ABSTRACT
In the following, I attempt to engage with inclusive education as a movement and as a concept. However, whether it can be termed a movement is as unclear as the question of whether it can be considered a singular concept is. The notion of inclusive education originates in English-speaking countries and has been promoted by theoretical developments as well as political and civil rights movements. It can in a sense be considered a child of the notion of inclusion, in the sense that it encompasses an attempt to formalise and operationalise the normative concept of inclusion. Inclusion, however, is just as ambiguous a concept as inclusive education. Not only are there conceptual, theoretical and political disputes over the meaning of the two terms (Allan, 2014a, pp. 182–184; Popkewitz & Lindblad, 2000, pp. 6–7); there are also great cultural and geographical differences in the use of the notions. In order to try to limit and narrow – and to make possible at all – the attempt to grasp the concept, I confine myself to the British and Danish contexts, although the intricate connections between the developments here and at the international level must, at least to a certain extent, be incorporated. The implications of international declarations such as the Salamanca Statement are of great importance to regional and national projects of inclusive education, and they give an insight into how theoretical movements influence and are influenced by political developments. However, there is also an obvious gap between the efforts for inclusive education and the policy credo of Education for All in the developed countries, such as Denmark and the developed English-speaking countries, and less developed countries. 2 A discussion of whether the efforts are of the same nature and have the same aims is beyond the scope of this work, but there is something to be said for the argument that in regard to education it should not matter where one is born. Education should be accessible to all, and in a sense, this is a central component of the educational theory that is presented. Education – as proposed here – necessarily functions as a disruptor of social order and necessarily is for all. However, this does not make it blind to the cultural differences that determine local curricula and educational processes. In other words, it does not mean that what is ‘put on the table’ 3 in the activity of schooling should be the same or that how, when and in what settings it takes place should be the same 24across the world. Quite the contrary; the activity of schooling as proposed here is in stark contrast to the standardisation agenda of international policies such as the Bologna Process and some of the documents that have followed in the wake of the Salamanca Statement. Nonetheless, I argue that some of the constitutive elements of the activity of schooling are the same across the world, and two of these are that it is a revolutionary process which potentially breaks with social order and that it is constituted by openness to difference and the task of establishing a shared space for attention towards the world. 4 In other words, it is constituted by difference in its very nature, being a matter of bringing together and mediating between the individual human being in all its difference and the world we inhabit.
