Search

In this paper, we address the work of teachers at the intersection of educational policy and professional discretion, by undertaking a conceptual reading of "Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Educational Excellence in Australian Schools," and examining how the report conceptualises teacher practice. Drawing on the Bourdieusian notion of regulated improvisation, the study explores the constraints of pedagogical practices as conceptualised by influential policy reports of this kind, highlighting the paradoxical expectations of the report on teachers whose situational awareness of classrooms is curtailed through regulation. The study examines the tension between teacher autonomy and constraints, negating important considerations to temporalities of learning. The central contribution of the paper is a conceptual understanding of how policy drivers position teacher expertise through standardisation, compliance and performance, a concern not unique only to the Australian context of educational policy, nor schooling.

In the context of international systemic reforms promoting professional standards for teachers and inclusivity of diverse students in schools, this paper presents and demonstrates conceptual means by which educators can critically respond to the uncomfortable couplet of standardisation and difference. This is primarily achieved by theorising alternative ways of making sense of difference. Core to the argument is that standards can become more than prescriptions for educating in the same way when teachers recognise their positionality, examine the socio-cultural context of their work, and take action to ensure equality or equity of opportunity within the classroom. The paper is presented in three sections. The first section addresses the use of teaching standards in the United States and Australia, examining various ways inclusive education is articulated as a standard for practice. The second section engages theory from critical disability studies as a fillip to thinking differently about disability. The final section creates conceptual space for educators to move effectively between different intentions -- their own as practitioners, the profession's standards, and socio-material conditions involving ethics and accountability. On the whole, conveyed throughout the paper is the necessity for teachers to orientate towards contextual sense-making of professional standards to support inclusive practice.

Purpose: This paper emerged from the challenges encountered by both authors as academics during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Based on their subsequent reflections on inclusion in education for minoritised academics in pandemic-affected institutional contexts, they argue that beyond student-centred foci for inclusion, equity in the field, is equally significant for diverse teachers. Working as tempered radicals, they contend that anything less is exclusionary. Design/methodology/approach: Using a reciprocal interview method and drawing on Freirean ideals of dialogue and education as freedom from oppression, the authors offer dual perspectives from specific positionings as a non-tenured woman academic of colour and a tenured staff member with a disability. Findings: In framing this work dialogically and through Freirean ideals of conscientização, the authors' collective discussions politicise personal experiences of marginalisation in the teaching and researching of inclusion in education for preservice teachers, or more pointedly, in demonstrating the responsibility of all to orientate towards context-dependent inclusive practices. They assert that to enable educators to develop inclusion-oriented practice, the contextual frameworks need to ensure that they question their own experiences of inclusion as potentially precarious to enable meaningful teaching practice. Research limitations/implications: It offers perspectives drawing on race, dis/ability and gender drawing on two voices. The bivocal perspective is in itself limitation. It is also located within a very Australian context. However, it does have the scope to be applied globally and there is opportunity to further develop the argument using more intersectional variables. Practical implications: The paper clearly highlights that universities require a sharper understanding of diversity, and minoritised staff's quotidian negotiations of marginalisations. Concomitantly inclusion and valuing of the epistemologies of minoritised groups facilitate meaningful participation of these groups in higher education contexts. Social implications: This article calls for a more nuanced, empathetic and critical understanding of issues related to race and disability within Australian and global academe. This is much required given rapidly shifting demographics within Australian and other higher education contexts, as well as the global migration trajectories. Originality/value: This is an original research submission which contributes to debates around race and disability in HE. It has the potential to provoke further conversations and incorporates both hope and realism while stressing collaboration within the academic ecosystem to build metaphorical spaces of inclusion for the minoritised.

In this paper, we weave in and out of theory and narrative in order to consider the potential of disability and its relationship to knowledge construction. We consider theories to be stories that one can tell about the world. And these theories are enlivened by other stories that we tell about ourselves and the world around us. As disability researchers, we explore the ways in which disability becomes known in the world and we do so through our own tales and theoretical narratives of knowing disability. In telling stories, then, we break down artificial boundaries between theory and narrative. And in theorising our stories -- and storying our theories -- we seek to explore the potential of disability to unsettle and challenge exclusionary curriculum. This textual assemblage traverses diverse themes including diagnosis, school programming, welfare, transportation, social interaction and access.

