This paper seeks to present a research process that assembled different perspectives on inclusive education from a range of stakeholders including parents, children, teachers, teaching assistants, educational psychologists, social workers, health practitioners and members of the community and voluntary sector. The study was initiated with a key question ‘how different stakeholders perceived their roles and responsibilities in relation to inclusive school communities.
The theoretical framework that was being tested builds on the validity of extended schools and children’s centres developed during the new Labour government in Uk (1997-2009). In these contexts professionals and community members who contribute to the healthy development, well-being and education of all children and young people are drawn together to enable every young learner to thrive and flourish within an inclusive school community. Such an educational context may be able to provide for all children and develop an ethos of respect for difference, equality, social justice, and social cohesion.
Azzopardi (2008:11) argues that ‘inclusive education’ needs to be viewed as a process located within the culture, policies and practices of a whole school and community.’ He therefore suggests that research into it should draw on an ‘assortment of contexts: school, family, disabled and parent activists, policy-makers, service providers and trade unionists’. This research aims to draw on a similar breadth of perspectives. Slee (2011:104) too endorses the importance of aiming for such an emancipatory worldview based in the analysis of the complex social factors in schools ‘that more or less disable or enable children’. The framework draws on emancipatory disability studies and the social model of disability (Oliver 1996, Barnes 2002); on dialogue as a fundamental way of human engagement (Sidorkin 1999, Bakhtin 1981)and on Vygotsky and Freire 1971, 2009 in relation to inclusive pedagogy.
