Foundations of Inclusive Education Research

From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion

Scot Danforth Phyllis Jones
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 FROM SPECIAL EDUCATION TO
INTEGRATION TO GENUINE
INCLUSION
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Scot Danforth and Phyllis Jones

ABSTRACT

This chapter traces the shift of many progressive educators from a

general faith in special education to the more recent push for democratic
and ethical inclusive education. This chapter examines the critical scho-
larship that propelled many educators away from systems of special edu-
cation and into the inclusive education movement. Two phases in the
development of inclusive education are described, an initial failed attempt
often described by researchers as “integration,” and the current social
movement building toward a more genuine social transformation of class-
rooms and schools.
Keywords: Special education; integration; inclusive education; critical
scholarship; policy

An especial interest in the history of thought and expression is, of course, characteristic
of transitional ages in the lives of cultures; it arises when received traditions of thought
and mystic endowments appear to have lost their relevance to current social problems
or their presumed coherency …. (White, 1969, p. 606)

Foundations of Inclusive Education Research

International Perspectives on Inclusive Education, Volume 6, 1 21
Copyright r 2015 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved
ISSN: 1479-3636/doi:10.1108/S1479-363620150000006014
1
 2 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

Over the past three decades, an ambitious field of study and practical
action involving policy development, teacher preparation, educational
research, and professional practices has grown. What we know broadly as
inclusive education, a field dedicated to educating students of varying abil-
ities and social identities in communities of acceptance and support, has
developed into a worldwide professional and political cause. As this field of
thought and action has blossomed, little attention has been paid to the con-
ceptual and disciplinary traditions that have served to inform, propel, as
well as limit the progress of inclusion. Roads have been traveled, so to
speak, without critical inspection of the suitability of both the means of tra-
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vel and the technologies of navigation. Scholars and school-based practi-

tioners have tended to make the naı̈ve, trusting assumption that the
intellectual structures and content appropriated and utilized in the name of
inclusive education are appropriate and sufficient to the purposes and chal-
lenges of the inclusive education cause.
White (1969) has observed that the intellectual roots of a nation, project,
or field of study are seldom scrutinized when all seems well. When people
feel comforted, stable, and reassured, the tendency is to focus solely on the
standard tasks at hand without questioning the underlying concepts that
give intellectual and practical structure and content to those tasks.
Customary practices of thought and inquiry are casually taken to be both
valuable and necessary to the work. Only under the duress of significant
cultural transition or dramatic social failure do scholars begin to cast an
eye of critical reconsideration upon the intellectual ingredients that, over
time, came to comprise the customary recipe.
The purpose of this chapter is to trace the course taken by many pro-
gressive educators from a general faith in special education to an on-going
push for a more democratic and ethical inclusive education. This chapter
begins with an overview of and an introduction to the traditions of critical
scholarship that comprise what might be called the inclusive turn, a historic
shift of faith among educators seeking social justice and effective educa-
tional provision, a step away from systems of special education and toward
the energetic, purposeful, and often loosely defined inclusive education
movement. This chapter will narrate the political and practical circum-
stances that facilitated the inclusive turn, thereby providing a description of
both what inclusive educators largely stepped away from and what they
optimistically stepped toward. This chapter will then describe two phases in
the development of inclusive education, an initial failed attempt often
described by researchers as “integration,” and the current social movement
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 3

searching for and building toward a more genuine social transformation of

classrooms and schools.
Understanding the radical change in ethical, philosophical, and practical
commitment that leaped many educators from a devotion to special educa-
tion to a quest for inclusive education, one may then ask the kinds of ques-
tions that drive the remainder of the volume. Once many educational
practitioners and researchers left traditional special education to seek a
progressive inclusive education, adopting the latter as the school reform
movement more likely to fulfill their visions of ethical and democratic
schooling, what were the primary scholarly traditions and conceptual
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foundations employed to build “this new field of inclusive education”

(Danforth & Naraian, 2015, p. 70)? What ideas, notions, and theories then
constitute this field? If inclusive education stands as a political and practical
mission quite distinct from traditional special education, what unique,
useful intellectual resources have been gathered to fortify and fuel this field
of inquiry, policy, and pedagogy? That is the purpose of this volume, to
offer an articulation neither comprehensive nor final of those intellec-
tual foundations of inclusion.

