ABSTRACT
Inclusive education is an umbrella term used in the United States to describe the restructuring of special education to permit all or most students to be integrated in mainstream classrooms through reorganisation and instructional innovations. Educative change is characterized by an ongoing search for what works locally rather than that which seems to work elsewhere. It seeks to interrupt the normative priorities that limit and define educational policy, practice and research in narrow ways, and instead promotes invention and its correlates – human agency, self understanding, interpretation and dialogue – all uncommon features of educational change. Research into classrooms where educative practice is evidenced, in the form of renewed curricula in mathematics, science and reading through whole-language instruction, indicates that teachers have, in fact, challenged their own assumptions about the nature of teaching and learning. Moreover, the degree to which these innovations challenge the conventional paradigm of practice prompts a range of teacher response from acceptance to avoidance.
