Inclusive Education: International Policy and Practice

Citation

Seguin, J.A. (2011), "Inclusive Education: International Policy and Practice", Journal of Educational Administration, Vol. 49 No. 1, pp. 110-112. https://doi.org/10.1108/09578231111102135

Special educators in the USA are more focused on getting their students included in general education classrooms than at any time since the federal mandate for special education services in 1975 (PL 94‐142). Tunnel vision on our issues is a natural result when you are expected to focus so closely on one issue. Armstrong, Armstrong and Spandagou open readers up to a world from which our provinciality has protected us. All of the countries on Planet Earth are struggling with the issues of bringing children with disabilities together with typically developing children. As some of those countries were colonies of other countries and have residual attitudes due to their status as subjects to another country, colonial status and inclusion took on a metaphorical relationship as different classes relating to some perceived superior entity.

In Inclusive Education: International Policy and Practice, the experiences and academic histories of the authors are presented in the Epilogue as a means of reflecting on inclusive education internationally. Reading the Epilogue brings greater understanding to the entire book. Ann Cheryl Armstrong began her journey at the University of Manitoba as a part of four professional development workshops offered to an international assembly of teachers, including those from Trinidad and Tobago, such as Armstrong, at which she was even more motivated to teach students with learning difficulties upon her return to the islands. Dr Armstrong was then engaged in the conceptualization of special education for her nation: a conceptualization based on the social model of disability rather than the medical model. As her experience in working with various governmental entities increased she entered the doctoral program offered by the University of Sheffield in the Caribbean. Globalization was a focus of the program, further opening Dr Armstrong to looking at special education as it was conceptualized and developed in many countries. Derrick Armstrong uses his own poor experiences with education in his childhood as the driving force behind his work. From England, Dr Armstrong worked for nine years in the Caribbean providing a counterpoint to the thinking of Ann Cheryl Armstrong, from the perspective of a citizen of a developed country (p. 145) “bringing enlightenment and new learning” to people from a less developed country. The juxtaposition of Armstrong's and Armstrong's origins reinforces the struggle for communication when backgrounds and experiences are so varied. Ilektra Spandagou, after completing her undergraduate degree at the University of Athens went to work in a pilot project for UNESCO just as that organization was struggling with developing the Salamanca Statement, a statement calling on all nations to provide inclusive education. Later, while in the doctoral program in education at the University of Sheffield, Spandagou met Derrick Armstrong, starting the collaboration that resulted in this book. Taken together the authors present an amazing background and view of special education internationally.

Inclusive Education: International Policy and Practice has four sections: “History, social context and key ideas” that takes the American reader out of her/his comfort zone and enters a larger environment in which basic assumptions are useless; “Policy case studies” which allows the opportunity to become more familiar with specific situations; “From policy to practice”, which appeals to the urge to get moving and change education; and “Conclusions and reflections”, referred to earlier as the real introduction of the authors, their experiences and their philosophies that both arose from their experiences and guided those experiences. Each chapter starts with a Chapter Overview and ends with a Summary, Discussion Questions and a list of further reading. Thus, this book readily adapts itself for use in a university graduate course setting.

Section 1 comprises three chapters ranging between ten and 15 pages each. Chapter one lays out the issues the subsequent chapters will expand on. The authors' perspectives are grounded in the social context of disability and present the relationship between disability and education with politics. With too few resources for the superior education of typically developing children or for social services for adults, the provisions of scarce resources is dependent on the social value for a population with disabilities. The more stressed the resources of a nation are the more important this political discussion becomes. Teacher education comes under fire for instilling in general education teachers a sense of professional competence when they have no skill at adapting the curriculum to the needs of a variety of levels of styles and abilities of learning. Occasional reference to American education is offered, but the focus of the work is reserved for England and several of its past colonies or current commonwealth members. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization features prominently as a vehicle for nations learning from each other's systems and constructs.

Chapter 2 places education in the context of the twentieth century and its wars to end colonialism, the struggles of new countries to assemble governments with fewer resources than the colonizing entity, then the development of globalization and its impact on struggling nations. Private or corporate interests struggle with the welfare rights of those unable to benefit from capitalism. Caught up in this struggle are children and those with disabilities, and inevitably, children with disabilities. Political science and educational philosophy intersect in this chapter. Chapter 3 presents the contradictions in various models of inclusive education and the implications of these contradictions for children. For the first time the outcomes of inclusion are addressed as driving the model of how it will be implemented. The chapter ends by critiquing the role of inclusion in various definitions of inclusion or models of school organization.

Section 2 on “Policy case studies” launches into the “internationalization of inclusive education” in chapter 4 and the struggles to bring a unified concept of inclusive education to such a diverse array of cultures and maturity levels of the various governments. Chapter 5 proceeds with a study of how international agencies, such as UNESCO, impact individual countries as it cross‐pollinates educational models and constructs. Many short case studies are peppered through chapters 4 and 5 of this section to more readily spur discussion. Chapter 6 turns from developing nations to the European Union and how it deals with its members on inclusion.

Section 3 turns “From policy to practice.” The concern that special education is a means for moving disruptive students out of general education class is confronted in Chapter 7. This becomes a core issue when defining inclusions: if special education's big service is the removal of students from classes so that teachers can teach, inclusion will destroy that service. A framework of service provision is presented in “School action” and “School action plus” which presents a social construct of identification and assessment that hinges on whether the school can offer all of the needed services or whether services from external sources will be needed – somewhat similar to the American Association on Mental Retardation (named recently revised to the American Association of Developmental and Intellectual Disabilities) attempt in the 1990s to define mental retardation not by IQ range but by the intensity and longevity of services needed. This chapter is the more challenging for the American reader as it focuses on British laws and uses a different set of terms than are commonly used in the USA. Chapter 8, “From policy to practice: defining inclusion in schools” struck this reviewer as being very powerful – in reviewing the chapter I noticed that I had underlined almost every word in the chapter. This chapter addresses differentiated instruction, rights to access, continuum of achievement, entitlement to support, and the social contract theory as being so inadequate that it fails people with disabilities. The chapter concludes with a quick review of what is working and what is not in the implementation of inclusive education. “Exporting inclusion to the developing world,” Chapter 9 brings to conclusion the topic of this very densely written book. Exporting educational concepts to developing countries runs the risk of the developing country perceiving the patronizing attitudes of the colonial era and responding to that emotional context rather than the context and social justice of inclusive education.

The last section is a one‐chapter exploration of the authors and their experience with international education as described in the second paragraph of this review. Again the authors hold a unique combination of representatives of developing and developed countries by both birth and where they taught. It is always difficult to recommend an audience for a book, as each good book deserves a very broad array of readers. Similarly, readers who might not be expected to benefit from a particular work, due to their unique combination of interests or the moment at which the reader decides to broaden her interests, are ignited by readings they might not expect them to appreciate. Inclusive Education is an important book for those ready to look broader than their own experiences to try to understand a broader stage on which the same issues we are familiar with play out in ways that are very unfamiliar to us. That was my experience with this book. Certainly it could be of interest to anyone interested in special education: special education teachers, parents of special needs children and school administrators struggling with the challenges of inclusion of special needs children in general education classes. But this is not a book for the neophyte educator who is still struggling with their daily schedule. For those with the time and interest in looking wider this is an extremely valuable read. And it reminds me that right or wrong, I am glad to be in an American educational system that is not in a life or death struggle with deciding whether the country has the resources to offer special education. Conversely, how exciting it would be to teach in a smaller country where the Minister of Education is accessible to teachers and philosophies of education, and where its goals and its target population are discussed and acted on.