CRITIQUE OF SPECIAL EDUCATION

In North America, Western Europe, Australia, and elsewhere, the field of

inclusive education grew out of a sense of disappointment with the theory
and practice of special education. During the 1970s and 1980s, many
educational scholars found the systems of special education provision,
supporting educational policies, and developing research literatures to be
deeply flawed. Criticisms targeted the efficacy and ethics of practices, the
undemocratic consequences of policies, and the narrow epistemologies and
methodologies of research (Danforth, 2004; Danforth & Morris, 2005;
Gallagher, Heshusius, Iano, & Skrtic, 2003).
In the United States, for example, the academic critique of special edu-
cation included multiple dimensions that scrutinized both research and
practice. A series of scholars raised philosophy of social science issues,
questioning the positivistic bent of published research while espousing criti-
cal and interpretive forms of qualitative inquiry (e.g., Heshusius, 1982,
1984, 1988, 1989; Iano, 1986, 1987; Poplin, 1987, 1988). The holistic, clini-
cal style of research that mixed practices of quantitative and qualitative
 4 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

data collection that was popular in the 1950s and 1960s was quickly nar-
rowing to a detached brand of objectivism by the time the national
Education for Handicapped Children Act was implemented in the late
1970s (Danforth, 2009, 2011). As qualitative approaches to research gained
legitimacy and common practice among general education scholars in the
following decades, American special education journals largely rejected
qualitative inquiry in favor of behavioral and statistical analyses. Critics of
this ideological hegemony claimed that the lack of critical and interpretive
research contributed to the devaluation and disenfranchisement of disabled
youth in American schools. An authoritative brand of objectivism funds
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mechanisms of social control, while many approaches to qualitative

research offer opportunities for humanistic understanding and political
liberation (Gallagher et al., 2003).
Running parallel to the philosophy and practice of inquiry critique
was a two-front protest scholarly and legal concerning the practices
of institutional racism in processes of special education identification.
Early papers by Dunn (1968) and Johnson (1969) asked whether the
special education system served as a means to segregate and alienate
African-American students. Mercer’s (1973) study illuminated the biased
social processes that applied the label “mental retardation” to large num-
bers of African-American and Mexican-American youth. The Larry P. v.
Riles federal district court case filed originally in 1971 claimed that the
use of racially and culturally biased intelligence tests by the San
Francisco Unified School District resulted in the disproportionate place-
ment of African-American students in “educable mental retardation”
classes. The court ruled in 1979 in favor of the plaintiffs and ordered the
State of California to cease using a single intelligence measure to deter-
mine special education eligibility and placement of African-American
students (Wade, 1980).
Critique of special education took a slightly different path in the United
Kingdom. The 1944 Education Act established distinct categorical provi-
sion for learners across the United Kingdom. At the age of 11 all children
would take an examination to decide either an academic grammar educa-
tion (university track) or technical secondary modern schooling (workforce
track). This was known as the “eleven plus.” Children were also sorted
into a range of separate schools relating to a disability diagnosis, for exam-
ple, schools for pupils with moderate and mild disabilities. At this time, the
responsibility for educating students who fell into the category of “educa-
tionally subnormal severe” lay with the Health Department. This
suggests that this group of children were deemed uneducable.
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 5

In 1971 this responsibility shifted to the Education Department follow-

ing campaigns by education and welfare sectors (Peter, 1995). This move
occurred in the context of a general “comprehensive” initiative that arose
as a backlash to the 11 plus selective schooling system. Educational sociolo-
gists were a major presence in this critique, which connected the selective
schooling practices to wider societal issues, such as social class and poverty
(Bernstein, 1977; Tomlinson, 1981).
Whilst the new comprehensive schools were being established for main-
stream education, the heritage of the Department of Health endured as the
hospital junior training centers were replaced with separate schools for chil-
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dren with severe learning (intellectual) disabilities. This provision added to

the well-established segregated schools for children with other disabilities.
There was an assumption the different groups of learners’ required discrete
and different schooling.
The Warnock Report (1978) highlighted the flaws with provision based
on categorization and labeling. This report acknowledged that main-
stream schools were full of pupils with differing needs and that there were
indeed 20% of children requiring some form of educational support
across their school career. Of that 20%, 18% included learners with no
formal identification of special education highlighting the fact that schools
and classrooms were made up of children with many diverse learning
needs. The discourse of integration was the dominant discourse, with
attention being paid the integration of learners with formal special educa-
tional needs in mainstream schooling, be it locational, social, or func-
tional integration. A major focus was pedagogy, how to make integration
work in practice.
The 1981 Education Act formed part of a shift in policies about special
education, it put an end to provision developed around categories of dis-
ability and stated that pupils had special educational needs when they had
learning needs that required additional provision from that was offered in
the mainstream school. Such individual needs would be represented in a
Statement of Special Education that set out the needs and how a Local
Education Authority was going to meet these needs. It has only been
recently, in the Children and Families Act of 2014 that created space for
multi-disciplinary Education, Health and Care plans that replaces the
Statements of Special Education. Norwich (2007) argues that even though
these changes in policy occurred, in practice the categorization of children
sustains and tends to be about finding disability categories with better
sounding names: the heritage of the medical model of disability continuing
to influence policy and practice.
 6 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

