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European Educational |
ISSN 1474-9041 |
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Volume 2 Number 2 2003 |
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Other issues available | Journal home page | Publisher home page |
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CONTENTS [click on author's name for abstract and full text] |
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THEME Christer Brusling & Birgit
Pepin. Introduction. Inclusion in Schools: who is
in need of what?, pages 197‑202
Graham Badley. The
Crisis in Educational Research: a pragmatic approach, pages 295‑308
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Introduction: Inclusion in Schools: who is in need of what? |
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The history of schooling of children with special needs has been described as going from neglect early in the twentieth century to segregation based on individual needs in the 1920s–1960s to integration in the 1960s to the present (Casey, 1994). This picture could be complemented by the current movement towards inclusion in schools, which is responsive to the needs of children as well as to their rights as citizens, and to the needs of all of us to learn to live in a world of differences (Thomas & Loxley, 2001). The global dimension of this movement has been described by Mittler (2000) as connected to places like Jomtien (Thailand) and Salamanca (Spain). In Jomtien, ministers of education and officials from 155 governments met in 1990 and committed their countries to set national targets for the coming decade in five domains: expansion of early childhood care and development activities, including family and community intervention, especially for poor, disadvantaged and disabled children; universal access to, and completion of, primary education (or whatever higher level of education is considered as ‘basic’) by the year 2000; improvement in learning achievement such that an agreed percentage of an appropriate age cohort (e.g. 80 per cent of 14-year-olds) attains or surpasses a defined level of necessary learning achievement; reduction of the adult illiteracy rate to say one half its 1990 level by 2000, with sufficient emphasis on female literacy to reduce the current disparities between male and female literacy rates; and expansion of provisions of basic education and training in other essential skills required by youth and adults, with programme effectiveness assessed in terms of behavioural changes and impacts on health, employment and productivity. (Mittler, 2000, p. 14; the original text can be downloaded in four different languages from: http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/sne/salamanc/index.html) Mittler concluded that although relevant statistics over the past decade show some progress, children do not seem to be a high priority for most governments. The Salamanca conference in 1994 reminded governments of their duty to provide for children with difficulties and disabilities – however they are defined – and discussed the philosophy and practice of inclusion. The conference declared: ‘inclusion and participation are essential to human dignity and to the enjoyment and exercise of human rights’ (UNESCO, 1994). Governments were expected ‘to adopt as a matter of law or policy the principle of inclusive education, enrolling all children in regular schools, unless there are compelling reasons for doing otherwise’. On its website, UNESCO states that ‘concurrently “inclusive education” is a transverse issue which cuts across all education initiatives – from early childhood education to primary education, vocational education, adult education, teacher education and curriculum development – as well as in spheres related to culture and social development’ (http://www.unesco.org/education/educprog/sne/). A guide for teachers in schools has been developed and been used in over 50 countries (UNESCO, 2001). The percentage of pupils seen to have special educational needs varies in the European countries from 1% in Greece, to 18% in Finland (European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education, 2003a). There is, however, a common trend in all countries to move towards the inclusion of these pupils into mainstream schools. As could be expected, there is a high correlation between percentages of pupils in segregated provision and population density of the country. The approaches adopted by different countries can be grouped into three: the one-track approach geared towards inclusion of almost all pupils (Spain, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Sweden, Iceland, Norway and Cyprus); the multi-track approach, which offers a variety of services between the mainstream system and the special needs education system (Denmark, France, Ireland, Luxembourg, Austria, Finland, the United Kingdom, Latvia, Liechtenstein, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia); and the two-track approach, with two distinct systems, one mainstream and one consisting of special schools and special classes (Switzerland and Belgium). The European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education has not only looked into education policies and practices, but also at how special needs education is funded, and in particular at ways of funding that work as positive incentives towards more inclusive practices. Two parameters in funding models are discussed, destination locus (clients, pupils and parents, or schools, mainstream or special) and funding indicators (input, throughput and output). In general, evidence shows inclusive practices to be favoured by decentralised use of funds regionally allocated, adjusted for differences in socio-economic composition. A new report (European Agency for Development in Special Needs Education, 2003b) based on an international literature review provides findings from case studies in 15 European countries and expert visits. It discusses preconditions for and efficient practices to achieve inclusive classrooms. Important preconditions mentioned are teachers’ attitudes, skills, knowledge, approaches, materials and time, the support offered to teachers inside and outside the school [1] and government backing. Efficient practices are analysed in five groups: cooperative teaching; cooperative learning; collaborative problem-solving; heterogeneous grouping; and effective teaching by means of individual educational plans fitted into the normal curriculum. With these European developments in mind, this special issue addresses the theme of inclusion in schools from a number of perspectives. Five papers