Provocations: Putting philosophy to work on inclusion

Abstract

Inclusion is currently characterised by confusion about what it is supposed to be and do; frustration at the way the current climate of standards and accountability constrains teachers’ work; guilt at the exclusion created for individual pupils; and exhaustion, associated with a sense of failure and futility. This chapter considers the ‘impossibility’ of inclusion in the current context and how it has become a highly emotive and somewhat irrational space of confrontation, with questions about how we should include displaced by questions about why we should include, and under what conditions. An attempt is made to rescue inclusion from its valedictory state and to reframe it as an ongoing struggle and a more productive form of political engagement. This reframing takes some of the key ideas of the philosophers of difference - Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida and Foucault - and puts them to work on the inclusion problem (Allan, 2008).