The central research question asks how the policy of the LCA programme is being lived out in practice today and whether this lived experience continues to marry with the original aims and rationale upon which the programme was conceived and developed. This study will examine the LCA programme from the perspective of those who live the programme, namely students and teachers, as well as from the perspective of policy makers and school leaders. The study will place these voices at the heart of the analysis. The discursive, spatial and relational discourses explored in this study in relation to the recognition and valuing of difference in education is pertinent not only in an Irish context but also in a European and international context.

This research is situated within the wider field of the sociology of education and employs a critical emancipatory perspective, as informed by a Foucauldian critical approach to analysis. It was informed by a number of theoretical commitments shaped by a critical theory perspective and which underpin the conceptual and contextual framework of this study. This approach changes the focus from the perceived deficits of students in order to focus on the practices and discourses within schools and the ways in which these affect students’ experiences and their ability to voice these experiences. The voices of students are foregrounded in this study and as such there is a refocusing of analysis from student deficits to student voice. In its commitment to an emancipatory approach that centred on student voice, recognition, and lived experiences, I was keen to locate thinkers who could enable an exploration of power, dialogue and affect, hence the choice of Michel Foucault, Paulo Freire and Anna Hickey Moody as key theoretical interlocutors. Foucault’s theories of discourse, power/knowledge, the micro-physics of power, and heterotopias help us in understanding the lived everyday experiences of students. However, while Foucault offers us much, he does not deal specifically with the critical nature of pedagogy nor the affective or emotional aspects of lived experiences so his work is brought into conversation with Freire’s work on critical pedagogy and Anna Hickey-Moody’s work on affective pedagogy. Foucault’s concept of the insurrection of subjugated knowledges helps to foreground the voices of students as the starting point in a politics of possibility, with the works of Freire and Hickey-Moody further developing this in possibility to pedagogy in practice, in particular the critical and affective possibilities of pedagogy. The combination of this theoretical framework and the methodological commitments to voice, lived experience, and recognition, as I will outline below, allowed for a nuanced examination of the Leaving Certificate Applied programme. This brings wider issues of inclusive education to the fore such as the emotional aspects of inclusion, the spaces students occupy, the embodied experience of policies, and the highly contextualised nature of schools, as well as the complexity of policy enactment.

Rather than seeking demystified insights that I could use in order to ‘emancipate’ LCA students, I aimed instead to open up a space where these students could be heard and make possible a new way of seeing or doing things and the concepts offered by the thinkers utilized in this study offered a conceptual language for this. The way things are is only one, limited possibility. As Foucault puts it, ‘it is seeking to give a new impetus…to the undefined works of freedom’ (Rabinow, 1984b)

A choice was made to mobilise a mixed-methods approach, utilising an arts-based methodology. The adoption of such an approach aimed to open up a space for listening to the voices of participants, in particular the students, as well as highlighting the complexity of policy enactment and the contextualised nature of schools. The theoretical and methodological framework of this study are closely interwoven and are informed by the work of Foucault, Freire, and Hickey-Moody. This critical emancipatory framework enabled an exploration of schools as sites of contestation, resistance, and possibility, where identity is not something that is static but in a constant process of deconstruction and reconstruction. The methodological design of the study aimed not only to allow for the exploration of voice, it also allowed for these voices to be expressed in different ways. This methodology was a means of highlighting and effecting the recognition of difference. This mixed method design involved both desk-based research and field research. The field research employed a case-study approach and involved four participating schools in the North-West region. The field research in schools took place over a ten-month period; investigating students, teachers, coordinators, and principals’ perceptions and lived experiences of the Leaving Certificate Applied programme as part of a collective case study, the case study being the LCA curriculum itself. The research took place in phases, this is in keeping with Dewey, who believed that each ‘phase’ of inquiry had the potential for clarifying experiences and directing the inquiry (Dewey, 1938). Phase 1: A review of the literature and gathering of quantitative data. Phase 2: Sampling and Information Session Phase 3: Student Interviews (Phase 4: Student Workshop – Part One: Utilising Photovoice Groupwork (October 2018) Phase 5: Teacher/Coordinator/Principal Interviews Phase 6: Student Workshop 2Utilising Photovoice and Narrative Inquiry Phase 7: Teacher Focus Group –Practice Model Phase 8: High Profile Interviews Phase 9: Debrief session with students and teacher/coordinators. Phase 10 Thematic Analysis

This study offered a spatial, discursive, and relational analysis of feelings of inclusion and inclusive/exclusive practices within schools from the perspective of Leaving Certificate Applied students. This involved examining the embodiment of policy and the discursive, spatial, and relational encounters of such an embodiment. I argue that these encounters are emotional and, as such, inclusion itself needs to be understood as an emotional endeavour. This study makes a valuable contribution the literature on diversity, inclusion and education. The study highlights the importance of a spatial discourse and the emotions involved in the materiality and contextualised nature of policy implementation and the resultant feelings of inclusion or exclusion. This study aims to contribute to the wider field of education and to how inclusion is conceptualised in schools not just in Ireland but internationally. The emphasis placed on differentiation in discourse relating to inclusive education can at times be seen as an effort at ‘normalisation’ rather than one accepting of difference. In a Deleuzian vein, this study values different voices precisely because they are different. An effort was made to undo silences and to offer alternative perspectives and interpretations of inclusion that focused on the feeling of inclusion and the opportunities for real participation in school life. Listening to silences and being sensitive to contextual practices of discursive and spatial exclusions enabled a movement of freedom from hegemonic discourses and subjective constructions and opened up some possibilities to develop an alternative discourse of inclusive practices within education that look at inclusion with fresh eyes. I do not contend that inclusion is simple or easily achieved; inclusion is complicated and necessitates a certain messiness where voices are held in tension and ambiguities are welcomed and explored. However, I argue that how we conceptualise inclusion affects how it is lived out in practice.

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