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International Journal of
Inclusive Education
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Social justice and the

changing directions in
educational research: the
case of inclusive education
Roger Slee
Published online: 10 Nov 2010.

To cite this article: Roger Slee (2001) Social justice and the changing directions
in educational research: the case of inclusive education, International Journal
of Inclusive Education, 5:2-3, 167-177, DOI: 10.1080/13603110010035832

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 INT. J. INCLUSIVE EDUCATION , 2001, VOL. 5, NO. 2/3, 167±177

Social justice and the changing directions in

educational research: the case of inclusive
education

ROGER SLEE
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(Originally received 30 June 2000; accepted in ®nal form 26 November 2000)

Inclusive education has established itself as an important element within the general ®eld of
educational research. While the increasing attention to social inclusion is apparently con-
sistent with the general aspiration for social justice, this paper reasserts the fragility of
inclusive education as a vehicle for arguing against traditional notions of special educational
needs in favour of educational disablement as identity politics. It is important that in a
general consideration of education research and social justice space be a€ orded to interro-
gating the shortcomings of social justice research in education with regard to disabled
students. This brief discussion aims to introduce a range of issues pursuant to the intersec-
tion of education and disability politics.

Introduction: staking a claim

Opening his text, Pedagogy, Symbolic Control and Identity, Professor Basil
Bernstein (1996) announces the conditions for an e€ ective democracy. Such
is his con®dence in staking the claim for the conditions for e€ ective democ-
racy that he decides not `to derive these from high order principles’ (p. 6).
Rather, he lays out the `conditions’ and `rights’ that are prerequisites to a
democratic settlement.1 In this gathering of researchers and activists at this
conference on education research and social justice, I feel a similar con-
®dence in not having to debate inclusive education. I will progress from an
assumption of acceptance of the general concept of inclusive education.
However, when turning to questions of the intersection of disablement
(Oliver 1996) and education I do believe that there is some work necessary
to clarify its informing principles, to establish its epistemological precepts.
The absence of a language for inclusive education that stipulates its vo-
cabulary and grammar increases the risk for political misappropriation.
Traditional special educators demonstrate a remarkable resilience through
linguistic dexterity. While they use a contemporary lexicon of inclusion, the
cosmetic amendments to practices and procedures re¯ect assumptions
about pathological defect and normality based upon a disposition of cali-
bration and exclusion.2
Why do I insist on space in the agenda of this assembly to reconsider
the politics of special educational needs (Barton 1987)? Traditional special
education attempts to improve its credentials as a force for social reform by

Correspondence should be addressed to: Roger Slee, Deputy Director General, Education Queensland,
Education House, Mary Street, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
International Journal of Inclusive Education ISSN 1360±3116 print/ISSN 1464±5173 online # 2001 Taylor & Francis Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/13603110010035832
 168 ROGER SLEE