were selected, ranging from teachers’ negotiation of roles within a reformed school system emphasising inclusion and the construction of self-governing students (Dennis Beach, Sweden) to teachers’ attitudes towards grade retention as a means of dealing with ‘school failure’ (Patrick Bonvin, Switzerland). In ‘From teachers for education change’, Dennis Beach reports on a one-year ethnographic investigation of the 1994 reform of the Swedish upper secondary school and the development of what was termed a new school vision (promoting inclusion by means of team teaching, collaborative planning, student–teacher cooperation and increased professionalism). At the time, schooling was discussed within a neo-liberal market discourse. Beach focuses in particular on the tensions and contradictions inherent in this setting, and how they cause teachers to feel uncertain. While on the one hand, they try hard to adapt to the reform, on the other, they find new ways of upholding the usual differentiation of students into the ‘good’ (academic) ones and the ‘weak’ (vocationally oriented) ones. Beach argues that one of the implications of the reform is that teachers experience little control over their own professional lives. It appears that it does not allow teachers to be rational, autonomous professionals, but rather, disrupts, subverts and disintegrates their professional subjectivity. However, he identifies and describes different kinds of resistances, and concludes by saying, ‘The key to realising the possibilities of social inclusion in education lies thus in constantly questioning new policy rather than passively accepting it’. It is often pointed out that inclusion is a continuous process, not a state discreetly achieved. Alan Dyson, Frances Gallannaugh & Alan Millward report from a three-year study of schools’ attempts to develop more inclusive practices in partnership with teams of researchers. Like Beach, they notice that the discursive context in which this is to be realised is rather hostile. Despite a background of the current preoccupation in the United Kingdom with ‘standards’ and ‘excellence’, teachers, organised in teams, were willing to try out ways of becoming more inclusive. The eight schools taking part in the project developed very different courses of action, some perceived as narrow, some wide ranging. Contrary to Beach’s reference to his teachers’ subverted professional identities, Dyson et al found that this project ‘allowed the teachers to rediscover some of their “professional wisdom” and trust their judgements in taking action that they perceive to be in the best interest of pupils’. There is a paucity of longitudinal studies of students with special education support. However, in Sweden, Ingemar Emanuelsson has followed 8500 students born in 1982 from their third year in the comprehensive school to the age of 19, when they left the upper secondary school. Repeatedly, he collected data such as school marks, national test results, information on special education support given, subject and programme choices made, as well as answers to a questionnaire related to self-concept and school experiences. In his article, he asks if, and how, school careers and development of self-concepts differ between students given special educational support and students without such support. Tentative results are presented. One result is especially relevant to the question put forward in the title of this issue: who is in need of what? Schools and teachers allegedly do not need inclusion; rather, they emerge as agents of differentiation for students independent of student-perceived abilities. To what extent is the Scottish policy of inclusion in schools in the forefront of teachers’ minds at the very beginning of children’s school life? Christine Stephen & Peter Cope have studied the transition from pre-school to primary school through the lens of inclusion. A sample of children previously observed in pre-school took part in the investigation. Data were collected during the children’s first year in school, in particular towards the end of the school year, in addition to retrospective information about the arrangement for transition made in the transitional period. Both teachers and parents were interviewed. Results show that the arrangements for transition were more concerned with conveying school expectations to parents and children than with teachers learning about their new pupils or children’s curricular experiences from pre-school. Accordingly, categories in which pupils were placed by their teachers were the following: ‘ideal pupils’, ‘well-adjusted pupils’, ‘pupils needing time to adapt to the classroom’, and ‘pupils having difficulties in the classroom’, with almost half of the children seen to belong to the last two categories. Using cases, Christine Stephen & Peter Cope argue for the identification, and educational control, of barriers to inclusion, such as cultural and social differences between children and their families, in addition to differences of value systems between pre-school and primary school. Research on grade retention as a practice to raise student achievement levels seems consistently unable to provide evidence to support this practice. Despite this, it is practised in most European school systems. Patrick Bonvin examines how it works within the Swiss context, which places the decision-making on teachers. More than 4000 students and their teachers participated in his study, in which 2.3% of the students were retained in the second grade. Retainees were matched with similarly low-achieving peers who were not retained. Bonvin shows that teachers’ attitudes towards the efficiency of retention are equally divided between those in favour and those against. Teachers’ decisions to retain increased with more positive attitudes towards the efficiency of retention, as well as with their underestimation of student maturity and intelligence. Perhaps more importantly, Bonvin concludes, ‘Teachers who accept responsibility for school success and failures, as well as teachers who recognise the effects of the system’s selectivity or structure, seem to hold more negative attitudes towards retention’. The research highlighted in this EERJ special issue illuminates cases and contexts of an emerging borderless space of European educational research, that of the conditions for and practice of a shared educational policy – inclusion in schools. Note [1] The role of resource centres and support services is reviewed by the EU Commission HELIOS II in Warwick et al (1997). References Casey, K. (1994) Teaching Children with Special Needs. Wentworth
Falls, Australia: Social Science Press.