The civil rights agenda played a major influence on the developing policy
and practices of inclusion. Reformers from the rights perspective were dri-
ven by the idea that it is a human right for a child to be included in their
local mainstream school (Evans, 2007). The United Kingdom has a history
of actively participating in international discourses of policy and practice
around inclusive schooling. The signing of the Salamanca agreement in
1994 signaled a shift to developing inclusive schooling. The international
commitment to a rights based equity agenda for all children is demon-
strated through the sustained engagement and participation in international
policy and practice discourse, for example, the most recent UNESCO
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Incheon Declaration (2015).

The Center for Studies in Integration in Education (later known as the
Center for Studies in Inclusive Education) advocated for this and chal-
lenged Local Education Authorities to change practice achieve this idea.
This center worked very closely with parent and advocacy groups. The
Index for Inclusion (Booth & Ainscow, 2000), a school review tool that
examines the barriers to learning and participation emerged from the center
that focused on developing inclusive practices. Professional perspective
influenced the next policy development in 1998, Meeting Special
Educational Needs: A Programme of Action, which set out the funding
streams to raise the standards for all children. This allocation of resources
for different groups of pupils, including those with special educational
needs became a focus of research that endures today. Changes in teacher
education preparation also contributed to the developing policy and prac-
tices of inclusion.
Scholarship in special education in the United Kingdom, although influ-
enced by the psychological discourse, also embraced more qualitative
approaches. In the eighties and nineties, inquiry in special education
tended to emanate from professional organizations and played a large role
informing classroom practice (but not necessarily questioning it) and the
dissemination occurred through professional journals. The medical model
of disability heavily influenced such scholarship. In 1986, Len Barton
created the journal Disability, Handicap & Society, which changed to
Disability & Society in 1993 that served as a publication outlet for sociolo-
gical and qualitative inquiry in special and inclusive education. This
inquiry contributed a more critical discourse to that of the current practice
based scholarship and was further augmented with the publication of
the International Journal of Inclusive Education, which encourages multi-
disciplinary dialogue on inclusive education.
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 7

All pre-service teacher education programs in discrete areas of special

education would cease (HMSO, 1985). All future teachers were to have an
undergraduate mainstream preparation, which could then be augmented
with additional special education training at the graduate level. This policy
change reflected the view that all children benefit from teachers with a cen-
tral general education component to their preparation. Scholarship in
inclusive schools, including inclusive pedagogy, emerged as researchers and
practitioners engaged with this shift in teacher education policy (for exam-
ple, Florian and Kershner’s exploration of inclusive pedagogy in 2009).
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CONVENTIONAL AND CRITICAL NARRATIVES

Standing high above the broader wash of critical scholarship, two books,
one British and one American, became centerpieces of the wave of critique
and discontent on both sides of the Atlantic. Tomlinson’s (1982) sociologi-
cal analysis of special education in England revealed the harsh political
underside of special education systems typically portrayed as humane and
unproblematic. Behind the veneer of charitable good will and professional
expertise was a political system perpetuating social hierarchy and injustice.
American scholar Skrtic’s (1991) philosophical analysis demonstrated the
irrationality and ineffectiveness of the most basic conceptual and practical
features of the American special education system. Skrtic illuminated
an administrative bureaucracy and professional culture lacking scientific
reason and democratic values.
Although the two critiques were quite different in nature one sociolo-
gical and one philosophical each encouraged scholars to question the
assumption that special education theories, practices, and delivery systems
were rational and egalitarian. Further, each highlighted and further fueled
strands of critical scholarship concerning the politics of disability and dis-
ability science in the public schools. The knowledge base and professional
practices of special education came under intense fire in both the United
States and United Kingdom.
Taken together as the two most prominent and influential critiques of
special education, the Tomlinson and Skrtic books combine to provide a
powerful pair of narratives that effectively perform a “hermeneutics of sus-
picion” (Leiter, 2004, p. 74). The hermeneutics of suspicion is a mode of
critical reading originally developed by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur
based on his interpretation of the strategies employed by Marx, Freud, and
 8 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