appropriating the discourse of inclusion to deploy old assumptions about

disability based upon quasi-medical pathologies of defectiveness to relocate
its practice in regular schools and capture new clients (Slee 1997). The
robust critique of these discursive practices needs to be presented to edu-
cators in general and be incorporated in teacher education in particular.
State education departments across Australia have mandated that initial
teacher education programmes establish compulsory units in special educa-
tion in order to prepare neophyte teachers for student diversity and inclu-
sive education. For this observer, such a strategy is the antithesis of the
inclusive education project and guarantees continuing educational disable-
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ment.
The introduction of units of study in special education for all teachers
embraces unacknowledged assumptions. First, the focus for inclusive edu-
cation is narrowed to the traditional constituency of special education. We
are told that teacher education students will need to be become familiar
with the range of syndromes, disorders and `defects’ that constitute the
population of special educational needs students. Inclusive education is
reduced to a default vocabulary for a Gray’s Anatomy conception of educa-
tional inclusion. Knowing these students and how we have developed tech-
niques of dealing with them through special educational practices will make
the regular teacher more inclusive. Herein lies a fundamental cultural ¯aw.
Inclusive education is about all students. Inclusion is an aspiration for a
democratic education and, as such, the project of inclusion addresses the
experiences of all students at school. This is not just an issue to be
addressed by the traditional special education community. While special
educators are seldom likely to place issues of class, culture and ethnicity,
sexuality, bi-lingualism, and so on onto their agenda for educational inclu-
sion, there is still a tendency amongst sociologists of education to pull up
short before disabled students when arguing for the representation of
diversity in schooling. A recent example is presented in Corson’s (1998)
work, which while demonstrating concern for the politics of gender, race
and cultural diversity, remains silent on disability and the unequal politics
of special education. Of course this work is indicative of many others.
There has been a general tendency for both special education and educa-
tional sociology to disregard the ®eld of disability and education as a ®eld of
cultural politics. Jenny Morris made a similar observation when com-
menting upon the silence of the feminist research on questions of disability.
These diagnostic frameworks, and the knowledge that informs them,
have been challenged by the ®eld of disability studies as representing a
form of cultural exclusion (Oliver 1996, Barton and Oliver 1997, Moore
et al. 1998). Educating ensuing generations of teachers in these codes is to
formalize exclusionary special educational discourses as the o cial knowl-
edge of di€ erence. Second, disability is disconnected from education policy
in general and from the practices of special educators.
This paper serves as a gentle reminder that those arguing for social
justice in education must continue to subject notions of justice in education
for disabled people to `explicit and sustained analysis’ (Rizvi and
Christensen 1996: 2). Contemporary assumptions about the rectitude of
special educational knowledge and practice are as in much need of critical
 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 169

analysis today as they were when Sally Tomlinson (1982) undertook her
seminal investigation almost two decades ago. At the centre of this discus-
sion is an invitation for us to explore our own knowledge of disability and
disablement and to examine the implications of the kinds of beliefs we hold.
This paper will attempt a beginning to this task.
Divided into three sections, the paper will ®rst interrogate the theo-
retical dilemmas for inclusive education as it is appropriate by or seeks to
escape the ideological yoke of special educational discourse (Brantlinger
1997). This discussion prompts a reconsideration of the politics of disable-
ment as they are played out in the cultural politics of schooling. Second is a
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discussion of inclusion and exclusion in a context of `raising standards’,

school e€ ectiveness and educational markets. I will then identify a series of
implications for new educational research agendas and the reconstruction of
an inclusive curriculum for initial teacher education and beyond.

Where did you do the knowledge?

This is a paper concerned with human rights and the production and
reproduction of meaning as it adheres to the intersection of disablement
and education. Meaning is made through what Foucault (1974) describes as
discursive practices that `form(s) the objects of which they speak . . . they do
not identify objects, they constitute them and in doing so conceal their own
invention’ (p. 49). The formation of disability, and thereby its ideological
representations, suggests and simultaneously restricts a range of
possibilities for inclusive education. It is with the creation and denial of
possibility that I am concerned. My intention here is both opportunistic
and optimistic. Later in this paper I intend to share a problem that con-
fronts me as a Dean of a Faculty of Education responsible for initial teacher
education. What goes into a curriculum pursuant to enabling neophyte
teachers to lead the project of inclusive schooling and what kind of educa-
tion research will inform such a project? The question, I acknowledge, is
inscribed with assumptions and suggestions that require unpacking. `What
inclusive schools?’, some may ask. Others may be perplexed by the nature
of the inclusive educational project and seek clari®cation on whether I have
tinkering or radical reconstruction in mind. Others may want to inquire
about who does the teaching and how decisions are made about what to
teach or research. Such a discussion has been missing from much of the
inclusive schooling literature, especially more traditional accounts of inclu-
sive education and special educational needs.
In order to engage with these questions, we do need to examine the way
in which the uses and abuses of language frame meanings that disable and
exclude. I concede that I am inclined to stumble over the taken-for-granted
language of `special educational needs’ and more recently `inclusive educa-
tion’. I have observed that others are not so awkward and engage in con-
versations about inclusion irrespective of the fact that they may be talking
across deep epistemological ravines. It is this problem of language and
meaning that lies at the heart of the inclusive educational project.
 170 ROGER SLEE