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From Teachers for Education Change |
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This article concerns issues connected to social inclusion and exclusion in Swedish upper secondary education in the late 1990s, after the 1994 curriculum reform. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork that was completed in 2000 and that appropriated participant observation and interview methods in data production. Extensive comments from teachers and headteachers on strategies and ideas about how to work within the context of the reform, with respect particularly to expressed aims of providing an education of good and comparable quality for all students and opening up higher education to groups who were previously excluded from it, figure strongly in the article. The intention was to discover what the people working within schools felt about their working experiences with respect to social inclusion and to understand what stands in the way of the realisation of social inclusion at present. The article indicates that two competing regimes of truth currently operate on what counts as valid teacher work but also that a creative subject position for all education participants is important in projects of inclusion. |
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Making Space in the Standards Agenda: developing inclusive practices in schools |
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In spite of the focus on inclusive education in recent years, there is a relative dearth of studies which explore the complexities of the move towards greater inclusion. This article seeks to redress this situation by reporting some interim findings from a three-year study of schools’ attempts to develop more inclusive practices, involving teams of researchers from three higher education institutions working in partnership with 25 schools, in three local education authorities. The development took place within a national policy environment which focused heavily on the issue of ‘standards’ narrowly defined. This article reports the way that this context helped to form schools’ responses to inclusion and the ambiguities in these responses. It argues, however, that the view of schools’ actions as entirely determined by this external agenda is as erroneous as the image of them battling heroically against it in the name of inclusive values. Rather, to a greater or lesser extent, schools tried or were impelled to find spaces within the ‘standards agenda’ where different values and priorities could be realised. The article outlines some of the factors which made this process more or less likely to occur and offers an important new way of thinking about the development of inclusive education. |
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Differentiation, Special Education and Equality: a longitudinal study of self-concepts and school careers of students in difficulties and with or without special education support experiences |
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The main aims of the article are to analyse how school and learning careers of students with special education support during their compulsory schooling differ from those judged not in need of such support. Choice of study programmes, success in upper secondary schooling, and schools’ grading of learning in compulsory school are focused upon. Patterns of post-secondary school careers are of special interest. Determined needs of special support are related to individual student characteristics as well as teaching needs of differentiation and educational demands. The database used is from approximately 8000 Swedish students, born in 1982 and followed from school start-up through post-secondary school to the age of 19. Allocation of special education resources is found more clearly related to school needs of differentiation than to individual student characteristics. The amount and kind of special education support are also related to self-confidence and students’ choice of and success in post-secondary school programmes. Conclusively, most of an individual student’s education career possibilities are determined early, often in the compulsory school. Such patterns are related to the overruling aim of inclusive education in ‘a school for all’. More proactive roles for support teachers are discussed. |
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An Inclusive Perspective on Transition to Primary School |
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Despite a commitment to inclusion and equality in the national priorities for school education in Scotland, the experience of children as they move from pre-school to primary school falls short of being an inclusive experience for all, and some children are at risk of becoming disengaged from education at the beginning of their school career. In this article, the process of transition to school is examined through the ‘lens’ of inclusion. The data comes from a study of the experience of 27 children during their first year in school. It was clear that teachers saw transition to school as a one-way process in which children had to ‘fit in’ to school, and did not see it as their task to respond to the diversity of children’s preferences, previous experiences or background. It is argued that the teachers’ approach is akin to adopting a medical or individual model of inclusion (locating the difficulties in the child) rather than a social model that looks for the source of difficulties in the mismatch between the environment and the child’s needs. Adopting a social model allows for barriers to inclusion at the beginning of primary school to be identified and some of the barriers that children experience are explored, with illustrations from the data. |
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The Role of Teacher Attitudes and Judgement in Decision-making: the case of grade retention |
