The main purpose of the present abstract is to present how life stories helped me as a researcher to discover the non-obvious perspectives of the disabled persons, according to inclusion. The results that I will present are part of my PhD. thesis at the University of Sheffield, concerning the exploration of Special and Inclusive Education Practice in Cyprus. Story telling constitutes one type of qualitative research based on narrative. A ‘life story’, for example, can be gathered for research purposes. Life stories can be written alone or told to others who collaborate in writing (Goodley et al, 2004). Life story research is not a methodological strategy of last resort but frequently the methodological strategy of a choice. (Goodley et al, 2004, p. 173). Thus, the field of “special” education must confront the fact that there is nothing inherently true or correct about its professional knowledge, practices and discourses and so stories of special and inclusive education become important. Today within “special” education the qualitative paradigm is increasingly viewed as worthy and there is increasingly willingness for researchers to provide story based data (e.g., Clough, 1998). This is a complex task: Life story research can be seen as an arena in which struggles take place over values, applications and change. Our own habits and patterns of thinking and behaving as life story researchers need to be examined all the time ( Goodley et al, 2004, p. 107). By choosing to use story based research the danger of leaving out the voices of disabled children and young people will be minimized. According to French and Swain (2000): much of the research on disability, including disabled children, has ignored the views and experiences of disabled people themselves (p.18). In relation to this Robinson and Stalker (1998), mentioned also: while there is a well established body of knowledge about the way parents experience life with a disabled child, children’s own accounts of their lives are largely missing, their voices have not been heard (p.7.)

II knew from the beginning that it would be very tricky to claim any conventional ‘validity’ for these stories and that I needed to have lot of courage to use such a technique in my work. On the other hand though I knew those students very well and I have such a close relationship with them and their families that I was sure that if they wanted their stories to be learned by others, I should find a way to tell them in order to inform the field and try to do our best for the future of it. When I have presented the stories of disabled students they are wholly stories constructed through my eyes – and so they are composite stories based on amalgamated impressions intertwining the young person’s story and mine too.

This paper will present all the feelings, anxieties and worries I had faced in order to write those stories. There were various purposes for writing the stories: to raise the voices of three disabled students who do not have the ability to communicate in a verbal way, to reveal the ways inclusion had been applied and finally to give suggestions for further improvement. Those stories provided me with knowledge I did not have in the past. The revealed to me unknown perspectives of the term inclusion.