Supervisors info:
Ντεροπούλου-Ντέρου Ευδοξία, Επίκουρη καθηγήτρια, Τμήμα εκπαίδευσης και αγωγής στην προσχολική ηλικία, Εθνικό Καποδιστριακό Πανεπιστήμιο Αθηνών
Summary:
The concept of inclusion undergoes repeated corrosions through the legal, academic, political and educational Discourse. The politics of “creative ambiguity” and confusion at the levels of practice and use of Discourse, creates various questions regarding the ideological constructs, that like “parasites” gather round the concept of inclusion and that keep corroding its “collisional” nature and its historically constructed content.
The questions that emerge concerning inclusion, can be approached through social theories that seek after the answers to the alleged formal and legal ontological and epistemological paradigms. The answers to these questions can also be sought for in the morphology of the educational system and politics, as well as through the “microphysics of authority” (Φουκώ, 1991), as part of the school reality and routine.Τhe “inclusive” education politics legalizes and validates the complex controversies that overrun the educational system, through declarative discourses, through circular and reprobate reforms.
The present research attempt is a qualitative research that employs semi-stuctured interview as a research tool. The sample consists of ten (10) teachers working in general primary education, specialty teachers, as well as additional support teachers. Its primary goal is to investigate the understandings and views of the teachers and the additional support teachers on the matter of the institution of additional support services, and the limits of the inclusive contextualization of the institution, as defined through the legal documents and the educational Discourse, in a critical perspective however, with the goal of delineating a single “truth” and rationale that is formed, kept and reproduced by professions and services, that have been created to consolidate this “truth”. The research questions and sub questions gather round five (5) axes of views, interpretative approaches, experiences, practices and recommendations of the teachers. The content of these axes is thematically analyzed (Qualitative – Thematical content analysis), with the purpose of reaching conclusions on the conceptual approaches, the significations and practices of teachers concerning inclusive education, disability, diversity, the inclusive education policies, as well as the approaches on differentiated pedagogy, the teaching methods and styles of cooperation with all the members of the educational community, including the family.
The teachers through the interviews seem to abide to a medical approach on inclusive education, connecting tightly inclusive education to special education. On a declarational approach of inclusive education, the entire body of Law 3699/2008 is gradually unraveled. In the teachers’ declarations, all the controversies of the Discourse become apparent, in a hunt of politically correct language and linguistic compliance. Through this hunt, the beclouded medical epistemological paradigm is established and the individualistic and charitable approaches of disability as a personal tragedy experienced by the learners and their families come to the surface. The teachers reject the traditional exclusive frameworks of special education, however they accept and “welcome” the partial and fragmentary education of deviating learners’ populations through special educational frameworks in general education. The teachers “include by excluding” (Καραγιάννη, 2004) and “accept” diversity under terms as “reproducers of a normality” (Foucault, 1975), not differentiated but generalized to all the learners’ population, with the authority of the “Norm” defining their views and practices.
Keywords:
Inclusion, Inclusive education, Primary school, Additional support services, Disability, Diversity, Education policies
