1.1 Asking questions of education
Consider another quote made in relation to education:
Systems and their parts do not develop spontaneously, or in an evolutionary manner, and they do not develop out of purely humanitarian motives. They develop because it is in the interests of particular groups in a society that they should develop and that they should develop in particular ways.
In order to draw out some of these evolved and now taken-for-granted ways of thinking, try a thought experiment suggested by Richard Elmore (1995).
Activity 1: Asking questions of education
Imagine the first day of lessons in a school in which students have not been grouped, teachers have not defined their work according to such groups, no decisions have been made about how much time will be given to content, and no one has decided how student progress will be assessed. Imagine that first morning, imagine hundreds of people arriving of all ages, some to learn, some to teach.
With this in mind, ask yourself these questions:
- Where would you put everybody?
- Do you put everybody in the hall, ask the teachers to stand on one side and the students to stand on the other?
- Do you divide the teachers up first or do you divide the students up?
- Do you create set groups/classes?
- Are groups you create divided according to demographics, interests or experiences?
- Are groups defined by number, by space available, by age, by height, by language spoken, by family group?
- Do you expect teachers to teach everything they know or just something they know lots about?
- Can teachers spend all day teaching something they find interesting?
- Should you expect students to study things they already have some understanding of, or of which they have no understanding?
- Can students spend all day studying something they find interesting?
- And how do you assess the ability of the teacher to teach and the learner to learn?
- Should you assess what the learner wants to learn or what the teacher wants the learner to learn?
You might want to discuss this thought experiment with a friend or colleague. Make notes about any thoughts you have along the way.
Discussion
In answering the questions in Activity 1 you are beginning to explore broader issues which underpin how we create our educational spaces. For example:
- Should, and can, all children learn and play together?
- In what ways are children different (or similar) and how should this affect the opportunities they are presented with?
- To whom should we allocate limited resources?
- What education and social care system is best for the country and its economy?
- What expectations should we have of practitioners?
In answering these questions, you are also likely to have looked back at your own experiences, and reflected upon where your ideas and beliefs have come from. This might involve looking back on your own education, or forward to the education you’d like for future generations; or experiences you have had in other settings. If you are a practitioner, it could have reflected the kinds of environments you have worked in or the challenges and opportunities you have experienced in different contexts. If you have felt marginalized by experiences, you may have wanted to disrupt the structures that supported your marginalisation in order to create new possibilities.
It is perfectly possible that in responding to the last activity, you suggested spreading all the students who arrived at the ‘school’ amongst knowledgeable people in their local community. You might have wanted to work against a simplistic notion that one group of people has something to learn and another group of people has something to teach. You may feel that everyone has the ability to learn and everyone has the ability to assist others to learn, or that teaching and learning is not neatly assessable; maybe you want us to see them as hand-in-hand, that through teaching something we learn from it, and through learning something we become teachers. After all, in many languages, the word for teaching and learning is the same.
Your thinking may also have been influenced by the theoretical statement at the start of Activity 1. You may have considered how your answers to these questions reflect ‘the interests of particular groups in a society’. When examining and proposing the kinds of challenges at the heart of a course such as this, it is always useful to note who is benefiting and who is being disadvantaged. Whose version of events are you listening to? Whose voice is being heard? The official history rarely includes the experiences of the people on the margins or who have been the targets of intervention and what has been perceived as its solutions and innovations. For example, Pellicano et al (2014) identified that over a 10-year period in the UK, over half of the funding associated with autism went to studies focused on biology, brain and cognition, and just over 1% on societal issues and explorations of people’s lived experience.
These questions are particularly relevant in a consideration of inclusive education, because across a broad sweep of literature, inclusive Education can be seen as an ‘assault on oppressive vestiges of the past’ (Slee and Allan, 2001, p. 176). The call is for transformation, evolving and changing continually (Hausstätter, 2014), involving a commitment to proactively eliminate barriers, to respond flexibly and to create change in the policies, practices and cultures of ‘regular’ schools (CRPD, 2016), as well as changing the ‘behaviour’ of adults (Ainscow & Sandhill, 2010).