The ®eld of special education has drawn from medicine and psychology
®rst to establish, and later to modernize, discourses of the `backward child’
(Burt 1937) or `slow child’ (Schonell 1942) as a subject for diagnosis and
segregated educational treatment (Tomlinson 1982, Skidmore 1997). As
Foucault (1997: 11) observes, `More often, it happens that a discursive
practice brings together various disciplines or sciences, or it passes through
a number of them and gathers several of their areas into a sometimes
inconspicuous cluster.’ The power of traditional formulations of disability
as defective individual pathology separated from political, cultural and
historical speci®city is ubiquitous.
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Discursive practices are not purely and simply modes of manufacture of discourse. They take
shape in technical ensembles, in institutions, in behavioural schemes, in types of transmission
and dissemination, in pedagogical forms that both impose and maintain them. (Foucault 1997:
12)

So it is with special educational needs. Fulcher (1989) and Skrtic (1991)

identify the co-implication of the professional interests of the special edu-
cation industry, teachers and administrators in regular schools, and
machine bureaucracies. Embracing psycho-medical discourses for purposes
of diagnosis and remediation, education workers also assumed a bureau-
cratic discourse that ®xed the `special student’ as a policy problem
requiring a technical solution. Elsewhere I have described the alacrity
with which special educators relocate their traditional knowledge and prac-
tice in new settings and describe their locational shift with a comfortably
inclusive lexicon (Slee 1996). Education administrators and teachers are
more than willing to submit di cult students to a battery of ascertainment
tests to measure the degree of disability and the appropriate form and level
of resources required to maintain the student in educational provision.
Teachers, education administrators, psychologists and special educa-
tors unite in this campaign for institutional equilibrium. A new calculus
of distributive justice is produced which fails to recognize disablement as
an outcome of cultural or identity politics (Young 1990, Yeatman 1994,
Fraser 1997).
These discursive alliances remain largely untouched, in educational
practice, by disabled researchers who are best placed to lead the project
of social justice and inclusive education for disabled students. Mike Oliver
(1996: 79) is unequivocal:
When I moved from being a lecturer on disability to one on special education I was amazed at
how similar the issues were and how similar were the experiences of users of special education to
the users of other welfare services. All such services were, and still are, dominated by profes-
sionals who produce them, were patronising and failed to o€ er disabled people choice or control
in their lives . . . the education system failed disabled children in that it has neither equipped
them to exercise their rights as citizens nor to accept their responsibilities . . . the special educa-
tion system has functioned to exclude disabled people not just from the education process but
from mainstream social life.

For Oliver education is a site of cultural politics. Special education stum-

bles into the reductionist trap of promoting inclusive education according
to the technical assimilationist imperative of making `defective’ kids ®t the
school as it is. Inclusion, and social justice with it, cannot be reduced to
`absorption’ (Bernstein, 1996). Fundamental assumptions about di€ erence
 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 171

and the role of education must be placed on the table. While special educa-
tion remains uncritical of its pathological gaze it continues to reduce social
issues to personal troubles (Wright Mills 1959).
At this stage it may be useful to ask a direct question, how do we come
to know disability? The answer to this question for most of us isÐat a
distance. At other times I have drawn on shameful episodes from my own
biography to relate the acquisition of childhood myths and phobias about
disabled children concealed behind the high walls of the special develop-
mental school in our small country town. Our myths were as outlandish as
the science that informed the foundations and growth of special educational
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knowledge in previous times (Foucault 1967, Gilman 1982, 1988, Bogdan