As education systems the world over acknowledge the significance of supporting students with disabilities and related conditions to maintain school enrolment, building the capacity of educators to fulfil an inclusive ambition is frequently promoted through activities like awareness training. Here, the intention is to potentially change how people living with disability are understood and related to. Traditionally, awareness raising work relies on psychological interventions targeting human being's cognitive-behavioural triumvirate -- thoughts, feelings and behaviours, nudging public policy and individual attitudes to sustain such changes. Yet, an inevitable lament typically befalls researchers and practitioners when inclusive ideals are not reached through the promotion of human rights, individualised support and positive attitudes. Advancing a conceptual approach to orientating to difference resourced by theory from critical psychology, critical disability and affirmative ethics, our discussion seeks to question the validity of current orientations to awareness training in favour of engaging difference differently. The discussion is relevant to education policy makers and practitioners seeking to reduce inequities, particularly among students living diverse ways of being within mainstream populations, so they might engage difference differently to reduce school exclusion.

This paper presents an analysis of two surveys that were conducted in an Australian university's School of Education, investigating how students and staff understood the inherent requirements of their courses. The survey results highlight that despite there being no explicit written inherent requirement statements for these courses both staff and students believed they had a deep understanding of the nature and potential effects of inherent requirements. The longer the students and staff were connected with the School, the more likely they were to feel aware of the culturally structured inherent requirements of these courses. Overwhelmingly, staff and students drew upon a hegemonic doxa that normalised exclusion on the basis of the assumed limitations of individual students or potential course applicants. The authors propose a shift in policy and practice from inherency focused on the assumed student deficits towards coherency premised on the teacher workforce, better resembling the intent of inclusion of education and of society more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The publication of John Hattie's "Visible Learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement" in 2009 has led to the widespread adoption of the Visible Learning program around the world. Critique of this program has been less widespread, especially in English, and has tended to centre on the mechanisms of meta-analysis. We consider what Visible Learning puts to work in relation to cultural politics and find it closely aligned with agendas of neoliberalism, sexism and ableism that operate to perform exclusion in schools and to de-professionalise teachers in feminised work. We argue that the metaphor of Visible Learning itself requires much more careful attention.

In this paper I draw upon findings of a recent qualitative project conducted in Queensland, Australia in which all actors--the researcher and 5 participants aged 13-17 years--were linked together by our shared experiences of being students with impaired vision (VI) and who were educated in inclusive secondary schools in Australia during the last two decades. The narrative demonstrates the alienating legacy of two everyday routines of schooling, the placement and the daily commute. In the paper I show how referential knowledge acquisition of a trans-identity research alliance can reveal barriers to inclusion that might be ordinarily overlooked. Theoretically I map the research relationship formed between myself and participants using both Foucault's analysis of how human beings are made subjects (1982) and Bourdieu's understanding of reflexive interviewing in qualitative research (1998). The empirical contribution of this paper is to demonstrate how special education discourses render subjects more "special" than the sum of their actual impairments, and methodologically to highlight the role of qualitative inquiry in the field of inclusive schooling.

Life's paradoxes present across the varied landscapes we traverse in education and serve as formidable barriers in attempts to secure ethical consistency in practice. The presence of paradox invites educational researchers and practitioners to diligently examine our available choices, particularly when fixed by dominant ways of knowing/being. This too is especially consequential as these resources work for or against what we hold to be fundamental to our practice. This quandary is responded to here in three parts. The first section steps through a paradoxical psychosocial assemblage created in Australian educational practice through the National Assessment Program -- Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN). The second section then suggests possibilities for challenging paradoxes around the status quo by reflecting on ways professionals from a range of countries in the Asia/Pacific region can reexamine their own practice as part of theoretically informed postgraduate research. The third section discusses how paradoxes have persisted in Australian policy responses to disability, which evade substantiated ways of being and knowing inclusion. The relationships paradox invites us to are entangled and complex but in opening ourselves to prospects inherent in contradiction we challenge ourselves to explicating preferred ideals.

