How can we support educators to develop skills and
understandings inclusionally?
Christine Jones and Marie Huxtable
Paper presented at the Annual Conference of the British Educational Research Association, 7 September 2006, Warwick University.
Through this paper we wish to convey to you the ontological and embodied values which give meaning to our lives; the passion we have for our work and the commitment we feel to working inclusionally with each other, our colleagues in the authority, other professionals and schools. We believe that as members of the Inclusion Support Service our lived and living values of inclusionality are brought into all aspects of our work; the way that we relate to each other, and with other educators with whom we work, as well as forming the living standards of judgement that we use to account to ourselves and others for our educational influences in our own learning, the learning of others and in the learning of social formations.
We want to share this chapter of our journey that answers our question, ‘How can we support educators to develop skills and understandings inclusionally?’, in a way that shows you what we see and what we feel. We did not know what was ahead of us: we were sometimes surprised by what we found; it is a journey that takes us to places we did not know existed, and we wish to communicate the excitement as well as the intellectual rigour we are seeking to develop. The way we are going to do this is to outline the context in which we are working and then to focus on what we are doing, how we are doing it and the influence we are having with teachers in a workshop on creativity and finally show you how these values are expressed beyond us as our living, inclusional standards of judgement. In doing this we see ourselves contributing to the new epistemology called for by Schon (1995).
The representation of evidence in this
paper is multimedia. We have become increasingly concerned about the way the
form of evidence drives practice; put bluntly, ‘you get what you look for’. We
are looking to find forms of evidence that will support us in developing our
practice beyond the confines of ‘checklists’, ‘bullet points’ and the
inappropriate use of statistics. These traditional forms of evidence do not serve
to communicate progress fully in a dynamic sense even in the apparently
straightforward intellectual domains, let alone in the complex world of human
educational endeavour where the cognitive, affective and physical domains are
recognised to be inextricably interwoven.
We take Whitehead and McNiff’s point:
“Our values need to be seen as in lived relation with others. For them to make sense, the values themselves need to be understood as real-life practices, not as abstract concepts.”
(Whitehead
and McNiff, 2006, p.58)
and Sinclair’s
“... that
pedagogy works at viseral and sensual levels, as well as intellectual and
imaginative, activating appetites and desire.”
(Sinclair, 2005, p.91)
Through presenting this paper as a mutimedia artifact we wish to contribute to the development of a form of evidence which communicates what we value and enables us to be publicly accountable.
The need to develop processes and
procedures that enable us to move between research, practice and policy in a
meaningful way has been clearly identified by Furlong and Oancea (2005). Practitioner based research,
inclusion and emotional literacy are key concerns for educators in schools and
local authorities as can be seen from the recent strategies and directives
emanating from the DFES; for instance the SEAL (Social Emotional Aspects of
Learning) materials issued by the DFES for primary schools in 2005, and the
work on the implementation of The UNESCO Salamanca Statement 1994.
Through our work to develop and implement
the Local Authority’s EDP (Education Development Plan) strand on the Action
Research Project – learners and learning, we have moved from
understanding these as discrete activities with points of connection to
distinct facets of developing an educational culture which is inclusional
(Rayner 2006).
Through this paper we do not intend to give
a definition of inclusional/inclusionality/ inclusionally or inclusive/
inclusion as if their meanings can be communicated through propositions that have become separated from the
process of creating the meanings through practice. We shall give evidence of
what our current understandings are in a way that invites you to join with us
to co-create further understandings and in this way we are seeking to give
living meaning to an inclusional way of being. By inclusional/inclusionality we are working with Rayner’s (2006) ideas where he describes
inclusionality as a ‘relationally dynamic awareness of space and boundaries
that are connective, reflective and co-creative’. By inclusive/inclusion we are
thinking of the Salamanca statement 1994 where it refers to an inclusive
environment which includes all.
In leading on the Education Development
Plan Action Research strand, we have been working ‘to build the capacity of
schools regarding inclusive practice through Action Research’. We have sought
to do this by working within our spheres of influence with our colleagues in
the education authority, educators in schools and the local universities. We
are focusing in this paper on the time we worked together to run a workshop on
creativity where you can see us working together to support educators to
develop skills and understandings inclusionally.
Throughout the paper we use 'my~our’ and
i~we’ in the same way as was used by Whitehead and Huxtable.
