The rights of students with dis/ability are addressed by international conventions, federal and State legislation. The Australian State Government of Victoria operates within this legislative and policy context supporting the inclusion and participation of people with dis/ability in the wider community.  Under State legislation, the Department of Education and Training provides its Program for Students with Disabilities which targets funding for government schools providing resources for students presenting with moderate to severe dis/ability. At the end of 2013, the Government’s Education and Training Committee handed down its report into the provision of music education in schools. The report acknowledged little substantive improvement had been recorded in the quality and provision of music education in Victoria over the preceding twenty years and that students with dis/abilities face greater challenges accessing quality music education programs.

Paradoxes present in all forms of education and our understanding of these are affected by the frames we employ to make sense of unfolding events. This paper scrutinises the role theory plays in processes of, and struggles around, governance and regulation in inclusive education. In particular, the provision of music education for students with dis/abilities. The discussion uses ontological constructionism (Corcoran, 2017) to provide a way of thinking with theory in relation to inclusive education reform. To date, exciting and bold movements in contemporary social research, like post-positivist or new materialist work (Lather, 2007; St. Pierre, Jackson & Mazzei, 2016), has struggled to find adequate interdisciplinary support from psychological theory. In searching for potential collaborators, differences between cross-disciplinary forms of constructionism are not sufficiently acknowledged and at its most disorienting, psychological theoretical distinctions between forms of constructionism and constructivism are conflated, clearing the way for understandable critiques of psychology’s tendencies to essentialism and reductionism. This study connects ontological constructionism with new materialism to claim the arts in education for all.           

Corcoran, T. (2017). Ontological constructionism. In A. Williams, T. Billington, D. Goodley & T. Corcoran (Eds.) Critical educational psychology (pp. 26-33). London: Wiley Blackwell. Lather, P. (2007). Getting lost: Feminist efforts toward a double(d) science. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. St. Pierre, E.A., Jackson, A.Y., & Mazzei, L.A. (2016). New empiricisms and new materialisms: conditions for new inquiry. Cultural studies<=> Critical methodologies, 16(2), 1-12.