ABSTRACT
This chapter sets out the book’s context, coverage and position, while explaining how it presents a broad contemporary and critical analysis of the field of inclusive education for children and young people with difficulties and disabilities. It explains that despite its appeal that there are theoretical concerns about the ambiguity of what is involved in inclusion and practical concerns about realising inclusive education. The core ideas in the book are about value and conceptual tensions and dilemmas, such as, the dilemmas of difference – whether and when educational differentiation is excluding and humiliating and when enabling. However, the chapter also discusses other tensions and dilemmas in the field; participation vs protection, choice vs equity and choice vs. social inclusion. This is to consider how value tensions can be approached, using Berlin’s distinction between a hedgehog and a fox perspective. This is the distinction between holding a single universal value versus holding several values that can be contradictory. The chapter explains how the book is inclined to a plural value – fox perspective, while extending hedgehog-fox distinction by identifying two typical approaches to handling these value tensions.