“In working and researching together we
are aware of our shared commitment to respecting the individual identity and
integrity of the other while recognizing that we are engaged in a process of
co-creating knowledge in interconnecting and branching channels of
communication with each other and with others. Hence, following Murray (who
first used we~i in personal correspondence), we use i~we to communicate a
relationship in which an individual’s identity co-exists with a social
relationship to the other(s).”
(Whitehead and Huxtable, 2006)
Because we are engaged in a self-study of
knowledge-creation in the process of researching my~our educational influences
in my~our professional practice, a living theory approach to action research
appears appropriate as the form of research in which the individual
practitioner generates explanations for their educational influences in their
own learning, in the learning of others and in the learning of social
formations (Whitehead, 2006).
The action research approach used in the
enquiry will follow the model of Thinking Actively in a Social Context (TASC),
developed by Wallace (2001) as it
is being commonly used throughout our authority by educators to give a form to
their own enquiry processes and that of their pupils from nursery to secondary.
We work for Bath and North East Somerset Local
Authority. Chris is currently the Inclusion Officer leading on, amongst other
things, the Inclusion Quality Mark.
Marie is a senior educational psychologist who co-ordinates the APEX
(Able Pupils Extending Opportunities) and, amongst other things, the Widening
Learning and Thinking strategies.
We are committed to contributing to an inclusive learning community and bringing inclusional values more fully into our work to contribute to the realisation of the vision of the authority expressed in the Children and Young People’s Plan 2005 – 2009:
“We want all Children and Young People
to do better in life than they ever thought they could. We will give children
and young people the help that they need to do this.”
We could show you a
picture of our local children that carries for us that sense of inclusionality
that we have penned above, but we do not understand our work to be parochial
and instead choose to offer you one which connects us overtly with these values
that are shared internationally across cultures from a presentation at Ningxia
Teachers University:
“On a visit to Ningxia Teachers University in China in May 2006 I
gave two lectures with Professor Jean McNiff. One on Living Theory Action
Research in China: A World View and another on Educational Action Research in
Ningxia Teachers University: Possible Futures. We ended both lectures with the
following photograph to reinforce our ideas about relational forms of
accountability that included love, spontaneity and pleasure.” (Whitehead 2006)
To provide evidence of our inclusional
educational values being lived requires a form beyond text which conveys only a shadow of what we are trying to
communicate and respond to the challenge that Eisner (2005) describes:
“One of the basic
questions that scholars are now raising is how we perform the magical feat of
transforming the contents of our consciousness into a public form that others
can understand” .
(Eisner, 2005)
We are accountable to
ourselves and others for improving our practice but the form of evidence we are
required to provide to OFSTED and other inspecting bodies does not enable us to
focus on what we value as educators. ‘Standards’ as denoted by SATs and exam
results are still the priority for OFSTED; a school can meet the criteria on
the five outcomes in the ‘Every Child Matters’ agenda: be healthy; be safe;
enjoy and achieve; make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-
being, and still receive ‘a notice to improve’. The enthusiasm, passion and pride that a school community
evokes and the consequent outcomes for children and young people can be
experienced by those who visit a school, but how to provide evidence that can
contribute to the judgement of an effective school presents a challenge that as
yet has gone unanswered.
What we mean when we
say we can experience such a culture of a school is illustrated by Chris:
“I see and feel these expressions of joy when I visit schools as a mentor and assessor for the Bath and North East Somerset Inclusion Quality Mark. I recently interviewed a teacher and he was responding to my questions. He then said, ‘I am really happy at this school, but you’re not here to listen to that’, to which I responded, ‘That is exactly why I am here. That is what I want to know about. Please tell me about it’. He gave me a number of examples where he felt he had an influence – seeing children achieve when it was felt they weren’t able to, purely by him taking a risk and believing in himself and the children whom he taught. When I interviewed two teaching assistants at a school, they told me about the support they had had from the head teacher at a time when they were feeling very low and felt they were losing the battle in supporting some pupils with behavioural difficulties. They explained that it was through the head teacher supporting them that they were eventually able to successfully support these pupils. These pupils are still included in the schools. Parents have told me that their children’s schools have done more than they could ever expect schools to do to include their children whether the children have a learning difficulty, a behavioural difficulty or a physical difficulty. Pupils have told me how well they are doing at their school, how they could never have done it without the hard work and commitment of their teachers. They have told me how proud they are to wear their school uniform. Caretakers have spoken to me about the pride they feel for their school in keeping it clean and tidy. The emotions demonstrated in these schools are palpable. The values that people hold are living in these schools.”
