Relationships are a crucial aspect of schooling and are particularly important for student groups that have been traditionally marginalized, such as students who receive special education services. Positive peer relationships are essential for enhancing a sense of belonging and academic and social well-being for all students, particularly those with disabilities. This paper introduces the concept of ‘relational inclusion’ in the context of special and inclusive education and provides an example of how to explore it using a Social Network Analysis (SNA) Toolkit. The authors argue that schools and educators should be more systematic in understanding and promoting relationships, thus developing more inclusive, caring, and just communities.

The paper has two main purposes. First, it aims to introduce and define the term ‘relational inclusion’ in the context of special and inclusive education. Second, it presents a tool that enables educators to directly examine the nature of inclusivity in their classrooms: a Social Network Analysis (SNA) Toolkit. The authors show how teachers can make use of this tool to explore and transform relational inclusivity in their classroom communities, with a particular focus on students with identified disabilities.

Inclusive education or inclusivity has gained international momentum over the last few decades, but there remains much ambiguity in defining the term (Lindsay, 2003). In this paper, the authors use these terms interchangeably to refer to various models of school organization that promote the involvement of students with disabilities in the general education environment. Despite the ambiguities of inclusion, there are a few generally agreed upon tenets of these models. First, that disability is a social creation. Inclusive education stems from the social model of disability, which posits that it is not the differences themselves that cause someone to be disabled, but rather the social institutions around individuals which are unable to accommodate these differences. Second, that educational settings can be designed to meet the needs of all students. Third, that policy agendas should explicitly demand that students have access to equitable learning environments, prioritizing access to general education settings.

One of the main justifications for including students with disabilities in general education settings is for opportunities to engage in social interactions with peers (Mamas et al., 2021). Inclusive pedagogy aims to provide students with opportunities to experience meaningful social interactions and develop peer relationships (Freitag & Dunsmuir, 2015). The success of inclusion is often measured by the extent to which these students are accepted by their mainstream peers (Lewis, 2002). Unfortunately, as Connor and Berman (2019) argue, much of what is happening in educational practice in the name of inclusion has been a technical response to change rather than meaningful integration.

In this paper, the authors argue for the concept of relational inclusion as a fundamental ethical, moral, and pedagogical component of larger conceptualizations of inclusive education. By relational inclusivity, they mean the degree to which all students are connected into the social fabric of their educational environments. This rests on the belief that students’ sense of belonging and community are integral to both their academic and civic success. The authors call it out as a separate term to emphasize that programmatic models of inclusion do not necessarily result in actual inclusion in all senses of the word. Instead, relational inclusion needs to be actively monitored, developed, and maintained to ensure that students, particularly those with disabilities, are able to fully engage and actively participate in their educational contexts.

In this paper, we approach relational inclusion from a social network perspective. From this perspective, inclusion is not examined through proximity and placement, but rather through the relationships which develop (or not) within and across physical spaces such as classrooms. It is our belief that educators should be intentional about cultivating and growing relationships among all students and particularly their students with identified disabilities. According to Kenis and Oerlemans (2007), a social network perspective focuses on the joint activities of, and continual exchanges between, participants in a social system or network. They argue that this perspective is characterized by an interest in the relationship patterns that connect the actors that make up a system’s or a network’s social structure. This paper considers that the social network perspective consists of the relationships among students and how these students are embedded within social networks of interconnected relationships that provide opportunities for, or constraints in, social interactions and other elements in their educational journeys. Practitioners can collect relational social network data through the Toolkit, enabling them to visualize network structures and obtain valuable insights into the social dynamics in their classrooms. Here we provide an example of how the SNA Toolkit can be employed by teachers to examine and support the development relational inclusion within their practice. The Toolkit is an easy-to-use, free, web-based program which facilitates teachers’ use of social network tools such as sociograms in order to advance relational inclusion. It was conceived, designed, and developed to enable educators conduct descriptive SNA, which illustrates the social dynamics within their settings. A noteworthy advantage is that it does not require any knowledge around social network methods as the necessary elements are built into the program. The SNA Toolkit is currently hosted here: www.socionomy.net. As the Toolkit is an online program, teachers can sign up and start using it immediately without any software installation required. The Toolkit enables teachers to register their classroom(s), add their students, create and disseminate a social network survey to their students, collect and subsequently analyze relational data from their classroom. The preprogrammed survey that comes with the Toolkit asks students to identify their friends in the classroom by selecting their names from a list, who they play with during recess or non-academic time, who the seek out for help with academic work and who they talk to if they are having a bad day at school.

Upon completion and submission of the survey by students, the Toolkit generates the results for the classroom. The results include both a classroom report and an individualized report for each student. Educators have immediate access to those results and reports with a click of a button. The results include visual network maps (sociograms) and descriptive SNA measures based on each prompt/question in the survey. After the data has been collected and the reports produced, educators should examine it carefully. Each question’s network map can be customized to highlight information of interest to the school team, with options to change node size, color, and shape based on different measures and variables. In addition to examining the network maps, educators should explore the descriptive SNA measures included in the classroom and student-level reports to help them make a better sense of their students’ social dynamics. For example, the classroom report includes the density for each classroom network. Network density shows the portion of the potential connections in a network that are actual connections, and it is represented by a percentage. In sum, if we acknowledge the fundamental role of students’ social capabilities in academic learning and the importance of the school in developing a democratic society (Jagers et al., 2019), then this calls for new ways of observing students’ social environments in school. Fundamental to discussions of inclusion, therefore, need to go beyond proxy measures of student learning and school climate. Instead, we need explicit and targeted ways to observe, measure, and reflect on the social environment of learning in schools, or what we call relational inclusion. We believe that the Toolkit provides valuable insights to educators looking to develop more systematic, iterative ways of understanding the relational dimension of school and that these insights are an important factor addressing educational inequities.

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