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ABSTRACT This article presents a study of grade retention as it ‘naturally’ occurs, focusing on teachers’ role in the process leading to retention or promotion for comparable peers. Achievement and IQ were measured prior to the retention decision. A total of 4248 second grade students initially participated in the study, of which 2.3% were retained. Eighty-three retained students were involved in the study, and matched with 83 low-achieving peers. Measures at the teacher’s level included attitude towards the efficiency of retention, towards criteria that ought to be taken into account in the decision and general attribution of children’s difficulties in school. Teacher decision-making shows internal consistency but seems biased when objective criteria are examined. The probability of a child being retained was substantially influenced by teachers’ attitude towards the efficiency of retention as well as by their evaluations of developmental maturity, intellectual potential and their achievement expectancies in language. |
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The Crisis in Educational Research: a pragmatic approach |
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This article first identifies and discusses four main causes of the crisis in educational research. These are summarized as false dualism, false primacy, false certainty and false expectations. False dualism is the apartheid that divides positivist and constructivist researchers with positivists believing in an objective reality and constructivists arguing that reality is a social construction. False primacy is the view that the positivist paradigm has come to dominate research to the detriment of more open, pluralistic and critically reflective approaches. False certainty is the argument that in an increasingly complex and uncertain world researchers have retreated to a reactionary position in order to shore up the dominant paradigm. False expectations is the case that governments, especially, are demanding more evidence-based research in order to provide urgent solutions to educational problems. The second part of the article shows how taking a pragmatic approach may help us resolve some of the difficulties identified. For example pragmatists would not privilege any one paradigm or methodology over another but would argue that both science and constructivism offer different sets of tools for investigating different aspects of the world. This also means that pragmatists see inquiry not as discovering what is really out there but as offering more or less useful descriptions to meet our particular needs and purposes. The third part of the article argues that pragmatism is not an alternative model of research but is more a working point of view or a perspective which is admittedly modest and, so pragmatists think, appropriately fuzzy. What a pragmatic approach to research actually leads to, through reflection, is a kind of useful if temporary equilibrium amongst the community of inquirers. Part of this approach is the rejection of the idea that scientific research can be used with certainty to specify educational practice. All it can provide is possible lines of action. |
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Using Problem-based Learning to Explore Qualitative Research |
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The aim of this article is to discuss an approach to deliver a component on qualitative research on a research methods module in a postgraduate diploma in third level learning and teaching using problem-based learning (PBL). The Diploma in Third Level Learning and Teaching is on offer to a variety of academic staff (lecturers) in higher education at a higher education institute in Ireland, hereafter referred to as participants. The 10-week Research Methods module is one of eight offered on the Postgraduate Diploma, all designed and delivered using the pedagogic strategy of PBL. The entire Postgraduate Diploma is voluntary, and only lecturers who are keen to implement novel pedagogical approaches in their own subject disciplines apply for a place on the modules. However, the key to the participants’ success is by using the principles of PBL to share and discuss valuable information with their colleagues in a variety of other disciplines. The opportunity is being given to enhance group learning in a real-life multidisciplinary learning environment. The objective of this module was to explore qualitative research methods and their distinctive value as an educational research approach. The learning issues established in the PBL group focused on the relationship between the actual real-life authentic problem, the theoretical underpinning and epistemology associated with a qualitative research approach. |
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Teachers’ Understanding of Internationalisation as an Essential Part of Nursing Education in Sweden |
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This study presents a phenomenographic, contextual and content analysis approach used to reveal the understanding 60 university teachers in the Swedish nursing programme had of internationalisation. A 28-page self-administered questionnaire, especially designed for this study, was distributed to university colleges of health sciences in southern, central and northern Sweden. The variations in teachers’ qualitatively different experiences and understanding of internationalisation were first related to two perspectives within their working context – an organisational didactic and an educational didactic – and second, the perspectives were described in five main themes and 10 subthemes. The findings imply the importance of reinforcing an understanding of internationalisation in coherence with the need for a didactical theoretical awareness and thinking of the learning object. |
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