It is values such as
these that we wish to form as living standards of judgement to be held publicly
accountable to; test scores and statistics can be clearly seen as inappropriate
in that context.
Through
this paper we are aware of a desire to contribute to the development of
objective evidence of those living educational values that are our passion.
However, we are also aware of being open to criticism that our subjective
judgements reduce the objective value of our evidence. To strengthen our
objectivity from the ground of our subjective judgements, we use Popper’s
(1975) insight that objectivity is strengthened through the use of mutual
rational control by critical discussion:
“The
words objective and subjective are philosophical terms heavily burdened with a
heritage of contradictory usages and of inclusive and interminable discussions.
My use
of the terms objective and subjective is not unlike Kant’s. He uses the word
objective to indicate that scientific knowledge should be justifiable,
independently of anybody’s whim: if something is valid, he writes, for anybody
in possession of his reason, then its grounds are objective and sufficient.
Now I
hold that scientific theories are never fully justifiable or verifiable, but
that they are nevertheless testable. I shall therefore say that objectivity of
scientific statements lies in the fact that they can be inter-subjectively
tested. The word, subjective, is applied by Kant to our feelings of conviction
(of varying degrees). I have since generalised this formulation; for
inter-subjective testing is merely a very important aspect of the more general
idea of inter-subjective criticism, or in other words, of the idea of mutual
rational control by critical discussion.”
(Popper, 1975, p.44)
The significance of our enquiry in the
context of educational research can be related to Snow's point of the need to
bring the personal practical knowledge of educators into the public domain
“The reflections of skilled
practitioners deserve to be systematised so that personal knowledge can become
publicly accessible and subject to analysis.”
(Snow, 2001, p.9)
Chris takes up the
story of our workshop on creativity. The account is framed by the TASC
(Thinking Actively in a Social Context) wheel (Wallace 2001) as a framework
familiar to educators writing an action research account and supporting their
pupils through the same processes of enquiry.
We offered to run a
workshop at the Bath & North East Somerset SENCO Conference in June 2006
entitled ‘Creative learning: Unlocking Potential’. We knew that the
participants would consist of educators in Bath & North East Somerset;
mainly special educational needs co-ordinators but also class teachers,
headteachers and educators from the local authority. .
The question we set
ourselves was ‘how can we work inclusionally with educators during an hour
workshop to enable them to extend their own understandings of creative
learning, and to contribute to the creation of new understandings which they
would wish to explore further in their own schools and classrooms beyond the
workshop.
We had each run
workshops on various themes before using powerpoint and activities. We knew
that we could make it fun, that participants would go away with activities to
use in the classroom and the evaluations would in all probability be good, but
we recognised that we would primarily be ‘delivering content’. For this
workshop we wished to experiment with practice explicitly related to our
emerging understandings of
inclusionality and we wanted to engage participants in deep, rather than
surface learning in a way that would carry the possibility of contributing to a
transformation of classrooms for children to learn creatively. A fairly
ambitious idea for an hour’s workshop but our confidence in each other, if not
in ourselves, gave us the courage to take, what felt like, a very big risk.
We would like to give
you a taste of our planning as we try to hold our values in focus through all
aspects of the way we live and work; as we have said above, we wanted to try to
get closer to ‘practicing what we preach’. When we met to plan the workshop we
discussed at length how we might run the workshop in an inclusional and
creative way; that we would not be the deliverers of received wisdoms, giving
strategies drawn from various reputable source which were believed to help
promote the creative learning of pupils as participants may be expecting.
Instead we evolved a session to engage participants through discussion,
questions and activities intended to connect their prior knowledge, stimulate
their imaginations and begin to engage them in asking their own questions as to
how they could improve their practice to promote creative learning in their
pupils. We wanted the educators to be the learners, learning about themselves
and influencing their own learning, thus coming up with their own answers and we wanted to provide them with links to current
thinking in a way that wouldn’t constrain their own.
We were taking a risk
in a very public forum to move from the security of approaches with which we
were familiar ; we did not know how it would be received as this was quite a
departure from a lot of current workshop practices; neither of us had worked in
this way before, we had not run a workshop together and
we had to be able to create a safe creative educational environment swiftly
with an unknown group to be able to make the most of a one off event.
