Inclusion in Education and in Public Debates on Education

Abstract

Inclusion is nowadays a most cherished notion in educational discourses and policies around the globe. Discourses of inclusion appear as the most humane, politically sensitive and praiseworthy heights that political thought and educational practice can reach. At the same time, a kind of inclusion in the public sphere is enacted whenever people freely join debates on matters of general interest, educational or other. For, participation in debates on education and on teacher education is not limited to educational researchers, teacher organizations and all those involved in educational theory and practice. The present article begins with the operations of inclusion in educational theory and discusses some complicities and risks lurking in the unqualified valorization of inclusion that is noticeable in educational discourses and in public debates on education and teachers’ performance. Such valorization operates inter alia at the expense of thoughtful withdrawal and pertinent self-exclusion. In societal debates on education, inclusion as unconditional prerogative of a narcissist I (eye) or as social interpellation to participate legitimizes just everybody’s having investigative relevance to issues of education. The article ends with some suggestions concerning the positioning of inclusion within a broader set of concepts required for a desirable redirection of educational discourses and policies.

On the idea of intrinsic human worth

“…This could almost be seen as a pedagogical goal: the cultivation of a more modest demeanour, as a way of coping with the paradoxes of inclusion/exclusion. This modesty is sometimes in short supply as the rhetoric of inclusion discourses can sometimes become shrill and insistent (a point noted by Papastephanou, 2019). This has the effect of alienating sympathy, but not merely because of the way that demands may be expressed.…”

Glo-ubuntu as an extension of Global Citizenship Education: Cultivating the notion of an African university

“…The examples listed here of GCE in service of neoliberal globalised market needs seem to reduce and constrain the potential of education from a powerful transformational and societal tool to merely the initiation of students into a neoliberal hosting frame (Papastephanou 2019).…”