1988, De Swaan 1990, Potts and Fido 1991, Hevey 1992). The common
sense passed on by my parents resonates with the undertones of special
educational knowledge: pity, defectiveness, abnormality, the heroic dis-
abled such as Keller (Crow 2000) and Bader (Oliver 1996), cure, care,
charity and protection. My training to become a special education teacher
did little to disrupt these views, rather it provided a sophisticated language
with which to generalize further the categories and consequences of dis-
abling conditions and syndromes. I was equipped with the technology to
measure and commence remediative interventionsÐa card-carrying desig-
nator of disability.
It was only later that di€ erent sets of questions were presented to me
through sociologies of disability and di€ erence. The work of disabled
researchers and activists and their allies suggested that the quasi-medical
generalizations that carried expert authority suggested little about the
experience of disablement, essentializing people, their lives, hopes and
possibilities (Finkelstein 1980, Abberley 1987, Barnes 1990, Oliver 1990,
Morris 1989, Thomas 1999). Debates within disability studies reveal a
number of ways of `knowing’ and researching disability from Marxist-
based social models of disability through to feminist and post-modern
accounts (Barton and Oliver 1997). Such debates provide greater interro-
gative potential for reconsidering social justice, education and disability. At
the heart of our survey of disability knowledge must be the question of
meaning and interest. In whose interests do particular forms of knowledge
operate? Here I side with Tomlinson (1996) who concludes that it is the
professions that derive greater bene®t from the expanding practice of spe-
cial education. We arrive at Thompson’s observation of `meaning in the
service of power’ (1984: 7).

Hello stranger! Exclusion as a policy text

In Postmodernity and its Discontents, Zygmunt Bauman (1997: 17) talks

about social `othering’.
All societies produce strangers; but each kind of society produces its own kind of strangers, and
produces them in its own inimitable way. If the strangers are the people who do not ®t the
cognitive, moral or aesthetic map of the worldÐone of these maps, two or all three; if they
therefore, by their sheer presence, make obscure what ought to be transparent, confuse what
ought to be a straightforward recipe for action, and/or prevent the satisfaction from being fully
 172 ROGER SLEE

satisfying, if they pollute the joy with anxiety while making the forbidden fruit alluring; if; in
other words, they befog and eclipse the boundary lines which ought to be clearly seen; if; having
done all this, they gestate uncertainty, which in its turn breeds the discomfort of feelings lost ±
then each society produces such strangers. While drawing its borders and charting its cognitive,
aesthetic and moral maps, it cannot but gestate people who conceal borderlines deemed crucial to
its orderly and/or meaningful life and so are accused of causing the discomfort experience as the
most painful and the least bearable.

The exclusion and `othering’ of young people through the forms and
processes of education is endemic. Researchers such as Ball (1994), Gewirtz
et al. (1995), Apple (1996), Whitty et al. (1998) and Lauder and Hughes
(1999) have built a substantial critique of the corrosive e€ ects of markets
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upon schooling and on the corresponding narrowing opportunities for an

increasing population of marginal youth. The context of education policy
creates the conditions for exclusion that militate against an inclusive educa-
tional project.
The issue of context therefore is central to questions of educational
disablement. Inclusive education is an ambitious project given that we
seem to be commencing with an oxymoron as our organizing concept.
Schools were never really meant for everyone. The more they have been
called upon to include the masses, the more they have developed the tech-
nologies of exclusion and containment (Slee 1995, Blyth and Milner 1996).
It is important to insert a caveat to acknowledge that such a generalization,
while adhering to systems level and to some schools, is disrespectful of the
work of some other schools and their communities in guaranteeing educa-
tional provision for all (Rose 1995). An historical artefact, schools were
established for a minority of privileged students who were prepared for
the academy and the professions. The relatively recent advent of mass
compulsory schooling merely elaborated the processes of social strati®-
cation and exclusion through a range of dividing practices in the school.
Segregated special education together with the unskilled labour market
colluded with schools to conceal the inevitability of failure. A rational,
indeed scienti®c, explanation was produced that attached blame to the
defects and pathological inability of those who were failed by the narrow
academic curriculum and restrictive pedagogy on o€ er.
Crisis in the unskilled labour market and the concomitant extension of
schooling for increasing numbers of young people has witnessed a number
of trends that reinforce the claim that schools are reluctant when it comes to
inclusion. First, the expansion and net widening of special educational
provision within and outside of regular schools. There has been a forma-
lization of exclusion as a permanent feature of the educational landscape in
coexistence with discourses of inclusion. OFSTED inspectors are dedi-
cated to the assurance of the quality of Pupil Referral Units (Parsons and
Castle 1998) that pick up the students that schools which are serious about
inspection and their League Table performance must shed. Last month
notwithstanding the governmental noise about countering social exclusion
in excess of £30 million was made available for the establishment of more
pupil referral units. Second, the struggle over the constitution of the cur-
riculum continues amid panics over standards and measurable student out-
comes. The panic over standards in literacy and numeracy has facilitated a
 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 173