Nietsche. The general purpose of this form of critical analysis is to decode

how a given discourse both illuminates and conceals, instructs, and distorts
(Scott-Baumann, 2009). Working in this tradition, Tomlinson and Skrtic
articulate two narratives of special education practice, policy, and research.
Most common, and rarely critiqued, is the conventional narrative of special
education as a reasonable, ethical, effective response to the fact that certain
children have disabilities or special needs. Tomlinson and Skrtic describe
this standard tale as an ideological, illusory veneer that serves dominant
power interests while occluding the deeper, more troubling meanings
hidden beneath (e.g., Brantlinger, 1997). The second narrative a critical
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narrative they offer is the counter-story of how professional and social

class power interests are fulfilled through the social production of child-
hood pathologies as well as development of professions and organizational
systems to control and treat those disorders.
Readers are cautioned that the narrative analysis conducted in this chap-
ter employs the same sort of ideal types that Skrtic (1991) utilizes in his
book. In order to create greater clarity of description and a stronger, more
explanatory contrast between the conventional and critical narratives, the
analysis involves a degree of hyperbole and oversimplification. The intent is
not to impugn the motivations or efforts of individual educators who have
devoted their careers to teaching young people. Indeed, many of those
earnest persons meet frustration in their daily work due to the unavoidable
tensions and inconsistencies between these two narratives. Our purpose is
not to question the personal motives of individuals but to present two over-
arching narratives of special education in bold relief in order to demystify
habitual occlusions, illuminate unexamined culverts, and promote new dia-
logues portending dramatic social change.
The conventional narrative told both by the field of special education
about itself and about special education by policymakers and laypersons is
the tale of “benevolent humanitarianism” (Tomlinson, 1982, p. 6). Picture
the common scene: A special educator meets a new acquaintance who asks,
“What do you do?” The special educator replies, “I am a special education
teacher. I teach children with disabilities.” To this, the face of the new
acquaintance softens, the eyes grow a little dewy, and the voice kindly says,
“Oh, you must be a very patient, caring person.” The public understanding
of what it means to be a special educator plays on longstanding assump-
tions about the tremendous “needs” emanating from disabled persons and
the equally enormous storehouses of good will contained within the care-
giving professionals. The special educator, in this story, is a grandiose
moral character built of equal parts compassion, kindness, and selflessness.
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 9

That moral character is the protagonist in the conventional narrative,

a story of an entire profession founded upon an ethos of charitable
motivations and helpful actions. The recipient of the professional’s wise
and caring attention is the nearly helpless disabled child (and family)
who, lacking the psychological abilities and physical fortitude to be a
self-determining agent, waits like a damsel in distress for the heroic
special educator. The conventional story matches the capabilities and
good will of the professional to the obverse character, the student in dire
need.
According to this common story, the unambiguous purpose of special
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education is “to ‘do good’ to certain children” (Tomlinson, 1982, p. 6).

There are students who, in the European framing, “have special needs” or
in the American discourse, “have disabilities.” Those students suffer from
deficits in learning, social, or behavior skills due to psychological, neurolo-
gical, or physical disorders. Whether understood in terms of special needs
or disabilities, these are students who cannot be effectively served by the
usual structures and practices of public education. Special education was
founded as an institutional subsidiary of the public school devoted to
teaching and caring for the (almost) unteachable. The profession of special
education is an organized enactment of a deep philanthropic impetus, a
humane desire to help those in need of help.
The profession’s ethic of charity is further fortified by its muscular
science. Skrtic notes the role of an objectivist science as an additional
source of virtue to the profession. Special education researchers and practi-
tioners embraced a functionalist approach to social science, a positivistic
brand of empiricism that offers a value-free neutrality and a capacity for
tremendous precision. This paradigm of science “studies it subject matter
from an objectivist point of view … to provide rational explanations of
social affairs (Skrtic, 1991, pp. 13 14). By embracing the form of social
science claiming the highest level of authority and certainty, special educa-
tion augmented the narrative of benevolent humanitarianism with a power-
ful discourse of rationality. Special education is devoted not only to
helpfulness but to knowing and acting with scientific exactitude. It is a field
combining a kindhearted ethic with an epistemology of rigor, fusing a
purity of the heart with clarity of vision.
Armed with a deep skepticism about the claims of benevolent motiva-
tion and ideology-free science, the critical narrative asks the Brantlinger
(2005) question, “Who benefits from special education?” Rather than
accepting the conventional narrative claims at face value, this story
involves a critical sociological and theoretical analysis of the facts on
 10 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

the ground, of what actually occurs in schools and classrooms as well as

university research and teacher preparation programs.
The first contention of the critical narrative is that special education
asserts powerful social control over children with special needs and their
families. Under the guise of helpfulness, the special education system is a
branch of government seeking to control children and families deemed
troublesome or deviant. Three specific features of the field of special educa-
tion operate to create and maintain the regime of social control, bureau-
cracy, authoritative science, and benevolent humanitarianism. Skrtic’s
research emphasizes the enveloping and unyielding nature of the special
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education bureaucracy as an organizational bulwark offering standardiza-

