Learning to Read "Inclusion" Divergently: Enacting a Transnational Approach to Inclusive Education

• In Event: 77.057 - MTCC Roundtable Session 35
  In Roundtable Session: 77.057-10 - Professional Development Through an International Lens

Abstract

Drawing on our experiences as researchers and educators in multiple national contexts, we argue for conceptualizations of “inclusion” that subsume both the discourse of equity and the material conditions of its enactment. In this paper, we look specifically at two groups engaged in enacting inclusion—novice teachers in the US and school principals in Germany. Using the theoretical frame of New Materialisms, we engage in a diffractive analysis of the data in each regional context to illustrate the phenomena of inclusion as intra-action between multiple human and non-human agents (Barad, 2008). Collectively, our study seeks to stimulate divergent understandings of inclusion that can remain situated within the material-discursive conditions of its enactment.

Authors

• Srikala Naraian, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Bettina Amrhein, University of Bielefeld