re-articulation of equity policy as a generalized back to basics movement

(Lingard 1998).
Third, the operation of the state schools sector as an educational mar-
ketplace to the mantra of competition and choice has privileged well
resourced choosers who `now have free reign to guarantee and reproduce,
as best they can, their existing cultural, social and economic advantages in
the new complex and blurred hierarchy of schools’ (Gewirtz et al. 1995:
23). The notion of choice is illusory. Schools move to the middle ground
and exert greater in¯uence over their choice of students. The assumption of
an informed and or mobile community of parents is ¯awed. Increasingly
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schools use special educational needs statements to regulate their student

body. In short, the thrust of policy conspires against an assertion of the
legitimacy of a politics of identity and di€ erence.

Education research and teacher education

In this parting section I simply want to raise a series of questions that

respond to general propositions about inclusion.

Proposition one

Inclusive education is not a technical problem it is cultural politics.

Inclusion speaks to the protection of rights of citizenship for all.
Hitherto, inclusive education has been framed as a ®eld for special
educational research, training and bureaucratic intervention (Ashman and
Elkins 1990, Kau€ man and Hallahan 1995, Jenkinson 1997). The problem
for the school is one of working out how to ®t di€ erent kids in with a
minimum of disruption. The research project then extends along the fol-
lowing lines:
. How do we re®ne our diagnostic tools to see what is exactly wrong
with the child?
. How is it manifested?
. Under what conditions can we stem the disruptions it causes to the
learning of the child and others?
. How do we create the correct attitudes in schools to make sure that the
child is accepted?
. How do we ensure the correct mix of resources, expertise and person-
nel support to facilitate the placement of the child?
The research imperative is the normalization of di€ erence by stabilizing the
newcomer in an environment that provides a bu€ er to enable schools to
remain the same. The teacher-training imperative revolves around the
transmission of regulated chunks of traditional special educational knowl-
edge so that the professions retain their authority and classroom teachers
are not so spooked when di€ erent students enter the classroom. This is
conservative incrementalism writ large. Paradoxically, it is paraded as the
vanguard of a progressive movement for social justice.
 174 ROGER SLEE

Responding to the spirit of the proposition suggests a new research and

teacher education agenda that enlists other forms of knowledge and exper-
tise. We know that the research act may perpetuate or interrupt power
relations (Gitlin 1994, Oakley 2000). It is therefore essential that we con-
sider carefully the form, processes and participants in disability research.
Here we are fortunate to be able to draw from a continuing discussion of
researching educational disablement which proceeds from establishing the
primacy of disabled people in making decisions about research focus,
design and conduct (Clough and Barton 1995, 1998, Moore et al. 1998,
Moore 2000). Teacher education needs to explore new forms of knowledge
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about identity and di€ erence and to suggest new questions that invite
students to consider the pathologies of schools that enable or disable
students.

Proposition two

Inclusive schooling is concerned with the educational experiences and outcomes for all children.
Since present forms of schooling routinely deny human rights and exclude students on the basis
of race, ethnicity, gender, disability, sexuality and class, inclusive education is a project of
educational reconceptualization and radical reconstruction.

