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.

 

Introduction

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.

 

 

Context

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)

 

 

 

 

Background

 

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.

 

 

 

Gather and organise/ what is already known/the context

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/the enquiry

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.

 

Imagined possibilities and the selection of one

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.

 

Implementation

 

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,