tion and inflexibility to diverse students and families who would benefit
from creativity and open-minded problem-solving. “(I)nstead of accommo-
dating heterogeneity, it screens it out by forcing its clients’ needs into one
of its standards programs, or by forcing them out of the system altogether”
(Skrtic, 1991, p. 165). An organizational system devised explicitly to deal
with extremes of human diversity responds with a finite, pre-set repertoire
of professional ideas and actions that frequently pigeon-holes students and
families.
The limited array of professional practices often described as
evidence-based practices authorized by the field of special education and
taught within teacher preparation programs are sanctioned and controlled
by the functionalist paradigm of social science. Despite the existence of
multiple paradigms of social science, the domination of functionalism in
special education allows the field “no recognition of the possibility of alter-
native frames of reference” (Skrtic, 1991, p. 118). Greatly excluded from
the special education discourse are alternative paradigms of social science
and disability studies scholarship with foundational roots in critical sociol-
ogy (e.g., Oliver, 1990) and the humanities (e.g., Thomson, 1996). At the
practical level, the hegemony of functionalist science in special education
actively discredits the knowledge and experiences of disabled students and
their families. The students and parents who speak from their own life
experiences fail to employ the approved quantitative, objectivist discourse
of special education research. Their subjective language is viewed as lesser,
as inaccurate and emotional, and they hold little power in special education
decision-making processes. This overtly ideological act of silencing, of
devaluing the experiential understandings of disabled persons and their
families, is legitimized by the authoritative science of special education.
Shielding the field of special education like a moral Teflon is the assump-
tion that the profession is an embodiment of benevolence and therefore
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 11

beyond reasonable critique. “(M)uch of this power is legitimate by the

ideology of benevolent humanitarianism which has allowed the community
at large to assume that whatever special education teachers do, it is ‘for the
good’ of the children” (Tomlinson, 1982, p. 133). To doubt or question the
charitable DNA of the field is both beyond reason and beyond the capacity
of the field itself. Scholars who walk down this critical path risk exclusion
from the professional discourse (e.g., top tier special education journals)
and the corresponding loss of status and income (e.g., university tenure and
promotion). The narrative of benevolent humanitarianism, coupled with
the authoritative science of functionalism, immunizes the field against
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intensive, critical scrutiny.

For critical scholars like Tomlinson and Skrtic (as well as Brantlinger
and many inclusive educators), the powerful trio of bureaucracy, authorita-
tive science, and benevolent humanitarianism operate as paradoxical invita-
tions to examine further, as suspicious indications of questionable power
dynamics at work. The resulting critical narrative describes professionals
special education researchers, administrators, and teachers as pursuing
interests such as social status and income through systemic oppression of
students identified as having disabilities or special needs. Tomlinson and
Brantlinger both identify working and lower class students, as well as stu-
dents of color, and their families as the most frequent targets of systemic
suppression and exclusion, as identified bearers of problems delegated to
the lesser second system of schooling.
General education conspires with this oppression by agreeing to identify
and exclude students viewed as problematic, as unruly and difficult to
teach, thereby supplying special education with the steady stream of chil-
dren and youth for diagnosis (disability, special needs) and segregated pla-
cement. The inefficiencies of general education are, to some extent,
alleviated through the removal of students viewed as undesirable or
troublesome.

The social origins of state special education can certainly be traced to the desire of edu-
cators in normal schools to separate out the defective and the troublesome, and thus
special education can be regarded as a safety-valve, allowing the smoother development
of the normal education system. (Tomlinson, 1982, p. 45)

The business of special education diagnosis, placement, treatment is

authorized and supported by general education seeking efficiency and regu-
larity with a culturally and biologically diverse student body.
The combined Tomlinson-Skrtic critique of special education’s many
flawed “mystic endowments” (White, 1969, p. 606) resulted, in most cases,
 12 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

in only mild and unsatisfactory efforts to reform special education practices

and research. For example, the philosophy and methodology of science
critique in the United States opened some slim avenues to the publication
of qualitative research in special education journals, but only if qualitative
methods mimicked the objectivist philosophy of science embraced by
the quantitative studies (Brantlinger, Jimenez, Klingner, Pugach, &
Richardson, 2005). Not long after American special education journals
began publishing some qualitative research, the United States Department
of Education pursued a positivism-only funding strategy, supporting only
“evidence-based” investigations modeled after medical research.
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The issue of the overrepresentation of students of color in American spe-

