Contemporary education occupies a moment of notable inconsistency, wherein universally accepted human rights to be included and inclusive are pitted against modern, standardisable programmes of clock time for both students and teachers. Liquid stability, social isolation and the erosion of privacy challenge theories and practises of inclusion in education, which are at risk of failure for being understood as excessively time consuming (Thomas & Whitburn, 2018). Such uncertainty plays out in the tentative actions of time-pressured educators who are performance driven, striving towards the promise of capacity and fidelity that evades them. As schools engage biometric tracking, notions of building a relational understanding of the needs of students before them dissipate. Simultaneously, students enter uncertain futures, characterised by less protection and more disruption than any generation that has come before them. 

In this presentation we explore some of these ruptures, drawing on current debates in inclusive education scholarship and practice about rights to be educated, within what Beck, Bonss and Lau (2003) call reflexive modernisation, and to which Adam (2003) threads the temporal. Our concern is at once the perceived elevated risks to education brought about by instituting inclusivity to schooling and teacher education programs, and as well the notions of time that operate as decisive forces in the lives of educators.Social values of democracy have been re-articulated, subordinated to dominant economic concerns whose contradictions can no longer be ignored (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Consequently, human rights are not distributed equally to all citizens. 

Initially we explore modernization and the emergence of human rights, concentrating briefly on the role these have played in instituting inclusive education. In the second we turn to perceptions of risk brought about through inclusive developments in reflexive modernisation, and the rift that subsequently emerges between rights and action through algorithmic discourses which remove humanity from the most human of endeavours, teaching. 

Drawing from the work of Adam (2003) we explore how industrial modernity is a key influence on time in education. In the presentation we consider the transformation of modernity and how teachers are positioned as surveillance workers—members of a workplace who are shaped by differential power (educational policy, school culture, community expectations), who through their actions support exclusionary positions of power when they come to negotiate identities that mirror local organisational needs. The mediation of teachers’ professional identities are mutually subject to and contribute towards a discourse of risk. Surveillance and risk abstract relationalities that are essential to realising inclusive practices that might be understood as reflexive, messy and problematic, to a counterpoint of fundamentals that valorise testing, as Mockler offers ‘privileges that which is simple and easy to measure over the more complex and untidy dimensions’ {Mockler, 2011 #3007@518}. The professional identity of teachers has shifted when pedagogy becomes performative and illustrative of a culture of compliance. Teachers become at fault for any failings, whilst the organisation (of the school) is exonerated. To this end we contrast the narratives of educators wherein schooling creates a false binary of the individual (teacher) as suspect and fallible against the organisation as infallible. This is supported by data with training teachers through a purposefully student first model, which diffracts time and valorises relationality.

We conclude that schooling practices are fragmented and complex social dynamics, which are given over to simple solutions. This work demonstrates that when a dominant agenda of compliance is enforced by regimes based on fear of risk reprisal, inclusion is promised but rendered invisible.

Adam, B. (2003). Reflexive modernization temporalized. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(2), 59-78. Beck, U., Bonss, W., & Lau, C. (2003). The theory of reflexive modernization: Problematic, hypotheses and research programme. Theory, culture & society, 20(2), 1-33. Mockler, N. (2011). Beyond ‘what works’: Understanding teacher identity as a practical and political tool. Teachers and Teaching, 17(5), 517-528. Rizvi, F., & Lingard, B. (2010). Globalizing education policy. London: Routledge.