Inherent requirements define core competencies that all students must demonstrate to be accepted, progress, and successfully complete professionally accredited programmes such as teaching. This paper presents research that examines how students of teacher education navigate supposed abilities to teach through their courses of study, to inform the development of a statement of inherent requirements for a large school of education in an Australian university. Drawing on critical disability perspectives, we present results from a survey conducted with students enrolled in teacher education courses. This analysis demonstrates that inherent requirements have little affect for students whose bodily capacities align with preconceived notions of abilities to teach. Yet, students with disabilities will likely experience impose barriers to their success within teacher education because of perceived inherent requirements to practice, which is not easily addressed through disclosure and reasonable adjustments. The paper concludes with a discussion addressing how when seeking to expand their impact in support of inclusive local and global communities, universities must necessarily start by paying close attention to the ways that they frame competency in relation to equity. Here we draw from concerns raised by students in the present study, and critical disability theory, to support an institutional transposition from inherency to coherency, reframing how ability to teach can align with contemporary policy aspirations and inclusive practices. The paper is unique for drawing on student experiences to inform the development of knowledge in the field of teacher education along with critical disability perspectives with which to analyse them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the changing terrain of disability support policy in Australia. Drawing on a critical disability framework of policy sociology, the paper considers the policy problem of access to education for people with disabilities under recent reform by means of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which commenced full roll-out across the country from July 2016. The paper reviews NDIS reports, legislation and associated literature to consider how eligibility to scheme participation and education services are shaped, and how education is positioned in the development and implementation of the NDIS. The analysis highlights tensions that exist for people with disabilities and their families who both access the scheme and who might draw on its provision to support their education, because of the way the policy is oriented towards pathological categorisation, standardised outcomes and service delineation rather than integrated support and informed involvement. The paper concludes by arguing that despite the policy priority across Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries of increasing lifelong learning opportunities, fragmented NDIS policy in Australia prevents people with disabilities from achieving this ideal.

The scientific metaphor of the lens remains widely used in qualitative education research, despite critiques of positivism. Informed by two recently completed empirical doctoral studies relying on "Metaphors We Live By," we propose that the attachment to the lens is a fetish. We argue that this fetish, evident even in purportedly feminist, post-positivist and inclusive education research, emerges from fascination with masculinist and ableist power predicated on the othering of the feminine, and those with disabilities. Recourse to the language of power proves irresistible, if dangerous, for academics. We call for caution in the casual use of the lens and for new linguistic research repertoires that produce reality differently.

This paper explores the experiences of a small group of families in Australia in relation to recent reform to disability policy by way of the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS). Framed in critical disability perspectives of policy implementation research, the paper focuses on the extent to which the scheme articulates inclusive opportunities for children and young people with disabilities, particularly in relation to facilitating access to education. Interview data that illustrate families' expectations of the scheme and latter-day experiences, coercions and negotiations highlight the tensions that exist for scheme participants who draw on its provision to support their education. These first- and second-order policy effects indicate a welcome change to disability support in Australia, though the extent to which the scheme can advance inclusion for people with disabilities is uncertain, given the distance rendered between the policy and its participants and other service systems. The paper concludes with a theoretical discussion based on the analysis of how the NDIS is framed to interrelate with scheme participants and education and how it might be reframed for better outcomes.

The contextual precept of this paper is to re-theorise inclusive education beyond technical rational solutions to the "problem" of disability. Drawing on Foucauldian and critical disability theories, I make the case for the analysis of inclusive schooling through the lens of students' "included" subjectivities--notwithstanding the presence of diagnosed special educational needs. I contend that there is a theoretical mismatch between humanist inclusive schooling and the posthumanist position of disability: an epistemic fissure that impedes inclusive development. Through analysis of the voices of students with disabilities from two different schooling contexts in Australia and Spain, I demonstrate how fragmented virtues of normalcy suffused their subjectivities. I conclude the paper with a discussion of the roles that DisHuman disability studies might play in recasting inclusive schooling by troubling normative discourse.

