Rethinking inclusion: the philosophers of difference in practice

1
Rethinking inclusion the philosophers of
difference in practice

• Confusion, frustration, exhaustion and guilt
• Collision course between high stakes testing
  programmes and inclusion (NAE, 2005, internet
  source).
• Inclusion a disastrous legacy (Warnock, 2006)

2
The philosophers of difference

• Active experimentation, since we do not know in
  advance which way a line is going to turn
  (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987, p137)
• A belief of the future, in the future (Deleuze,
  quoted in Rajchman, 2001, p76)
• Deleuze and Guatarris deterritorialization, the
  rhizome and difference Foucaults practices of
  the self and transgression and Derridas
  deconstruction
• Subverting, subtracting and inventing
  Recognition, rupture and repair

3
Teachers and students Subtracting, subverting
and inventing

• Teacher/student relationships
• School spaces
• Rhizomic learning
• Behaviour

4
Rhizomic learning

• A rhizome, a burrow, yes - but not an ivory
  tower. A line of escape, yes - but not a refuge
  (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987, 41).
• Empirical wanderings
• Maps, rather than tracings of knowledge and of
  connections with others

5
Nomadic learning to teach recognition, rupture
and repair

• Exposing aporias and deconstructing dogma
• From content to expression deterritorializing
  teacher education
• Student teachers empirical wanderings
• Doing difference and desire
• Repairing the profession, preparing ourselves
• Collaboration and collusion

6
Exposing aporias

• How can student teachers be helped to acquire and
  demonstrate the necessary competences to qualify
  as a teacher and to understand themselves as in
  an inconclusive process of learning about others?
  (Gregoriou 2001).
• How can student teachers develop as autonomous
  professionals and learn to depend on others for
  support and collaboration?
• How can student teachers be supported in
  maximising student achievement and ensuring
  inclusivity?
• How can student teachers be helped to understand
  the features of particular impairments and avoid
  disabling individual students with that
  knowledge?
• What assistance can be given to student teachers
  to enable them to deal with the exclusionary
  pressures they encounter and avoid becoming
  embittered or closed to possibilities for
  inclusivity in the future?

7
Deconstructing dogma

• Reading how texts get into trouble, come unstuck,
  threaten to contradict themselves
• Two handed reading
• scrupulous and plausible misreadings (Spivak,
  1996, p45)
• Undecidability

8
Deterritorialization

• Unsettling a performative code breaking
• Chaosmos
• Becoming foreigners in our own tongue
• Refusing the signifieds eg what is inclusion?
• Creative subtraction
• No individuals behind expression

9
Repairing the profession, preparing ourselves

• Foucaults practices of the self
• Determining the ethical substance
• Mode of subjection
• Self practice or ethical work
• The telos

10
Uncanny inclusion?

• Academics complicating rather than explicating
• interstanding (Taylor and Saarinen, 1995)
• looking out for microfissures through which life
  leaks Imperceptible rupture, not signifying
  breaks opens up these possibilities as
  stammerings, murmurs, decodings, and
  disorientations (Roy, 2003)
• uncanny a thing known returning in a different
  form a revenant (Banville, 2005, p. 10)