We decided on a plan
but wanted it to guide not dictate what we would do so we could respond to the
group receptively:
·
DISCUSSION: Why
are you here? What do you want out of this session? (In pairs. Feedback)
·
ACTIVITY:
Pictures – put pictures in order ranging from the most creative to the
least creative. (Three groups. Feedback. Why they found the pictures
creative/least creative).
·
DISCUSSION: What
creative learning happens in your class? What allows that to happen and why is
it important to you?
·
ACTIVITY: To pass
an uncooked egg to each other in as many ways as possible with the group
providing suggestions as appropriate. (Whole group. Feedback. How did you feel?
What were you thinking?
·
DISCUSSION: What
further questions do you want to explore to help you improve your practice in
developing creative learners in the classroom?
We provided references
and a selection of books on creativity at the end for those who wanted to
extend their knowledge base further.
We ran the workshop
twice. The sessions began by people saying why they had chosen this workshop
and what they had wanted from the session. Although
the two groups felt to be different in some respects, the reasons they gave for choosing the workshop appeared to be
similar on the face of it. For instance, responses from the first
workshop were, for example,
And the second
group:
However, the first group did not express the
same concerns as the second group such as the restrictions of the
curriculum, and worrying in case a colleague passed their classroom
and wondered what was going on.
Both groups responded to the picture
activity by stating that each picture was creative in its own way and
that creativity was very much in the eye of the beholder. However, the second group
discussed the usefulness of the pictures as provocations for their
pupils rather than exploring further their own understandings of
creativity.
Both groups responded to the egg
activity in very much the same way. In the discussion that followed,
when they were asked how they felt, whilst responses were similar, the
first group were particularly vocal. Such comments from
both groups show how emotionally engaged they were:
We discussed that
these feelings expressed by us may be how our pupils often feel in the
classroom and how these feelings can stifle
creativity and become creativity blockers. Whilst this
realisation energised the first group, some people in the
second group said that they did not want to take risks
and liked the feeling of being safe. Whilst we were trying to
support them in unlocking their creativity, some people seemed
to be more at one with those feelings that stopped creativity
and it was this discussion that presented as challenging for
us; an analysis of how we felt is described later. It is the
second session that was videoed so it was interesting for us to
see how well we managed to express our inclusional values
through working with a group where we experienced some
tensions.
You can see from the
example of responses to the workshops that we were reasonably
successful at engaging participants as creative learners,
extending their own skills and understandings of creativity.
How far we managed to stimulate their imaginations to carry the
possibility of transforming their classrooms afterwards can be
seen as follows.
The final discussion
focussed on the question that individuals in the group would
take away with them as to how they could improve their
practice. Most participants actively engaged in beginning to
formulate a question that interested them such as, ‘How can I
question children more appropriately to help to promote
creative learning?’
The
written comments on the session suggested that participants’
experiences of the workshop were positive and reflected their
affective as well as their cognitive engagement, for example:
Can
we pause again to signal a change in voice? Chris found
that she had written an account much as she had done
previously but this did not enable us to know whether we
had managed to …support
educators to develop skills and understandings (of
creativity) inclusionally. Jack Whitehead videoed
the second workshop and with Chris’ and Marie’s
permission brought a clip to the B&NES Conversation
Café. The group felt they could see the energy with which
Chris worked and Chris took the suggestion that she might
get closer to understanding herself living her values if
she responded as she watched herself on the video
working inclusionally in the workshop. It is here in the
evaluation that we are beginning to extend our own
understanding of inclusionality and the pedagogical
values it carries. You will see that the language form
that Chris used has changed and we would ask you, as you
read in the following section, to see if it gets closer
to communicating the embodied values and educational
theories of Chris and Marie as they were seeking to
express in the workshop.
The
move to communicating with rather than simply to others at this point is
consistent with our developing inclusional pedagogy where
we seek to extend our own learning and to co-create new
knowledge and understandings with others; to extend our
educational influence in our own learning and that of
others.
We are claiming that through the following text, images and video clips you can see us supporting educators to develop skills and understandings inclusionally. We would ask you to ask the questions of us that Jack Whitehead offers in, ‘How can I/You create living educational theories from educational action research?’ - Notes for an Ed.D. seminar in the University of Bath on 12 July 2006:
‘I usually ask a
validation group of my peers to criticise my explanations
of my educational influences in terms of the questions
Jack Whitehead
engaged with Chris’ account as he worked to prepare a
keynote (Whitehead 2006) and selected visual
images and video clips from the hour session that he
felt connected with Chris’ text. While you are
reading Chris’ account with Jack’s selection of video
clips we ask, ‘Can you
see what we see? Can you feel what we feel?’ as we
live and work inclusionally.
