ABSTRACT
This book is about 11 pupils with special needs, who were actively seeking inclusion in mainstream schools. The voices of the pupils and their mainstream peers are foregrounded and read alongside those of other interested parties-teachers, other professionals and parents-as well as the more formal discourses of special needs. The pupils’ accounts, thus, are not essentialized and treated as indicative of how things really are, but are viewed as part of a complex power/knowledge knot, which is not supposed to be unravelled (Simons, 1995). Research on the mainstreaming of children with special needs has tended to concentrate on the amount of integration taking place, seldom moving beyond crude notions of how much time a child spends in an ordinary school or classroom or ‘inventories of human and physical resources’ (Slee, 1993:351). The technical and empiricist bases of knowledge production and the ‘methodological individualism’ of researchers (Oliver, 1992a:107) has had the effect of constructing children with special needs as objects on whom this knowledge is exercised. The voice of the child is absent from most accounts of special education, silenced by professional discourses of needs which are concerned with matters of placement or practice:
Despite the growth of the disability movement and the struggles of disabled people to control the decision-making processes which shape their lives, little attention has been given to the say that young people have in controlling their education… They are the recipients (or not) of other people’s decisions. (Swain, 1993:156)
Where their voices have been foregrounded (Lewis, 1994; Lynas, 1986a; Sheldon, 1991) these have been read either positivistically, connecting truths to objects outside of language, or phenomenologically, connecting truth to the consciousness of individual knowers (Ligget, 1988). Research by Armstrong, Galloway and Tomlinson (1993) on the assessment experiences of pupils with emotional or behavioural difficulties and their exclusion from the assessment process by professionals is a notable exception. Such work reinforces the importance of examining pupils’ perspectives in the context of the power/ knowledge relationships in which they were obtained.
