This paper explores dilemmas in the enactment of inclusive education, based on the findings from an interview study with Swedish subject teachers and special educators.

Inclusive education is an educational ideal that emphasizes access, participation and achievement in education for all students, as well as a general acceptance for diversity. Although inclusive education has been a global policy goal since the signing of the Salamanca Statement in 1994, it has shown to be difficult to implement in practice. In this regard, researchers have pointed towards some tensions within the concept. For example, such tensions concern whether or not inclusive education presupposes identification of certain students that should be excluded, and to what degree and how teaching should be differentiated in order to meet the needs of all students.

Several researchers have attempted to account for such complexities by studying dilemmas that schools and teachers face in their everyday work. Dilemmas are generally understood as challenges that cannot be completely conquered due to their inherent conflicts of principles, values or goals. Thus, they can only be temporarily resolved, which require prioritizations where all available options carry negative consequences. Moreover, responses to dilemmas are always made in relation to contextual constraints, policy demands and pressure from other local actors. Thus, national or local policies and prioritizations can constrain school actors’ room for action. In this way, dilemmas that have been resolved on higher levels might remain implicit to practitioners.

While much conceptual and empirical research have studied dilemmas in schools, it has been argued that resolutions to dilemmas need to be further understood in relation to constraints imposed by neoliberal standards policies that has increasingly come to characterize education policy and school practices. For example, researchers have argued that the focus on meeting academic performance targets classifies failing students as deviant and in need of special educational support, and that standards policies transform inclusive education into a matter of access to mainstream classrooms and provision of support for reaching standardized performance targets. However, more research is needed on how this conflict take shape in practice, and how it frames dilemmas and their resolutions in schools. 

In this paper, this is pursued through an interview study with Swedish subject teachers and special educators. Sweden has traditionally been regarded as an inclusive educational system, but has lost ground in international comparisons of equity in school systems, which can be seen in the light of a rapid movement towards marketization and a focus on educational standards in the last decades. Thus, Sweden is an interesting case for studying the confrontation between inclusive and neoliberal ideals.   

In the paper, the theory on policy enactment by Stephen Ball with colleagues is used to analyze resolutions to dilemmas as taking place on an arena where local school actors interpret, negotiate and translate conflicting policy demands. In particular, the analysis of the interviews makes use of the concepts interpretations and translations, which highlight differences between actors' capabilities and inclinations to enact different policies, and thus resolve dilemmas, in different ways. Moreover, the notions of imperative and exhortative policies are used to illustrate how different kinds of policy entail different conditions for resolving dilemmas. By relating theoretical notions of policy enactment and dilemmas to each other in the analysis, the paper aims to provide further insights into how different school actors perceive dilemmas, and how they engage in the work of resolving them. In particular, the paper has the ambition to contribute with knowledge on how school professionals’ perceptions and resolutions can be shaped by conflicting policy demands, their school contexts, and their positions in the local school organization.

The empirical material in the current study was collected between October 2021 and March 2022, and consists of interviews with eight subject teachers and four special educators at three lower secondary schools in two Swedish municipalities. The interviews used open-ended questions to explore the respondents’ experiences of teaching students with different needs and how this work is organized at their schools. By offering the respondents a space to talk about these issues, the interviews aimed to provide insights into how dilemmas related to inclusive education take shape in the school context and how local school actors resolve them. This entailed an interest in how the respondents explicitly described dilemmas that they face in their everyday work, but also in tensions that reveal implicit dilemmas, for example such that have already been resolved by other school actors. The interviews were analyzed by thematic analysis consisting of the following steps: 1. Becoming familiarized with the data: The analysis of each interview started with a thorough reading of the interview transcript and a summarization of the preliminary interpretations of meanings and patterns in the interview. 2. Initial coding: In this phase, text extracts were coded into different categories in order to organize the data into meaningful groups. These categories reflected topics that emerged in the interviews, for example, communication between school actors, local routines and regulations, responsibilities of different actors, classroom priorities, and contextual factors. 3. Searching for dilemmas: The focus was then directed towards the respondents’ orientations towards conflicts of values, principles or goals that they face in their everyday work. This step was informed by previous theoretical and empirical research on dilemmas, and involved a responsiveness to other tensions and conflicts or aspects described by the respondents as problematic or difficult in order to identify new or implicit dilemmas. 4. Reviewing and refining: This phase included an examination of whether the candidate dilemmas that had been identified were coherent and distinct and whether they had sufficient support in the data set as a whole. In this respect, dilemmas were considered to be sufficiently supported if they were explicitly or implicitly described by respondents in all three schools. 5. Final analysis: In this step, the theory on policy enactment were used to analyze how different actors engage in the work of resolving dilemmas, and how their responses are shaped by context, external demands, and their position in the local school organization.

Four different dilemmas were identified in the analysis: - Special vs. general education settings - External control vs. professional freedom - Curricular demands vs. students needs - Individual vs. group The findings suggest that actors with different roles and positions in the local school organization might perceive and respond to different dilemmas in different ways. The interviewed special educators more frequently engaged in strategic discussions about dilemmas related to the placement of students and formalizations of teachers’ work with students in need of support, thus positioning themselves as actors with some authority in the work of resolving these dilemmas, whereas most subject teachers talked about resolutions to these dilemmas as local policies and institutionalized procedures. The other two dilemmas were resolved by teachers within the frames of classroom practice. Altogether, the respondents’ descriptions of their resolutions to dilemmas illustrated a multitude of different responses, where they engaged in both interpretations and translations while enforcing, valuating, ignoring and complying with policy. While contextual factors such as large class sizes were highlighted by several respondents as constraining their ways of responding to dilemmas, pressure from standards policies to focus on academic targets of performance were more implicitly mentioned, although it had a clear impact on their work. Although many of the interviewed subject teachers reflected upon constraints imposed by standards policies and consequences of the resolutions to dilemmas that they entailed, they did not tend to question standards policies, but talked about them as given frames for their work. The dominance of standards policies could also be reflected in the absence of dilemmas related to identification of students, since such policies connect the concept of special needs to the attainment of predefined knowledge goals, which might restrain reflections on whether identification of these students is desirable or not.

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