin, 2005), I shall present a range of personal philosophical standpoints, which seem to give rise to a variety of ways of constructing disability and/or conceptualizing diversity, as these have emerged from survey responses, research interviews and other interactions with mainstream school staff during the course of my doctoral research.
References
Benjamin, S. (2005) 'Valuing diversity': A cliché for the twenty-first century? In Rix, J., Simmons, K., Nind, M. and Sheehy, K. Policy and Power in Inclusive Education: values into practice. London, RoutledgeFalmer Clough, P. and Barton, L. (1995) Making difficulties: Research and the construction of SEN. London, Paul Chapman Publishing Corbett, J. (1996) Bad Mouthing: The Language of Special Needs. London, Falmer Press Sakellariadis, A. (2007) Voices of inclusion: perspectives of mainstream primary school staff on working with disabled children. Bristol; PhD thesis
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