Agency in Real Time? Situating Teachers’ Efforts toward Inclusion in the Context of Local and Enduring Struggles

Abstract

Background Teacher preparation for critical special education and inclusive education is premised on the ways in which dominant schooling discourses have unfairly positioned students with disabilities and their families. The hope of such teacher preparation programs is that through careful socialization into anti-oppressive discourses, teacher candidates will develop the capacity to go forth into troubled schooling systems and actively work against practices that perpetuate norms of dis/ability. Fundamental to such conceptualizations of teacher preparation is the presumption of teacher agency as a prerequisite for working toward equity in schools. Departing from conceptions of agency as a stable internal property that can be transported across contexts, I adopt a situated notion of agency to disclose teachers’ activities at the confluence of multiple schooling discourses. I deploy the framework of Holland and Lave to both unravel the local and enduring struggles that inform the discursive contexts in which efforts toward inclusion are made and disclose the cultural forms that emerge from the authoring of educators in the project of inclusion. Research Questions I reviewed the data generated at four different sites from 2006 to 2011 during the implementation of separate studies that I conducted to investigate inclusive practices. Those inquiries broadly examined how schooling/classroom conditions produce (in) equitable opportunities for students with disabilities. For this project, I re-examined the same data to ask the following questions: What are the particular conflicts and struggles that characterize the engagement of school practitioners seeking to implement inclusively oriented practices? Specifically, how do local discourses/conflicts within schools inform the production of specific forms of inclusive practice? Research Design All of the studies were ethnographically oriented and privileged a narrative exploration of participant experiences. Sources of data included participant observations and semistructured interviews. Additional data sources across sites included student work samples, school newsletters, electronic communication with participants, and informal exchanges with students and teachers in the classrooms. Each of the studies that were included in the cross-case analysis within this project was subject to separate and complete data analysis followed by a series of qualitatively written products reflecting the particular questions that guided each study. For this project, data were re-examined inductively with deliberate attention to the framework suggested by Holland and Lave. Conclusions Teacher education discourses that privilege a politics of polarity (inclusion vs. exclusion) may be insufficient to meet the complicated demands of enabling inclusivity in practice. I draw on the inevitable entanglement of diverse commitments within educators’ practices to suggest that inclusion as an act of deferring may be a helpful complement to those efforts. A pedagogy of deferral privileges the pragmatic negotiation with local and widely circulating discourses while upholding long-term commitments such as the disruption of norms of ability.

A Framework for Preparing to Teach Students With Extensive Support Needs in the 21st Century

“…This includes advocating for inclusive education through forming an inclusive teacher identity, and exerting personal autonomy to enact this identity (Li & Ruppar, 2020). It includes skills related to collective agency, in which allies are identified and sustained, with everyone taking a role in systems change (Naraian, 2014). It also includes recognizing ableism in its many forms.…”

Development and validation of a potential assessment inventory for assessing EFL teachers’ ecological agency

“…In the current climate of social justice and equity, a growing body of research (Lyons et al, 2016 ; Naraian, 2014 ; Naraian & Schlessinger, 2018 ; Themane & Thobejane, 2019 ) emphasizes the agentic role of teachers in providing inclusive education and equitable atmospheres for marginalized students. Naraian ( 2014 ) for instance utilized a situated concept of agency to discover teachers’ activities in several schooling discourses via observation, interview, and document analysis. The results indicated that teacher education discourses that benefit the policy of inclusion vs. exclusion are not sufficient to fulfill the complex requirements of permitting the practice of inclusivity.…”

“…A body of burgeoning studies investigated teacher agency from various standpoints such as the impact of teacher agency on teachers' professional development and the general quality of education (Lai et al, 2016;Ruan, 2018), the effect of teacher reflection on teacher agency (Jones & Charteris, 2017;Reichenberg, 2022), the interplay between teacher agency and teacher identity (Buchanan, 2015;Connolly et al, 2018), teacher agency and identity commitment (Tao & Gao, 2017), the effect of curriculum reform on teacher agency (Poulton, 2020;Ruan et al, 2020), and the role of teacher agency in inclusive education (Lyons et al, 2016;Naraian, 2014;Naraian & Schlessinger, 2018;Themane & Thobejane, 2019). The data collection methodologies utilized in these studies for the teacher agency construct are mainly based on interviews, reflective essays or diaries, classroom observation, portfolios, focused group discussions, document analysis, and teachers' narratives.…”

A Scoping Review on Teacher Agency for Inclusive Education: Mapping Existing Evidence and Conceptual Frameworks

“…In Italia, si è verificata una tendenza simile, che ha portato a sostituire il termine integrazione (processo volto a promuovere la partecipazione delle/degli studentesse/i con disabilità nella scuola di tutti), con il termine inclusione, interpretandone il significato in senso ampio, come processo che riguarda tutte/i le/gli studentesse/i, non solo coloro che sperimentano una condizione di disabilità (Lascioli, 2014). Il termine Inclusione scolastica assume infiniti significati sulla base delle culture e delle pratiche del contesto in cui si realizza (Naraian, 2014). Pertanto, appare ancora come un concetto ideale, lontano dalle pratiche d'inclusione (più o meno efficaci) introdotte a scuola (Naraian, 2020).…”

“…L'analisi dei contributi ha fatto emergere gli elementi che ostacolano la TA inclusiva dei docenti, confermando i risultati del lavoro di Li e Ruppar (2020). In sintesi, essi sono: la disuguaglianza di status fra docente curricolare e di sostegno, l'assenza di pianificazione condivisa, la mancanza di adeguato supporto alle/i docenti da parte della struttura amministrativa e di governance della scuola, l'impossibilità di tradurre in pratica quanto appreso durante il corso di specializzazione, che conferisce la qualifica di special education teacher, l'impreparazione dell'insegnante di sostegno in alcuni specifici contenuti disciplinari, la mancanza di tempo dell'insegnante curricolare per la differenziazione a causa della necessità di completare i programmi e, infine, la pervasività della cultura abilista (Naraian, 2014;Naraian & Schlessinger, 2018). Questi elementi presenti nel contesto americano sono stati rilevati anche nel contesto italiano (Canevaro & Ianes, 2019;Ciambrone, 2018;Fiorucci, 2016;Santi & Ruzzante, 2016).…”