ABSTRACT
Len Barton’s opening remarks in the foreword to this book, that inclusive thinking and practice are hard work, is evidenced as the case throughout all the chapters which follow it. As an academic, working in the relatively – and I stress relatively – informal atmosphere of a university, I am brought back sharply, in reading the chapters of this book, to the hectic pace of a teacher’s life in school or college. Tangible through the research struggles of the pages I have just finished reading are the sounds of the corridors I remember from my own teaching career, the bells ringing, the pushing, the armfuls of books being carted from one temporary classroom to the next, the dinner duties. When Simpson writing about the constraints on her research practice in Chapter 5 notes: ‘Finding the time for an observation is extremely difficult. Each time this has been arranged, Michael is absent, has absconded, a supply teacher is taking the lesson or I have been put on a cover rota,’ it all comes back to me – with frightening clarity – and I am moved, before making any other comment about the value of the contributions in this collection, to stand back and applaud – just as Joe’s classmates did in Kathy Charles’s beautifully articulated study, on a tremendously difficult job well done!