cial education programs first protested by Dunn (1968) and Johnson (1969)
has become an entrenched, seemingly unsolvable dilemma. Years of court
cases and research studies have yielded little or no progress. The only
assured consequence of legal and scholarly efforts has been the cottage
industry of professional activity pursuing reforms designed to adjust and
improve a special education system assumed to be, at its core, rational, and
benevolent.
Many critics of special education found themselves bumping into see-
mingly immoveable objects in their effort to clean up the political and ideo-
logical biases present within research and practice (Slee, 2011). Perhaps
they ran into what Tyack and Cuban (1995, p. 9) call the “grammar of
schooling” and Tye (1998) described as “the deep structures of schooling”
(para 2), structural and cultural features so close to the enduring social and
political identity of the public education system, that rational, incremental
reform was far more difficult than initially thought. The racial and social
class dimensions of special education systems and the ideological slant of
disability-related research were not surface blemishes amenable to reason-
able modification through the usual progression of research and profes-
sional education. Many scholars came to believe that these unrelenting
problematics were endemic and integral to special education as a system of
thought and practice.

FIRST PHASE: CHANGE BUT NOT SO MUCH

In 1993, when the debate among special educators in the United States
over early proposals for inclusion (often termed Regular Education
Initiative, or REI) was at its heated peak, an article by Kaufmann entitled
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 13

“How we might achieve the radical reform of special education” captured

the feelings and intentions of the anti-inclusion research community.
Kauffman (1993) not only criticized inclusion as a misguided movement.
He reassured those who opposed inclusion that the field of special educa-
tion could retain its essential character and practices, stave off the invasion
of inclusive education reform, and still view itself as favoring positive, pro-
gressive change. He offered a way for the field of special education to
describe itself as embracing meaningful progress while holding fast to the
ideological and practical aspects of the past.
Kauffman’s conservative essay stands as an accurate measurement of
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the mood of many general and special educators facing the apparent
onslaught of inclusive schooling. Dramatic social change without the dis-
ruption of altering beliefs, structures, and practices change without much
change became the unspoken ideological precept of the first phase of
inclusive education reform. Researchers have typically described this half-
step toward inclusion as integration, attempts to place individual students
in general classrooms without greatly disturbing the usual routines and
operating procedures of those settings (Thomazet, 2009; Vislie, 2003).
Special educators scrambled to modify the behavior and academic perfor-
mance of hand-picked disabled students in order to align them more closely
to general classroom norms. Additionally, in many cases, the integrated
student was surrounded with a variety of special supports including the
notorious Velcro classroom aides (e.g., Giangreco, Edelman, Luisella, &
McFarland, 1997) devised to help that student succeed. Throughout the
entire effort, allowing the instructional practices of the general classroom
and the organizational scheme of the school to remain primarily unaltered
were central achievements. Integration was ultimately viewed by many
inclusion researchers as a conservative episode feigning inclusion without
deeply questioning the purposes and practices of the bi-furcated general/
special education systems, without meaningfully challenging the status quo
concepts, structures, and practices that yielded social rejection and segrega-
tion for some students in the first place (Slee, 1993, 2011).
Florian (2005, p. 30) observed that “the task of integration has been
about how to join in the mainstream, how to become like others.” The
underlying philosophical orientation of integration was borrowed from the
1970’s concept of normalization. Originally developed by Danish and
Swedish scholars, normalization was popularized in the United States by
Wolf Wolfensberger (1972) in his book The Principle of Normalization in
Human Services. Wolfensberger articulated two aspects of this integrative
concept, the need to teach disabled persons how to behave and function in
 14 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

the mainstream and the need for the mainstream community to create
social roles of dignity and value for disabled persons. Public school integra-
tion pressed forward with the first notion while deemphasizing the more
dramatic and powerful second one. Students “with special needs” were
expected to change in order to “fit in,” but the ableist attitudes, structures,
and practices of the school remained chiefly uncontested.
Ainscow (1997) concluded that integration had fallen far short of the
social and political goals of inclusion.

(T)he ways in which we have gone about developing more integrated arrangements
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have, unintentionally, undermined our efforts. As we have tried to integrate pupils seen
as having special needs into mainstream schools, we have tended to adopt practices
derived from experience in special provision … (S)uch approaches do not fit within the
ways mainstream teachers plan and go about their work.

