Paradoxes of inclusive teaching practices and the beautiful between

Abstract

Imagine a PE teacher in a secondary school where "teaching inclusively" is one of the main principles. The school proclaims they work towards respect and acceptation of all kinds of differences. The teacher asserts this is good for children and society, because: "those who join inclusive settings in schools learn to overcome differences. That's how we work towards an inclusive world" (as is mentioned in the school's brochure). That is what a PE teacher tries to achieve every day: working together to create a better world by educating children towards good, happy, and healthy citizenship. In daily practice she 1 will experience that not all students are interested in PE. She encounters students who feel ashamed of their bodies being on public display due to disability, size, or ineptness. She takes students into account who lack proper clothes due to poverty or haven't had breakfast before coming to school. She struggles with what she calls boisterous boys and uninterested girls. She tries to keep the peace and abolishes ethnic and racialized-based quarrels among students from the gym. She is proud that PE offers an opportunity to excel to those who do poorly in cognitive subjects. She engages with students who see PE lessons as a time to show off their skills, while others want to chill out during a school day, etc. And while the teacher is trying to include everyone and make sure all enjoy PE in her heterogeneous groups, she also has to assign grades, contribute to social integration and citizenship, encourage personal development, inspire students to develop healthy habits, and to be physically active in leisure time (while she does the same), etc. She strives to meet professional standards defining what is described as necessary for PE to be a good experience. She experiences many dilemmas in this educational endeavor in her 24 PE-lessons in a week.Such daily practices of PE teachers are embedded in political notions about inclusive education at a national and international level. One of the first international policy initiatives to define and promote inclusion in education came in the Salamanca statement (United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), 1994). In this statement, which was signed in Salamanca, 92 countries, including the Netherlands, promised to work on increasing the participation and limiting the unnecessary exclusion of students with Special Educational Needs (SEN) in "regular" schools 2 (Magnússon, 2019). The focus of the promise was based on the assumption that all aspects of schooling must change if inclusion is to occur: the curriculum needs to be reformed, exclusionary practices Recent reports show that teachers think that integrating "other" students into the classroom has become more difficult and more complex (Ledoux & Waslander, 2020). This "othering" of (groups of) students who are named as needing to be integrated, may have emerged from the language of policies of inclusive education that aimed to regulate and limit the flow of children and youth to speci...