Things are hard to talk about when people don’t have a shared understanding of the meaning of words they use.
Even the difference between formative and summative assessment can lead to chaotic discussion if there isn’t an agreed definition of the two terms.
The problem is further complicated by how a term can’t mean anything on its own – abstract positions are given meaning by practical examples. Two people – for example – both thinking they work at “warm-strict” schools can find differences in how they interpret the phrase mean their disciplinary systems have very little in common.
Discussion of “inclusion” is affected by this ambiguity. The word is used all the time but the people using it often mean very different things, and it can’t mean anything in the abstract.
What then is an inclusive classroom?
To get to a point where this can be a meaningful question, I must define and exemplify what I mean if I am to avoid misunderstandings and misinterpretations.
The first thing to get straight is the word “inclusion” means nothing.
To be included or excluded there must be something to be included in or excluded from.
For inclusion to have meaning there must first be something to be part of.
On its own inclusion is just the first word of an unfinished sentence.
Schools – whether we want this to be true or not – have multiple functions and this makes assessing how inclusive they are tricky. A school can be more inclusive in some aspects of its practice than it is in others.
A friend of mine who works for Children’s Services in Leeds helped me understand this a couple of years back.
I expressed frustration to him about internal truancy at the school I was working at and how being in the building was pointless if children in it weren’t learning.
He pointed out things weren’t as simple – that many of the vulnerable children he worked with were a danger to themselves and others if they weren’t under adult supervision at school. He recognised that these children probably weren’t learning much in the schools he placed them in, but that for them the protective function of a school was more important. His definition of inclusion was different to mine and so were his success indicators. This is a tension I’m not comfortable with but get and respect.
I don’t need to get into all that because in this series I’m only focused on inclusive classrooms.
While it may be no easier to achieve, I think it’s easier to understand.
The primary purpose of classrooms is learning.
To be inclusive the children in them must learn what teachers wants them to learn.
Like schools they do have other functions too – for example learning how to behave in a group – but being good at these other functions can’t compensate for children in them not learning anything.
This does not mean all children in one year group should be all learning the same thing. By trying to do so schools usually end up being less inclusive – for example insisting children who do not know how to read well attend all timetabled lessons regardless of whether they understand a word or not.
Being more inclusive does mean adapting curriculum so it’s appropriate for children and in practice at school level this does sometimes mean children learning different things – for example a child with learning disability in mainstream because there are no special school places available would be badly served if they had to follow an identical curriculum to their non-learning-disabled friends.
But even when this is done well it is still hard.
Many children lack the inherent drive to learn what is on a school curriculum.
Many would prefer to be elsewhere, and this doesn’t mean anything has gone wrong.
Children who would rather be doing other things are not unusual or deficient. They are normal children. If all children wanted to be in school learning, then we would not need to compel attendance.
The often-reluctant nature of their audiences means teachers must be skilled in directing attention and motivating them. If a history teacher fails to spot a child is drawing anime characters in their jotter instead of answering a question on the feudal system, they are not included. If a child daydreams away the day and nobody intervenes, they’ve not been included even if they have been present and happy enough all day. If a child can’t read the text a teacher gives them and then copies out the questions instead of answering them, they have not been included.
Before getting anywhere near SEND designation and the specific difficulties some children face in learning it’s important to understand issues around inclusion in classrooms affect all children – not just a few, and that the degree of inclusion and exclusion to learning children experience day-to-day and lesson-by-lesson varies and fluctuates.
This takes me to my first principle; inclusion is a continuum, affects all children and changes over time.
The continuum is affected by the teacher, the behaviour of children, the curriculum and lots of other things too.
It’s possible for a classroom to be more inclusive on Monday than it is on Wednesday, for it to be less inclusive in the first half of the lesson than it is in the second. If there is a topic on the curriculum that lots of children are naturally interested in, then it may be easier to make the room more inclusive than if it is a topic that’s less compelling, and this may vary from child to child.
The learning vulnerabilities of children change over time too – something as simple as the normal fluctuations in a child’s mood can make it easier or harder for a teacher to include them in the lesson – techniques that worked fine one week may not work as well or even at all the next week.
Neither inclusion nor exclusion are fixed states, and trying to become inclusive is quixotic because the conditions affecting it change all the time and however inclusive we are there is always more that could be done.
Instead of trying to become “inclusive”, teachers should aim to be more inclusive more of the time and work on strategies and practices that make this more likely.
Seeing things this way means better professional conversations, because it removes the moral coding the term has assumed which leads to understandable defensiveness and performativity for other adults. It also means people can talk more honestly about where they really are without fear of a potentially humiliating judgement, and might allow them to look at small, specific things they can do to move on the contiuum without feeling the journey is too long for it to be worthwhile even beginning.
Ben Newmark 