The new educational policy situation in Denmark, where legislation requires that more children with special needs are included in ordinary learning environments, and where a new school reform - which came into force in August 2014 and which aims to support the development of an inclusive and more flexible school - challenge teachers and schools in general to transform the daily practices. A great deal is already known about the characteristics of effective inclusive schools (e.g. Ainscow, Booth & Dyson 2006; Farrell 2001; 2002; Dyson, Howes and Roberts 2002), and as well about inclusive learning communities (Egelund &Tetler 2009; Florian 2005; Westwood 2005; Hansen et al. 2014). But still it is a great challenge to achieve inclusion in practice (e.g. Farrell 2001, 2002).

On this background the objective of this project is to shift the scientific focus in educational research from a focus on educational, didactic practices and organizations to a focus on the importance of the constitution of communities through inclusion and exclusion processes. An understanding of inclusion and exclusion processes as the constitutive mechanism of communities is well known in social science (e.g. Laclau 1996, Luhmann 2002, Bourdieu 1997), but it’s underexposed in educational research related to inclusion (e.g. Hansen 2009, 2012, Edwards 2009).

Thus the project takes its starting point questioning the traditional distinction between general education and special education in ordinary schools by claiming that this distinction reduces the issue of inclusion to be a question of how different forms of educational, pedagogical and didactic knowledge and skills can be organized, and how professionals can collaborate in new ways so it becomes educationally possible to handle increased diversity in learning communities (Hansen et al. 2014). Instead, the aim is to examine the possibilities of transcending this distinction in order to develop and articulate a new approach, both theoretically and in practice, that takes its starting point in observing inclusion as a social practice that constitutes itself through both inclusion and exclusion processes (Laclau 1996; Luhmann 2002; Hansen 2009, 2012). A social practice understood as a practice producing and reproducing norms, values, rules, routines and identities through social processes, interactions, relationships and artefacts which lead to a specific social order (Lave & Wenger 2003, Latour 2005). Following, the question is not how to develop inclusive learning environments by eliminating exclusion through new ways of organizing and combining different forms of educational knowledge and skills (Booth & Ainscow 2004). Instead the question is how to handle both inclusion and exclusion processes in the task of ensuring the learning and development of all pupils within a social practice.

On this background this project examines how dilemmas related to both inclusion and exclusion processes unfold in different kinds of professional practices and cross-professional practices in order to develop new strategies, a new knowledge base and a new scientific basis for further knowledge about and research related to inclusion.

On this basis, the research question of the project is:

How can the understanding of inclusion as a social practice that constitutes itself through both inclusion and exclusion processes help to transcend a theoretical, conceptual and practical distinction between general educational and special education with the aim of articulating and developing a new theoretical approach in relation to inclusion?

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