Chris
begins:
“I am smiling as I watch the video of our Creativity Workshop and I am feeling the joy and pleasure in seeing inclusionality being demonstrated naturally and spontaneously in, between and with my friend and colleague, Marie, and other educators who are participants in the workshop. I am looking at Marie as she is inviting the group to respond to her questioning with her arms open, her eyes scanning the room and including all.”
“I feel the joy and pleasure in looking at Marie and me, sitting adjacently and leaning forward and smiling as we engage with the participants in discussing creativity, being creative and creating that moment together and with others”
(see the 8.2Mb, 1min. 31 sec. video clip from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/marie/mhchwk1min31.mov )
“We move outside the room and as I listen to what I am saying, I feel the flow of energy that I felt at the time and as I always feel when I am working with colleagues, every interaction unique and co-creative. I am listening to the expressive, 'ooh', and the intermittent laughter as the egg is passed around, all apprehensive should the egg fall, all separate, yet one as we share the activity in that moment in time. Silence follows laughter and laughter follows silence; those bursts of energy cutting through the atmosphere of apprehension. There are no barriers here between us; there is no vacuum dividing us; we are flowing as one and as the first task is complete, we clap spontaneously together.”
(see the 6.8 Mb, 1min 15 sec video clip from http://www.jackwhitehead.com/marie/cjmhwkegg.mov)
“I am still smiling as I watch the video as we move back into the room. The conversation, the questions and answers, the smiles and the laughter; Marie and I sitting adjacently, moving forward in response to comments, hands moving, arms outstretched, openly invitational.”
“Can anyone see what I see? Does anyone feel as I feel? As I watch the flow of interaction between one and the other, I am reminded of Rayner's Paper Dance of Inclusionality (http://www.jackwhitehead.com/rayner1sor.mov) and O' Donohue's 'web of betweenness' (2003). I am looking at inclusionality in action of which I am a part and I am seeing the flow of life- affirming energy between Marie, the group and me, and as I watch, I am feeling the joy of what for me gives life meaning – the flow of interaction between one and the other and the pleasure of that co-dynamic relationship. I am reminded of these feelings of joy when I was a teacher interacting with the class: I am learning from them; they are learning from me; we are all learning together in a co-creational relationship which could not happen without one or the other within that moment in time.
I value who I am and what I try to be; I value others for who they are and what they try to be; I value what we are between us and what we try to be. It is through my relationship with others and the generative flow and pleasure of our interaction that I grow and live a life that has meaning for me.”
We
would like to return to the question on which we
asked you to focus when we wrote, ‘we would ask
you, as you read, to see if it gets closer to
communicating the embodied values and educational
theories of Chris and Marie as they were seeking to
express in the workshop’.
The
form of evidence used to validate a claim to
knowledge is important and is taxing many in the
school system as can be seen in the oft used phrase,
‘we value what we measure, rather than measuring what
we value’. We are asking you to consider here how far
we have been able to offer you evidence that can be
validated, accepted as authentic and of value by
‘authorities’, whether they are the academy or
government department, while also communicating those
qualities and values that for us are at the core of
education and the reason we do what we do.
So
far we have sought to explore whether we have
communicated with you our growing understandings of
what it is for us to support educators developing
skills and understandings inclusionally. We have
asked you to consider whether we have communicated
those values more fully than relying on the
traditional text- based report format by using a
poetic, aesthetic form with images as well. We have
also tried to provide you with evidence as to our
success or otherwise in answering our question,‘how
can we work inclusionally with educators during an
hour workshop to enable them to extend their own
understandings of creative learning, and to
contribute to the creation of new understandings
which they would wish to explore further in their own
schools and classrooms beyond the workshop’.
Can
we remind you of one of our ambitions we touched on
in our introduction:
We are looking
to find forms of evidence that will support us in
developing our practice.
The actual process
of creating this artefact has provoked reflection on
our skills, understandings and values generatively. The structure of
text and narrative (Carter 1993) implies that this
has been a sequential discrete event whereas we have
weaved back and forth and been inspired to develop
our practice by communicating, in person and through
email, with many colleagues and each other. It has
felt to be a flow form that again connects with
another of our intentions:
We shall give
evidence of what our current understandings are in a
way that invites you to join with us to co-create
further understandings and in this way we are seeking
to give living meaning to an inclusional way of
being.
