Session Information
Session 11, Conceptualising Inclusion
Papers
Time:
2005-09-10
11:00-12:30
Room:
Agric. G07
Chair:
Jerry Rosenqvist
Contribution
Background: In Sweden, inclusive education in practice has proved to be a multifaceted and difficult issue often inciting frustration and letdowns. Despite UN declarations, national documents and curricula, giving emphasis to inclusive education, the main answer to deviancy still seems to be some kind of segregated solution. However, there are isolated endeavors to comply with the aspiration to include all children. An interesting question is how professionals in such schools construct the issue and formulate their collective competence for their work. Studying the process of creating sense and meaning in the ordinance to educate all children, entails finding ways to analyze a complex adaptive system of thoughts, talk and discourses. Aim of the paper: The aim of this paper is to present an analysis model to seize the process when school staff in a dialogue creates meaning and sense in inclusive education. The dialogues in question concern situations where school staff together talks about official texts related to the assignment of organizing education where children's different background, different knowledge and presuppositions can be seen as resources rather than problems. Lines of reasoning: Dialogues are taking form in interactive processes. The challenge is to seize these processes in order to get insights and uncover significant dimensions helping us to understand what occurs when governmental ordinances meet practice in school. Interaction develops in relation to the given assignment, educating all children, and to the space of the organizational structure and the given mandate. The texts in a dialogue are formed in complex adaptive systems where all factors change and adjust to each other in an everlasting process. One way to seize the complexity is to regard discourse as an activity or process of continuously shaped and reshaped systems of thoughts to construct meaning and make sense of reality. In my thesis the analysis focuses on discourses as different explanation models and thought systems constructed to make sense and shape meaning in school reality as well as in the mission to educate all children. In the present model the analysis focuses on three dimensions: - the construction of school reality - the construction of inclusive education in a wider social context - presuppositions and conditions for constructing discourses on inclusive education Each one of the dimensions is analyzed from three different points of view closely connected to discourse analysis. First, the dialectical relation between discoursive practice and the forming and interpretation of linguistic expressions, as Fairclough implies, can be seen in the discoursive interaction in the dimensions. Second, discourses become evident in situations of conflicts why the analysis model intends to use a dissensus perspective. Finally the dimensions are investigated from the linguistic significations implicated in them. In this sense the model focuses on hindrances and encouragement of specific discoursive expressions as well as shifts in arguments and normative versus factual terminology. The analysis model will be entirely developed and presented in my PhD thesis.
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