Research on teachers’ attitudes on the education of disabled students is prolific and explores two usually overlapping areas, teachers’ attitudes towards disability and attitudes towards the mode of education for these students. Considering the continuous prominence of this research, the limited critique of its purpose, focus and methods within the field is puzzling and worth exploring. In the field there is almost no engagement with Slee’s (2011) position that ‘most of this work is of questionable value and much of it is very predictable in design, creation and findings’ (p. 49) since it defines disability as the problem and the disabled person as the object of attitudes with a hierarchical pathologising depending on the category and severity of impairment, and it decouples attitudes conceptually from the actual contexts where they occur. This critique moves beyond the need for ‘better’ research to question its benefit. 

This is more important in a time of increased pushback to the rights, protections, participation, and even survival of disabled people. The layers of this pushback are structural, such as policy reversal, funding cuts, increased bureaucratic processes, as well as discursive. At stake here are the minds, hearts and ultimately the behaviour of non-disabled people, it is about attitudes. The presentation establishes the starting premise that attitudes are both significant and problematic aiming to challenge the discursive construct of attitudes in the mostly ahistorical and acritical conceptualisation of attitudinal research in inclusive education. The genealogical approach allows to interrogate the apparent consistency and linearity of attitudinal research on inclusion by foregrounding alternative perspectives. It does that by examining the contextual circumstances of two seminal texts and locating them within their historical context.

The first text is the early study by Norris Haring, George G. Stern and William Cruickshank, Attitudes of educators toward exceptional children, published as a monograph in 1958 and reprinted in 1978. This study allows to locate the presentation within the historical context that attitudinal research emerged in the United States and the historical connectedness between categories of race, class, gender, and disability. The discussion is centred on race at the time of Brown versus Board of Education. The second text is Vic Finkelstein’s Attitudes and Disabled People (1980). Finkelstein, as a co-founder of UPIAS, the Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation, which was foundational in the articulation of the Social Model of Disability in the UK, presents a powerful conceptual and methodological critique on attitudinal research on disability of the time, including the vested interests of professionals. The presentation discusses the centrality of vested interests, including the vested interests of researchers, in the field. This historical work is of significance for the field internationally as it allows us to look at the past to explore possibilities for the future. Considering the prominence of attitudinal research, with one third of all reviewed studies in Amor et al.’s (2019) systematic review being attitudinal studies, it is essential to critically engage with it, especially in a time that the rights of disabled people are under attack.

This paper takes a historical lens to attitudinal research on teachers’ attitudes on inclusion using a genealogical approach acknowledging that ‘the search for descent is not the erecting of foundations: on the contrary, it disturbs what was previously considered immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself’ (Foucault, 1977, p. 147). The genealogical approach allows to interrogate the apparent consistency and linearity of attitudinal research on inclusion, of what is researched and why, how is researched and what is found, with the aim to recover subjugated knowledges ‘that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systemisation’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 74). A range of documents were examined including attitudinal research (primary research and reviews) supplemented by historical documents and other relevant literature. The presentation in structured around two texts: one of the first studies (Haring, Stern and Cruickshank, 1958, Attitudes of educators toward exceptional children) and one of the first critiques (Finkelstein, 1980, Attitudes and Disabled People), as two examples of possibilities in the field that were repressed, ignored, and overlooked.

The history of the teacher attitudes research can be traced back to the 1950s and the genealogical approach provides a historical lens to examine the origins of the field, the context that it was established, and the early critiques. It spans periods, countries and types of literature and in doing so the analysis opens possibilities for critiquing the field and considering its future for researchers who are committed to inclusive education in a time of uncertainty.

Amor, A. M., Hagiwara, M., Shogren, K. A., Thompson, J. R., Verdugo, M. Á., Burke, K. M., & Aguayo, V. (2019). International perspectives and trends in research on inclusive education: A systematic review. International journal of inclusive education, 23(12), 1277-1295. Finkelstein, V. (1980). Attitudes and disabled people: issues for discussion, World Rehabilitation Fund. International Exchange of Information in Rehabilitation. World Rehabilitation Fund. Foucault, M. (1977). Language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews. Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (2008). Power/knowledge (pp. 73-79). In S. Seidman, & J.C. Alexander, (Eds.). The New Social Theory Reader (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003060963. Haring, N.G., Stern, G.G., & Cruickshank, W.M. (1958). Attitudes of educators toward exceptional children. Greenwood Press, Publishers. United Nations. (2006). Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and Optional Protocol. Author. United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. (2016). General Comment No. 4, Article 24: Right to Inclusive Education(CRPD/C/GC/4). Author. UPIAS/Disability Alliance. (1976). The Fundamental Principles of Disability. The Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation. London: Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation. Cases Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 349 U.S. 294 (1955) Brown v. Board of Education, 347 U.S. 483 (1954) Brown v. Board of Education, 98 F. Supp. 797, 798 (D. Kan. 1951) Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896)