The
reflections below are by way of illustration as we
move our account into the final part of the TASC
process and begin to connect with others and on to
engaging in further living theory action research
enquiries.
And
to connect you once again with the beginning of this
paper:
…we use i~we to communicate a
relationship in which an individual’s identity
co-exists with a social relationship to the other(s).
where we state our intention to contribute to
the development of a new epistemology with
relationally dynamic standards of judgement of
inclusionality.
It
surprised me~us looking at the video to see those
values of inclusionality being expressed during the
workshop. At the time i~we felt a tension running
through the session. I~we found it difficult at the
time to find a shared focus, to connect the thinking
of the individuals and the strands that were emerging
in the group and to extend them beyond to a creative
space. I~we heard concerns expressed about a shift to
risk, a reluctance to explore possibilities beyond
the constraints of government imposed initiatives,
strategies and agendas and the frustrations with
those perceived constraints. I~we felt the tension,
not because there was an antithesis between
participants or a clash of values, rather the
contrary; i~we felt frustrated by my~our inability to
help participants engage as creatively as i~we
believed they could have done and wanted to. I~we
felt i~we had not kept the space as open and creative
as i~we wanted to and i~we had not recognised and
responded appropriately to my~our own inclination and
that of others to present an argument justifying a
position and a desire to impose personal agendas.
Through acting and reflecting using video to research
and communicate, i~we have understood better the
qualities of inclusionality that i~we value and want
to see more of and those questions of the nature,
‘how do I…’ rather than ‘how can I…’ have enabled
me~us to recognise evidence of those values being
lived.
Marie
reflects:
‘Watching
the video of the workshop and responding to the
question, ‘how do I work inclusionally’, my
reflections were as follows:
The space between Chris and I feels easy,
relaxed and open.
I can see an unspoken communication between
us.
One takes the lead, then it is taken up by the
other without any clash.
As the hands of one of us are open, the other
is quiet
Our faces are open, relaxed, interested,
inviting others to enter that space
Both Chris and I can be seen looking round the
group
So between us we know that all are included.
Even if they choose not to speak.
The conversation flows back and forth across
and around the room.
Chris open arms, embracing
An energizing confidence,
Completely in the present.
Moving with a fluency, an ease, a grace
Eliciting a response, even from the most
constrained.
Laughter bubbles and occasionally erupts to
punctuate when something important is expressed,
Or to release a tension.
Each participating, building on anothers
offering,
And contributing their individual views. ‘
Chris
felt that this way of writing also connected with her
own way of writing and is yet another example of the
flow there is between us.
The reflections we both made independently, as
we each watched the video, stands in contrast to the
evaluation made during the workshop. We believe that
the use of video and image and the incorporation of
an aesthetic as well as analytic form of text,
communicates far more accurately and objectively, the
educational qualities we value being lived, than does
the traditional forms of evidence, relying on
checklists and statistics alone. We believe that such
educational qualities with their relationally dynamic
flow-form are constituting living standards of
judgement for an epistemology of inclusionality.
We have tried through focusing on our specific experience in the workshop to begin to communicate with you what we are seeking to do when we ask, ‘How can (do) we support educators to develop skills and understandings inclusionally?’ This work does not sit in isolation and we wish to remind you:
In leading on
the Education Development Plan Action Research strand
we have been working ‘to build the capacity of
schools regarding inclusive practice through Action
Research’. We have sought to do this by working
within our spheres of influence with our colleagues
in the education authority, educators in schools and
the local universities.
We have been working with our colleagues in the local authority to extend our skills and understandings of living theory action research through a weekly ‘conversation café’. An example of our colleagues’ commitment to contributing to an inclusive learning community and bringing inclusional values more fully into our work can be seen most clearly in this piece by Nigel Harrisson, Manager of the Inclusion Support Service, which he brought to one of our meetings and which we wish to leave you with to emphasise the importance of sharing our narratives of inclusionality:
“As
an Authority we are experiencing problems with the
number of permanent exclusions from schools. We are
reportedly the highest excluding Authority in the
South West. As a department that focuses on inclusion
and as Inclusion Manager myself, I think we need to
address this issue as a matter of urgency.
