# 1 Inclusive Leadership and communities of practice

Figure 1

A real difficulty for a course on inclusive leadership and professional development is the lack of an evidence-base which can directly help us. As noted by Waitoller & Artiles in their review of professional development research for inclusive education (2013), the knowledge base is limited and fragmented because of the different ways in which people conceptualise inclusive education and teacher learning.

> ‘The act of dismantling exclusion occurs in dynamic, politically charged, and historically contingent contexts. The degree of success of inclusive education, and how success is defined, depends on the work of local actors and their meaning making process situated in historically evolving activity systems. Thus, drawing broad generalizations about the practices, tools, and work of local actors from one program or school to another without regard for the complexities and idiosyncrasies of particular institutional contexts may result in unintended consequences. To understand inclusive education, researchers need to understand locally situated forms of exclusion.’

(Waitoller & Artiles (2013, p. 347)

A similar review (Holmqvist & Lelinge, 2021) facing the same challenge, identified four broad definitions of inclusive education: basic inclusion, classroom inclusion, general inclusion, and content inclusion. They also recognised that these were implemented differently in different social contexts (for example, inclusion may have a focus upon disabilities or have a focus upon wider socioeconomic and cultural perspectives with an aim to foster social justice).

As authors we have to make a choice in how we represent this field. For example, many people would suggest that inclusive leaders of inclusive schools should be calling for professional development that focuses upon categories of need or types of behaviour. However, in this course we choose not to do this. This is because the research base that would answer such a call is also very limited, rarely tested in meaningful school contexts, and very hard to carry out with fidelity (Rix, 2023). This reminds us that the calls for ‘evidence-informed policy’ are understandable but not sufficient. The focus cannot simply be about ‘what works’ but must be part of a debate around ‘what matters’, with an emphasis upon the importance of context (Stevenson, 2017).

OpenLearn - Inclusive Leadership: Collaborating for professional development
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