This paper presents an overview of a situational analysis of inclusive schooling in Spain from the perspective of students with special educational needs. The purpose of this work was to learn how young people collectively considered their experiences of school inclusion. The participants--aged 12-19 years who attended six different settings--highlighted the school community, resources, teacher pedagogy, support and social cohesion as germane aspects of their inclusion. Through a presentation of these characteristics, this analysis demonstrates how schools can effectively fulfil the core requirement of teaching and supporting diversity and, in so doing, how they can incite included subjectivities of differently abled students. This analysis is positioned within the climate of economic instability in Spain, which threatens to derail the headway made towards inclusive schooling via the introduction of severe austerity measures.

Aligned with the broader movement from structuralism to the post-structuralisms [Lather, P. 2013. "Methodology-21: What Do We Do in the Afterward?" "International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education" 26 (6): 634-645; St. Pierre, E. A. 2009. "Afterword: Decentering Voice in Qualitative Inquiry." In "Voice in Qualitative Inquiry: Challenging Conventional, Interpretive, and Critical Conceptions in Qualitative Research," edited by A. Y. Jackson and L. A. Mazzei, 221-236. London: Routledge; St. Pierre, E. A. 2013. "The Posts Continue: Becoming." "International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education" 26 (6): 646-657], research in disability studies for the past two decades has found "the potholes" [Miller, L., J. B. Whalley, and I. Stronach. 2012. "From Structuralism to Poststructuralism." In "Research Methods in the Social Sciences," edited by B. Somekh and C. Lewin. London: SAGE] of disability rights scholarship. In this paper, I offer a critical research framework in the field of disability studies in education that is theoretical, political and personal. Concentrating on the positioning of disability, I draw on the methodological tools of post-structural representation, subjectivity and constructivist grounded theory to study how discursive practices within (and around) secondary schools shape "included" disabled subjects. In the paper I develop this framework and then demonstrate its application in ongoing research that critically counters the conventions that marginalize particular students in schools.

In this paper, a detailed analysis based on the lived experiences of the study participants and the researcher (each with vision impairment) in education, post school and in the pursuit for employment is developed. The policy discourses of disability legislation--both at national and international levels--are explored with particular reference to their enactment in Australia. The analysis focuses on the collective indifference to detached others, which is evident in the linguistic construction of people with disabilities in the United Nations [(2006). "Convention of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities." New York: United Nations] and the "Australian Standards for Education 2005" [Australian Department of Education, Science and Training. 2006. "Disability Standards for Education 2005 Plus Guidance Notes." Accessed March 12, 2012. http://nla.gov.au/nla.arc-7692.]. Together, these elements reflect the neoliberal principles that cast a shadow over the discourses of the disability policies.

In this paper, I report core findings of a small-scale qualitative study that I conducted with a group of young people with vision impairment who attended an inclusive secondary school in the Australian state of Queensland. My objective was to capture their voiced experiences of their schooling through face-to-face interviews and to develop a substantive theory that was grounded in the collected data. Relevant to the study was my status as an insider researcher, which impacted both data collection and analysis. Here, I develop the methodological process that I followed and present core findings of the study. These findings shed light on the practices within schools that are designed to promote inclusion yet perpetuate exclusion for students with impaired vision.

The experiences of young people with disabilities of inclusive schooling are largely under researched. This paper reports recent findings of a small-scale Australian qualitative study, in which secondary students with vision impairment spoke about their experiences of receiving paraprofessional support. Two overarching themes emerged from this study: "light" and "heavy" paraprofessional support. The results presented here demonstrate that participants described that support personnel upheld the strong arm of the special education tradition, which was manifestly detrimental to their inclusion. Raw data is presented to elucidate the emergent themes, and to explain the various pedagogical and general support roles of class and special educators in eliminating the need for direct paraprofessional presence in lessons. The light and heavy model of support is also examined in terms of how it fits into the complexity of the education discourse and the young people's own aspirations for full inclusion.