Integration had preserved the ideologies, theories, and practices of special

education, proceeding as if the entire professional culture built to sustain
segregation must be maintained. Further, that entrenched professional cul-
ture was assumed to follow the disabled student into the general classroom.
Little adjustment was made to the norms of professional thought and prac-
tice developed in segregation, the too-narrow, inflexible pedagogies of gen-
eral educators who greatly avoided the challenges of human diversity and
the “individualized responses” (Ainscow, 1997, p. 3) developed by special
educators for use in isolated classrooms and schools.
What integration failed to address was “the way in which the organiza-
tion is currently structured” (Ainscow, 1997, p. 5), the institutional assump-
tions and pedagogical routines that nurtured and supported segregation in
the first place. Based on a study of integration, of inclusive reform failure
in countries across the developed world, UNESCO (2005) concluded that

The main challenge with integration is that “mainstreaming” had not been accompa-
nied by changes in the organisation of the ordinary school, its curriculum and teaching
and learning strategies. This lack of organisational change has proved to be one of the
major barriers to the implementation of inclusive education policies.

What was required for a more authentic change in public schools was a
more dramatic, critical interrogation of school ideology, organization, and
practice (Florian, 2005).

Whereas the idea of integration was seen as preparing children perceived as being spe-
cial to fit into a school that remained largely unchanged, inclusive education starts from
the assumption that all children have a right to attend their neighbourhood school.
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 15

Therefore, the task becomes one of developing the work of school in response to stu-
dent diversity. (Ainscow, 1997, p. 5)
(P)rogress is more likely if we recognize that difficulties experienced by pupils result
from the ways in which schools are currently organized and from rigid teaching
methods … (S)chools need to be reformed and pedagogy needs to be improved in ways
that will lead them to respond positively to pupil diversity seeing individual differ-
ences not as problems to be fixed, but as opportunities for enriching learning.
(UNESCO, 2005, p. 9)

Integration failed because it attempted to shift students from special educa-

tion classrooms and schools into general classrooms without questioning
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and reforming the parallel general and special educational systems that had
sought efficiency and order through the extrusion of students viewed as
deviant and problematic. It had hoped to smuggle excluded students back
into general classrooms without dismantling the oppressive organizational
culture and ableist professional culture that perpetuated and, arguably,
depended on the segregation of devalued students. It was undeniably naı̈ve,
lacking the fierce critique and powerful political agenda required to sub-
stantively transform schools.

SECOND PHASE: GENUINE INCLUSION

Aware that integration was not the inclusive school reform they had been
seeking, that it fell far short of the kind of ethical and political changes
they envisioned, researchers, teachers, and families have shifted to a more
ambitious challenge to develop the policies, research knowledge, and prac-
tices to more effectively pursue what Ferguson (1995, p. 286) has called
“genuinely inclusive schools.” Organizing instruction around the tradi-
tional concern with measuring and ranking levels of student ability is now
replaced with a new mission of embracing and teaching for the biological
and cultural diversity of students.
Ferguson describes this as a process of systemic unification seeking a
more democratic, accepting, supportive kind of learning community.

Inclusion is a process of meshing general and special education reform initiatives and
strategies in order to achieve a unified system of public education that incorporates all
children and youth as active, fully participating members of the school community; that
views diversity as the norm, and that ensures a high-quality education for each student
by providing meaningful curriculum, effective teaching, and necessary supports for
each student. (Ferguson, 1995, p. 286)
 16 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

Diverse human identities including disability, race, gender, class, sexual

orientation, and religion are accepted without judgment, ranking, or
pathologization. This intentional, courageous embrace of diversity occurs
without forgetting the historical and often enduring tendency of schools to
perpetuate cruel social hierarchies. Coupling critical vigilance with intense
compassion, professionals, families, and students work together to build
ethical communities where young people can learn and grow.
This is the current challenge, the pursuit of genuine inclusive schools for
all young persons. Conceptually behind and historically before the chal-
lenge of genuine inclusion are the traces of intellectual history tracked by
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the chapters in this volume. The authors in this edited volume offer multi-
ple glimpses into the best and most relevant scholarship underlying the
scholarly and practical work of the field of inclusive education today. By
following many trails of disciplinary knowledge backward, finding the con-
cepts and methods that have propelled the field forward to the difficult
political and pedagogical work of the present, the authors offer multiple
sources of insight into both the conceptual identity of the field the main
ideas and purposes that bring hope and promise as well as the enduring
social critique that guides the field’s vision of more democratic and ethical
communities. They remind us of how and why inclusive educators have
greatly detached from the “received traditions of thought” (White, 1969,
p. 606) that informed practices of special education segregation and pro-
vide intellectual and ethical grounding for the difficult travels ahead.

