This article draws upon and applies the ‘concept paper’ (Sayed 2002) within the DFID project ‘Learning about inclusion and exclusion in education: policy and implementation in India and South Africa’.
In this concept paper, several approaches to understanding and using the concepts of inclusion/exclusion are made. Such assumptions and approaches inform this article too, and it is important to spell out explicitly what these are at the beginning. Inclusion/exclusion are understood herein:
- To mean that questions of inclusion cannot be addressed adequately without taking into account issues of exclusion. As such, inclusion and exclusion are conjoined, theoretically and empirically. All processes of inclusion entail exclusion and vice versa.
- Inclusion here is not understood educationally to refer to people with ‘special needs’, neither is it about assimilating people in an existing order nor to reproduce a status quo based on inequalities and discrimination. To quote Barton on this: Inclusive education is not integration and is not concerned with the assimilation or accommodation of discriminated groups or individuals within existing socio-economic conditions and relations. It is not about making people as ‘normal’ as possible. Nor is it about the well-being of a particular oppressed or excluded group. Thus, the concerns go well beyond those of disablement. Inclusive education is not an end in itself, but a means to an end – the creation and maintenance of an inclusive society. As such, the interest is with all citizens, their well-being and security. This is a radical conception…. It is ultimately about the transformation of a society and its formal institutional arrangements, such as education. This means change in the values, priorities and policies that support and perpetuate practices of exclusion and discrimination (Barton 1999: 58).
- Forms of oppression are viewed as intersecting with each other in ‘non-synchronous’ and ‘interlocking’ ways. This means that forms of inequalities and experiences of discrimination need to be viewed relationally as complex and textured, allowing for an holistic appraisal of social processes and people’s experiences and identities. However, while non-synchronous, such intersecting forces in their configuration develop a ‘dominant articulating principle’, which Laclau and Mouffe, cited in McCarthy (1997), describe: A ‘dominant’ character refers to the relations along which ‘endogenous differences’ in the school are principally articulated. These dominant relations thus constitute an ‘articulating principle’ (Laclau and Mouffe 1985) pulling the entire ensemble of relations in the school setting into a ‘unity’ or focus for conflict. Such an articulating principle may be race, class, or gender (McCarthy 1997: 549).
- Schools are viewed as sites of struggle. They simultaneously ‘reproduce’ (Giroux and Aronowitz 1986) social inequalities and offer possibilities for critically questioning, opposing and challenging social structures and orders (Nkomo 1990).
- Policy is understood both ‘as text’ and ‘as discourse’. This entails viewing policies as outcomes of contestation and compromise and as having significant practical consequences.
- Inclusion/exclusion policies need to be holistic, implementable, with clear programmatic actions and time-frames that incorporate the dimensions of ethics and rights, efficacy, the political and pragmatic.
- In the context of schooling, educational policies need to address concerns about access into schools, school governance, developing a culture of teaching and learning, inclusive curricula and promoting an ethos of inclusion based on human rights and democracy.
This article uses the concepts of inclusion/exclusion with these understandings and applies them to the South African educational context. It is also a way of enfleshing the implications of applying the concepts of inclusion/exclusion in the South.
Related Content
This article comes from the IDS Bulletin 35.1 (2004) Race and Inclusion in South African Education
