Inclusion

Inclusion represents a philosophical and adminis-trative-curricular practice that places students with special needs in the general educational setting of the school as opposed to placing students in a self-contained classroom. Two central questions in curriculum studies have long been associated with the concept of inclusion: For whom are we designing school curricula and toward what ends? The movement for inclusive schools, classrooms, and practices brings these questions into sharp relief. To understand the inclusive schools movement, it is helpful to first examine the long history of exclusion that characterizes much of the history of schooling. Schools and school curricula have often acted as what Joel Spring calls sorting machines, and nowhere is this more evident than in the exclusion of students with disabilities from formal public schooling or in the subsequent creation of segregated, self-contained special education schools and classrooms. In these special education classrooms, students with similar educational needs are grouped together and educated separately from their typically developing peers.

In the United States, special education was codified by Public Law 94–142 in 1975 and guaranteed every child with a disability access to a free and appropriate public education in the least restrictive environment. Thus, in the 1970s, schools were required to place children with disabilities in the mainstream of public education as long as the student could be successful in these general education settings. This frequently meant that students attended nonacademic subjects with their typically developing peers or were main-streamed for subjects such as art and music. Not satisfied with either separate education or this partial access, parents and people with disabilities began to push for full inclusion of all students with disabilities into general education settings, with special education supports and services provided in the general education setting.

However, the distinction between inclusive schooling and special education is less a question of delivery of services model and more a matter of paradigm and orientation—that is, self-contained special education is based on a medical model of disability that attempts to diagnose the student's underlying problem, produce the correct label for the person (such as learning disabled, autistic, developmentally disabled), and then make an individual plan to remediate the problems. Inclusive schooling, however, emerges from a social model of disability that asserts that the category of normal—as in free from difference—is suspect. Impairment is not denied (e.g., paralysis is real), but its complications stem mostly from socially constructed barriers and attitudes. Disability can give rise to particular subject positions that inform one's identity and perspective. Thus, disability is an aspect of a person's identity, not all encompassing, but one part along with race, ethnicity, class, gender, socioeconomic status, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, and countless other ways people are both different from and the same as one another.

In the United States, inclusive education emerged out of the separate bureaucratic structures of the special education system and has focused primarily on issues of access to the general curriculum (first in terms of physical proximity or placement in general education classrooms and subsequently in terms of meaningful participation in general education curriculum) for students with labeled disabilities. However, a broader, worldwide movement toward inclusive schooling has drawn upon both curriculum studies and disability studies frameworks to inform emerging understandings of inclusive education as necessarily involving active and deliberate transformation of schooling as a whole (in closer alignment with United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's usage of the term). In this broader context, inclusive education seeks to resist and redress the many ways in which students experience marginalization and exclusion in schools. Inclusive teaching and schooling work to actively resist and dismantle the many sociocultural, institutional, bureaucratic, and interpersonal ways in which students and their families experience marginalization and [Page 467]exclusion in schools (e.g., on the basis of race, ethnicity, social class, dis/ability, gender, nationality, sexuality, language, religious [non]affiliation, etc.). This usage of the term inclusive education does not trace its discursive lineage directly from special education; rather, it emerges from a variety of broader policy and reform agendas, including a variety of traditions of anti-bias and democratic curricula.

...