In the research project Approaching Inclusion (AppIn) we investigate how teachers and other educators collaborate and how collaboration has an impact on inclusive school development.

Our starting point is to understand inclusion as a sociological concept – not as an educational or didactic concept – and we thereby shift focus from discussions on teaching practice to the question of how teachers and other educators handle both inclusion and exclusion processes through collaborative processes.

From a sociological point of view, inclusion and exclusion are two interrelated and interdependent processes. In the project, we argue that an unambiguous focus on inclusion ignores the sociological point that all communities need to place limits on what can be included and what must be excluded in order to secure their own existence (Hansen 2012; Hansen and Bjørnsrud 2018; Jönhill 2012). From this point of view, it is not possible to understand the concept of inclusion without its otherness, exclusion, and both inclusion and exclusion processes contribute to limits to diversity in order to ensure the cohesion of the community. Therefore, no social practice could ever be limitless (Hansen 2012; 2016).

The constitution of social order is the result of balancing between individuality and collectivity and on how much diversity a social practice can accommodate before the social structure is experienced as threatened (Latour 2005, Laclau 1996). Thereby, participation is limited and from this perspective teachers and other educators are challenged in their efforts to develop inclusive schools for all (Hansen 2012, 2016, Hansen et al. 2018).

When a community needs to ensure its own cohesion, inclusive education is both about ensuring students’ right to be included and to handle a high degree of diversity and about ensuring students’ ability to participate by supporting the students to learn to be able to participate and not only compensate for their special needs. Following, teachers and other educators need to ensure students’ right to participation and to support students’ ability to participate. Inclusion is therefore a question of both rights and obligation.

Based on these assumptions, we have enquired what makes up the delineation of social practice in a school context focusing on teachers’ and other educators’ contribution to this delineation through their collaboration. Investigating the constitution of a situated social order through collaborative processes in schools makes it possible to identify the social patterns that exclude the differences that would allow the creation of a more inclusive learning environment.

The project runs from January 2016 to March 2020. During six months of fieldwork, we followed six schools and twelve classes (second and eighth grade). First, we observed teachers’ practice for one week in each classroom, using video and field notes, as well as observing the collaboration between teachers and other educators at various kinds of meetings – 72 in total. We also did 27 semi-structured interviews with specific students, teachers and other educators. Audio recordings of meetings as well as interviews are transcribed. Our approach to fieldwork is influenced by ethnomethodology (Goffmann, 1964), grounded theory (Clarke, 2005), symbolic interactionism (Becker, 1998) discourse theory (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) and ANT (Latour 2005). The idea was to open up our fieldwork to all kinds of acting, performances, utterances, negotiations and social aggregates contributing to creating a social order through the delineation of social practice. The idea of openness involved trying to challenge ourselves to be surprised and curious, thereby challenging our implicit perspectives as researchers (Becker 1998). In order to support this process, we used video and audio recordings in the observations. All researchers thereby had access to all data, and data analysis has been a collective process. Furthermore, it has been an ambition that the analysis was sensitive to complexity. In our work with coding and analysing, Adele Clarke’s ‘Situational Analysis’ (2005) inspired us. This method is characterised by both supporting the more inductive-oriented movements in the analysis phase and creating a framework for our joint analysis through the work with maps that visualise key topics in the data material. Following questions guided our mapping of the data: Which goals and interests are performed and negotiated? Who performs and negotiates? What is the focus during the performing and negotiating? How do the professionals perform and negotiate? What are the results of these performances and negotiations in relation to students’ forms of participation? Thus, we have worked with an open coding of our material. For example, we based our coding on maps for each classroom practice, and afterwards we coded each map in relation to the other classroom practices. In this way, we identified common categories across the classrooms and the schools. After we finished coding data from the classrooms, we did the same based on the data from the meetings. Finally, we tried to identify tendencies across the maps and across classroom practices and meeting practices.

The project presents several findings. Firstly, collaboration can be characterized as producing decoration more than transformation, meaning that the practice does not change towards more inclusive education even though the goal of collaboration is to support inclusive school development. Secondly, the way collaborative processes are organized produces missing links between the different sub-practices in the school, represented by teachers, other educators, consultants, leaders etc. Thirdly, and based on our findings, we propose a definition of collaboration, focusing on the importance of negotiations, conflicting positions, transformation and links between the schools’ sub practices: “Collaboration is a praxis where professionals handle and negotiate different understandings of problems and solutions and thereby transform the existing social order” In our presentation at ECER, we present and discuss a collaborative model made with the aim of facilitating transformation of social practice in schools in order to develop inclusive learning environments.

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