There
are practical things that we could possibly do to
help the situation, and there are attempts to do so
through protocols with schools such as, the managed
moves protocol, the levels of exclusion and the hard
to place protocol. Having said that, there seems to
me, to be a clash of values in the system and
scepticism in individuals about schools adhering to
the protocols.
As
well as being the highest excluding Authority, we are
also the highest attaining Authority. In some minds,
I’m sure, the two are correlated. While there is
recognition that we must do ‘something’ about
exclusions, there seems to me, to be an unspoken
‘principle’ that if we push too hard we might affect
the attainment of the schools and risk the wroth of
Head teachers. To have high exclusions seems to be an
acceptable ‘evil’.
On
occasion we feel powerless to influence schools on
exclusions and, also importantly, on admission of
pupils they perceive they do not want, as it may
‘water down’ their results. Few people seem willing
to tackle schools over such issues. Unless they have
a statement of SEN, where the LA is the admissions
Authority, we have to rely on parents/carers
addressing the issues with the schools. Obviously,
some feel they are unable to do so, some feel it is
pointless as even if they were to get their child admitted,
the school has indicated they would be unwelcome
anyway.
I acknowledge that attainment is
important and that the needs of the other pupils must
be considered, but we are often left with pupils who
we cannot place, whose life chances are diminished
and seemingly without the overt backing to force
issues. My values also include championing the rights
of the ‘vulnerable’. In terms of living values, “How
do I champion the rights of those who have been
excluded and are difficult to include?” “How do I
balance that, alongside the rights of those already
included, and who also have a right to have a proper
education and within a system where there appears to
be a similar clash of values?”
It is easy being cynical about
the inability of schools to include the ‘hard to
include’. It removes the responsibility from me and
places the problem with the school.
“Every Child Matters. Even the
most disabled or disruptive pupil has a right to be
included. “How can I be expected to do my job when
schools don’t have the same values?” They need to
change their values to my values!!!
The truth of the matter is that
some ‘schools’ do have different values, different
motivations and a passion for attainment that may
differ from mine. In my own organisation there are
tensions between values such as inclusion and
attainment. “Whose values are right?” “Do I have to
change my values?” “Do they have to change theirs?”
“Do I have to fight others with different values, or
can I (as I believe I do), work at the interface
between differing values?” “How can I develop my
skills to do that job well?” “How will I know I’m
getting it right?”
(Question: “As a collective of
people with no doubt differing values anyway, is it
possible to assign values to an organisation?” I’ll
continue to do so as shorthand. In many cases, I
think we do believe that organisations have values).
There are some schools who show a
passion for what they believe is right, namely
ensuring that children and young people, who are
capable, fulfil their potential and gain attainments,
that will give them a good start for the future they
see. Some schools are also passionate about including
the hard to include. Even to the point where I have
become concerned that they are not balancing the
needs of the majority with the needs of the few. This
is a difficult challenge, getting the right balance
between the rights of the many and the rights of the
few.
Some schools try very hard to
include ‘the hard to include’. Even then, sometimes,
I think there is more some schools could do, partly
because I know there is more that I would do myself
were I doing that job. However, again, there needs to
be some balance between what schools can reasonably
be expected to do and what is really needed to
include a child or young person. Only recently there
was a case where a child had experienced trauma at
the hands of his parents. This resulted in a
disturbance in his development, lack of trust of
adults (and why not), the testing of boundaries to
see if he was safe, and re-testing them because he
was safe once before and those who should have
protected him let him down. His life was ripped
apart, his mind and emotions tortured. The ability to
concentrate, behave in a way that allowed and showed
trust, to focus on the future, was beyond him at that
point. His behaviour was disruptive to the point of
stopping others learning effectively. “Is this
something the school could or should address?” “Is my
passion for inclusion so great that I push for the
school to do more at the potential cost to other
children?” “If I did, would that not clash with my
own values that every child deserves a good
education?” I accept that inclusion is a destination
and that sometimes there may be detours before
getting back on the road to inclusion. Sometimes those
detours are long and painful. Without the traumatic
disturbance in his development he would, and should
be (within my values), educated alongside his peers.
Now that will not happen and I feel sad.
The passion for championing the
rights of all children and young people is a deeply
held value that I hope I live. Having the courage to
keep championing in the face of challenge is vital to
make a difference, but so is having empathy with
others and recognising their values and passions.
Working at the interface of differing value systems
is challenging but also worthwhile and exciting.” (Harrisson, 2006)
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