ABSTRACT
The inclusion ‘movement’ has both drawn upon and stimulated a wide range of education scholarship and research. This range embraces: attempts to refine the conceptualisation of inclusive education; studies which aim to identify the characteristics and determinants of inclusive schools and classrooms; comparative and detailed studies of practice which reveal features of inclusive practice in relation to specific groups of learners; studies of the educational and other outcomes of inclusive provision; and collaborative action research aiming to learn about and promote the changes in practice entailed in schools becoming more inclusive. Reviewing this range, Clough (2000) has usefully proposed a tentative ‘framework of perspectives’, with five main elements that map broadly onto related historical developments in the UK over the preceding fifty years. He has suggested that each perspective generally dominated a decade since the 1950s, having had its roots in earlier times and having consequences which in many cases continue into the present. So we have:
Whilst these different perspectives indicate the richness of research and scholarship in this field, they also point to a considerable degree of fragmentation. It is our view that the relationships amongst these perspectives have not, by and large, been characterised by productive dialogue. For the most part, indeed, there has been no relationship at all, and research within any one perspective has proceeded as though the other perspectives simply did not exist. To use our own work as an example, one of us (Dyson) completed a study of the impact on the attainments of other students of the inclusion in mainstream schools of students identified as having special educational needs (Dyson et al., 2004). The study operates with the familiar techniques of school effectiveness and school improvement research – analyses of student outcomes, aggregation of those outcomes at school level,
and case studies of more and less ‘inclusive’, and more and less ‘effective’, schools. Its conceptualisation of inclusion is limited and traditional: the idea that students can be divided meaningfully and usefully into those with and without special educational needs is accepted; inclusion is seen as being about the placement of the former group in mainstream schools; and the worthwhileness of inclusion is to be judged simply by its impacts on the attainments of other students. Whilst the study was designed in this way for what we continue to believe are good reasons, and whilst – as good research should – it acknowledges its own limitations, it remains the case that it owes little if anything to the other perspectives which have been so productive elsewhere in inclusion research. We suggest, however, that similar criticisms could be levelled at many other studies in this field.