STRUCTURE AND CONTENT OF THE VOLUME

In order to access examinations and descriptions of foundational concepts

and scholarship in the field of inclusive education, we asked a variety of
inclusive education researchers to reflect upon either a single scholar or a
single piece of scholarship that they believe influenced their own thinking
about inclusion. Our purpose was to gather a range of essays of great depth
into the history of ideas that have informed and influenced the field. Our
hope was that by gathering deep, probing explorations of important foun-
dational scholarship from a wide variety of inclusive educators we would
create a volume that attends to the main ideas and disciplines behind inclu-
sive education research.
The resulting chapters provide both breadth and depth on the intellec-
tual roots of inclusive education research:
 From Special Education to Integration to Genuine Inclusion 17

• Sheila Riddell (the chapter “Developing a Critical Sociology of Special

and Inclusive Education: The Contribution of Sally Tomlinson”) and
Julie Allan (the chapter “Stealth Bureaucracy in Sally Tomlinson’s
Irresistible Rise of the SEN Industry”) offer compelling witness to the
vital role played by British sociologist Sally Tomlinson in the develop-
ment of inclusive education thought. Sheila Riddell explores how
Tomlinson’s research has helped to demystify the often unexamined pur-
poses and practices of the field of special education. Julie Allan focuses
specifically on Tomlinson’s analysis of the bureaucratic expansion of spe-
cial education and the tension of that growth with the worldwide devel-
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opment of inclusive schooling.

• Chapters “Questioning Assumptions: Roger Slee and Julie Allan’s
Reconsideration of Inclusive Education” and “Interrupting the
Prevailing Discourse on Special Education: Political and Sociological
Perspectives Offered by Len Barton” continue to display the priority of
the sociological imagination. Tim Loreman’s chapter (Questioning
Assumptions: Roger Slee and Julie Allan’s Reconsideration of Inclusive
Education) explores the scholarship of Julie Allan and Roger Slee,
unearthing how inclusion often, ironically and tragically, means exclu-
sion. Phyllis Jones’s chapter (Interrupting the Prevailing Discourse on
Special Education: Political and Sociological Perspectives Offered by
Len Barton) looks closely at the contributions of influential sociology of
disability researcher Len Barton.
• S. Anthony Thompson’s chapter (The Bumpy Road to Genuinely
Inclusive Schools: Still Learning from Ferguson’s ‘Rabid’ Confessions of
an Authentic Inclusionist) explores the enduring question of the authen-
ticity of inclusion through an examination of the scholarship of Dianne
Ferguson.
• In the chapter “New linkages for a Complex Inclusive Education: Third
World Feminism, Post-Positivist Realism and Disability Studies,”
Srikala Naraian, a scholar mentored by Dianne Ferguson, asks how
Third World feminist scholarship informs a more nuanced understanding
of the politics of disability in school around the world.
• Umesh Sharma and Hasheem Mannan (the chapter “Do Attitudes
Predict Behaviour An (Un)Solved Mystery?”) interrogate a central
assumption behind inclusive education, employing Icek Ajzen’s contribu-
tion of Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) to ask how the attitudes of
teachers toward disability and inclusion matter.
• Scot Danforth (the chapter “Under the Mentorship of John Dewey:
Democratic Lessons for Inclusive Education”) mines the profound
 18 SCOT DANFORTH AND PHYLLIS JONES

educational thought of American philosopher John Dewey, illuminating

how his scholarship on democratic living and his Lab School curriculum
inform inclusion.
• Joseph Seyram Agbenyega and Sunanta Klibthong (the chapter
“Re-Imagining Inclusive Research and Practice: A Focus on Bourdieu’s
Concepts of Habitus, Capital, Doxa, and Field”) provide additional evi-
dence of the centrality of sociological analysis in the field of inclusive
education through an interrogation of the influential research of Pierre
Bourdieu.
• David J. Connor (the chapter “Assembling All the Jigsaw Pieces
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Together: The Critical Work of Dorothy Lipsky and Alan Gartner’s

Inclusion and School Reform”) analyzes the complex and lasting contri-
butions of inclusive school reform researchers Dorothy Lipsky and Alan
Gartner.
• In the chapter “Why the Pursuit of Inclusive Education Cannot Be Left
to Science: Lessons from the Work of Burton Blatt,” pioneer inclusive
educator Douglas Biklen investigates the political and practical relation-
ship between the work of American deinstitutionalization advocate
Burton Blatt and the inclusive education movement.
• The final two chapters of the volume conclude with demonstrations of
the importance of social theory and philosophy to inclusive education
research. The chapter “The Illusion of Our Separativeness: Exploring
Heshusius’s Concept of Participatory Consciousness in Disability
Research and Inclusive Education,” by Deborah J. Gallagher, recalls
Lous Heshusius’s powerful epistemological critique of American positi-
vistic disability research, challenging researchers to make meaning
together with teachers and disabled persons. The final chapter of the
volume, authored by Simo Vehmas, considers philosophical questions
related to the moral significance of disability in the scholarship of social
model innovator Michael Oliver and controversial animal rights advo-
cate Peter Singer.

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