We return to our remarks at the commencement of this paper concerning

the omission of some children from the social justice inventory. Those
concerned with the experience of disabled students have a great deal to
learn from the struggles of a number of social, and research, movements.
No advantage is derived through a calculus of emiseration. Cross-cultural
dialogues o€ er new possibilities for curriculum, pedagogy, school organ-
ization and educational research. Moreover, political lessons may be
derived in the ongoing struggle for social justice in education.
Ball (1998) invites us to think otherwise in furthering education studies,
pressing us beyond a state of `having too much knowledge and too little
understanding’. In this respect he shares a platform with Friere and Shor
(1987: 185):
Critical thinking needs imagination where students and teachers practice anticipating a new
social reality. Imagination can be exercised as a resource to expel dominant ideology and to
open up some space in consciousness for transcending thinking. I’ve asked students to be ima-
ginative generally in courses I teach. Our social inquiries regularly include a moment called
`reconstruction: where I ask students to imagine alternatives to the social problem they have
investigated, as a model of future solutions.

Proposition three

Inclusion is not a synonym for assimilation or normalization.

The teaching and research focus for teacher education must shift to studies
of di€ erence and identity politics. The country in which I reside has still to
embrace antiracist education as an alternative to liberal expressions of mul-
ticulturalism. Invasion is a word that disturbs and has not penetrated the
curriculum. Inclusion is not a colonizing imperative, it stipulates interac-
 SOCIAL JUSTICE AND EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH 175

tive diversity and the various forms of knowledge, research priorities and
pedagogy across that diversity. Inclusion is politically steadfast and aggres-
sive. McLaren (cited in hooks 1994: 31) puts it thus:
Diversity that somehow constitutes itself as a harmonious ensemble of benign cultural spheres is
a conservative and liberal model of multiculturalism that, in my mind, deserves to be jettisoned
because, when we try to make culture an undisturbed space of harmony and agreement where
social relations exist within cultural forms of uninterrupted accords we subscribe to a form of
social amnesia in which we forget that all knowledge is forged in histories that are played out in
the ®eld of social antagonism.

Fundamental questions are addressed and di€ erent formulations of justice

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(Rawls 1972, Young 1980, Fraser 1997) are enlisted to respond to these
questions. Who is in? Who is out? How come? Who decides? Who bene®ts
from this? Who loses? And inevitably: what are we going to do about it?
Answering these questions demands cross-disciplinary perspectives.
The propositions go on (Slee 2001). I return to my opportunistic ques-
tion: how do we educate our teachers consistent with the aspiration for
social justice and inclusive education? First, we confront the political
nature of our work and assign technical consideration to its second-order
status. Moreover we strive against the notion that compulsory special edu-
cation units for trainee teachers is better than nothing. Pierre Bourdieu
(1998) is instructive: `between two evils, I refuse to choose the lesser’.

Notes

1. It is worth setting out the conditions and rights for e€ ective democracy as stipulated by Bernstein for
they are apposite to this conversation about social justice and teacher education. To summarize: the
`®rst condition is that people must feel that they have a stake in society’ (p. 6). For Bernstein, stake
connotes reciprocity. The second condition is that people must enjoy con®dence in the political
arrangements, believing that these arrangements will enable them to realize their stake. Three
interrelated rights support these conditions: ®rst is the right of individual enhancement, which
suggests the encouragement of critical understanding of the past and new possibilities for the future.
This right ensures a condition for con®dence. Second is the right to be included socially, intellec-
tually, culturally and personally. This does not imply absorption or a condition of assimilation that
will be addressed here. Third is the right of participation (pp. 6±7). These democratic precepts stand
at the heart of forging a new cultural politics of disability and schooling.
2. A stipulative language requires that we consider the terms we use. Inclusion has been used to refer to
unconditional access by some while it refers to a sliding scale of partial participation for others. This
degree of latitude is unacceptable. I also suggest that our grammar needs checking as when I speak of
disabled people I use the word `disabled’ as a verb rather than adjective in the ®rst instance. People
are not of themselves disabled, it is a relational concept within a sociological discourse rather than a
pathological descriptor within a medical discourse. This engagement with language has profound
implications for policy.

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