Translating the Rhetoric of Inclusion into Reality: A Life History Account of One Teacher´s Determination to Make Inclusion Work

This study has traced the autobiographical factors which have shaped the development of an inclusive teacher identity. Additionally, it has examined how the changing discourses of inclusion have shaped its realisation in practice across a teaching career which spans in excess of thirty years. Life history method is used to examine the biography and teaching career of one informant. Additionally, an auto-ethnographic approach is employed to consider the effects of inclusion on the school in which the participant currently works and in which I have worked. The school is referred to as Marshlands throughout the text.
This is not a study which seeks to generalise. The data suggest that personal experiences of exclusion during childhood have significantly shaped the development of an inclusive teacher identity in both me and the participant. Foucault’s concept of transgression is applied to the narrative. Throughout the narrative it has been possible to identify acts of transgression by the informant, both within personal and professional contexts. Consequently it is tentatively suggested that transgression has played a significant role in the development of the informant’s values in relation to inclusion. Foucault’s framework of surveillance is subsequently applied to the narrative to illustrate how the informant and her colleagues at Marshlands have become objects of power, surveillance and intense scrutiny within a discourse of performativity. The narrative and auto-ethnographic account illustrate how it was possible for the informant to develop a more inclusive pedagogy under the previous discourse of integration in comparison to subsequent discourses of inclusion.
The thesis demonstrates how both the participant and her colleagues at Marshlands have endured detrimental effects for demonstrating a commitment to inclusion. Whilst this study is small-scale, there are implications for similar schools that either choose to or are forced to retain their commitments to educating learners with diverse needs. Unless measures of school effectiveness are broadened to include strengths in inclusive practices, schools like Marshlands will continue to be sites of surveillance and intense monitoring.