AN INCLUSION STORY
(Exploring aspects of educational inclusion
in Birmingham 1996-2000)
GETHIN LLOYD DAVIES
A thesis presented to the Faculty of Education
of the University of Birmingham
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
School of Education
The University of Birmingham
July 2001
Acknowledgements
This study would not have been possible without the assistance of many people in a number of very different settings and I thank them all sincerely for their advice, wisdom and for bearing with my idiosyncrasies.
In the fieldwork part of the study I was indebted to the Headteachers and the staff of all the schools I visited, whether this was for a single visit or as a participant observer. Their ability to cope with the extra demands my questions imposed was inspirational.
In the middle of the research I was particularly guided by the experiences of all the young people who became part of the Second City Second Chance initiative as well as the two individuals who I came to know as Danielle and Dana. All these young people will remembered as having breathed life into my work.
Finally my most sincere thanks go to both my supervisor, for her advice and leadership of our Research Group, and to Judith Davies for the onerous task of editing this work and advising on the final presentation.
AN INCLUSION STORY
CONTENTSPage
Introduction1
Chapter One The Scene11
Chapter Two Madness in the Method32
Chapter ThreeA Beginning, a Middle and no End in Sight 50
Chapter FourDanielle and Dana72
Chapter Five Courtly Green 92
Chapter Six St Edna’s and Lowlands High 116
Chapter Seven Five Houses 135
Chapter Eight Second City Action 157
Chapter Nine Endgame; Funnelling–In 186
Appendices
A; AppendicesList, Synopses Compiled and Abbreviations Used 227
B; References (and Other Sources) Lists 233
C;Author's Curriculum Vitae and Values Statement 254
D; Maps and Tools (Materials and Instruments used including 261
original Matched Study Plan and Initial Research Questions)
E;Sample Fieldwork Data and Audit Report 269
F;LEA and School Information 277
G; OtherBackground Materials 278
Footnotes
- Synopses are presented at the beginning of each chapter
- Footnotes are used (indicated thus; (4) and presented at the end of each Chapter).
- Field Note extracts are presented thus; A12, B77
- Chapter Subheadings are presented at the beginning of each chapter
INTRODUCTION
This story-study is an exploration of the ways in which the practice of educational Inclusion, and the understanding surrounding it, developed in the Birmingham area from 1996 to 2000. The exploration is recounted as a narrative and starts with a dedication to some of the remarkable students whom the researcher met during a four-year attempt at understanding inclusionary changes in schools. I was lucky enough to be able to work in a number of such schools as they became more inclusive of a wider range of individuals.
Contents;
Dedication
The Evolution of the Research Questions
The Initial Methodology
Story as Research
What Sort of Knowledge?
An Accessible Writing System
Participant Storying
Validity
Dedication
Many school students helped and inspired me to complete this investigation. Dana, a profoundly hearing-impaired young woman, and the (now hundreds) of students working as Valued Youth Tutors in the Valued Youth Programme of Second City Second Chance deserve unstinted admiration. These latter young people helped to create part of this story as they allowed the exploration of the most difficult Inclusion question; how do we include those students with behavioural and emotional difficulties?
In terms of the struggle of challenged students everywhere I am deeply indebted to the student referred to in Chapter Four as Danielle. Danielle suffered from Spina Bifida and, tragically, died during a routine operation on 1.10.98- at the beginning of her year 8 at the school known in this study as Five Houses. She was, at the time, the only student in a wheelchair at the school and all those who came into contact with her will always remember her vivacious approach to life and the ease with which she faced very great difficulties. She was someone who simply wanted to be regarded as an ordinary school student; different but equal.
The Evolution of the Research Questions;
The research started as an investigation of the meanings and operation of "Inclusion" as a phrase and set of actions. I was interested in why the word was becoming used and what it meant in action and I wished to develop my understanding in a rigorous way, using the experience as a part of my personal development. I took advice and, having completed an MPhil in educational research at an earlier stage in my career, set out upon the PhD trail. After much consideration and discussion the starting research question became;
“What interpretations and operations of Inclusion are to be found in Birmingham?”
Notably this question was more positivistic than the final range of questions which this study covered by the time it was completed five (part-time) years later.
In terms of geographical location the study became focussed, under the influence of a number of factors, on five schools in Birmingham whose interpretations and explanations could be compared. In retrospect, the part-time nature of the study was advantageous, in that it enabled changes over a five-year period to be observed.
During this period I initiated a charity with inclusionary aims (Second City Second Chance; SCSC). Since both the research and SCSC were part of my personal development, it became clear that an analysis of how my experience in the case study schools influenced my work for SCSC would also be a part of the research process. My thinking and personal development were themselves integral parts of the research process and I felt that they were worth recording and analysing.
At the point in the whole journey when, for the sake of reporting, this account had to be written, the central question had evolved to become several;
What understandings do the key operators have of the Inclusion process?
How are the lessons from one Inclusion experience transferred to another?
Why is this all happening at this time anyway?
How did all the above questions influence my development and the growth and direction of SCSC?
This evolutionary process is described in more detail in Chapters One and Two, but it should be noted that the research question evolved from one which concerned end products to one of process and ethos. As a consequence the relevant research tools changed; initial interviewing and collection of written evidence gave way to ethnographic work in the schools and an introspective "storying" of all of the developments, including the evolution of SCSC.
The Initial Methodology
The study began with an emphasis on investigation using a methodology that included structured interviews with key LEA/school personnel and even contemplation of a matched study of one initiative using a comparison school. Those mechanisms, however relevant at the beginning of the period of investigation, changed or evolved over time and the matched study was abandoned because of the change in the nature of the research questions described above. As a result, the obvious and congruent way of reporting the study also changed and the main vehicle became a story of values and experiences that could analyse a very complex field. I developed the belief, supported by contemporary research literature (1), that telling the story was the most valid way of portraying the understandings that developed during the study.
Story as Research
While I came to this view independently, it was interesting to discover the parallels in other fields where understanding was the main focus. I began by wanting to know Who/ What? and When? about Inclusion but arrived at Why? towards the end of my study. At a philosophical level I became fascinated by the debate about the differences between research in Natural Sciences and that in Social Science. I was concerned to make clear my understandings as a researcher/writer after the challenges of the field and to make my learnings useful in an accessible format. This had been argued for by many others, for example Douglas Foley in Shacklock and Smyth;
"…notions of an authoritative, formal, objective language, die hard. Many practitioners still believe that scientific narratives must be written in as abstract and formalistic a language as possible. Such narratives must be organised around a series of second order abstractions that characterise, compare and classify the lived experience being observed. More importantly, such texts must not drift into the vortex of ordinary connotative, personal, expressive language and its endless forms of linguistic play. As Michael Foucault (1972) notes, there really is no author in academic writing. There are only authoritative discourses and their discursive regimes. Many of these authoritative discourses emerge from new academic disciplines that form a vast new social surveillance apparatus.
Moreover, if we adopt Bourdieu's view of academia as the site of bourgeois taste cultures, academics are the new professional middle class of cultural workers (Ehrenreich 1989). Even allegedly 'radical scholars' who break with their ideological role as scientific surveillance expert do not necessarily eschew the academic culture and its preferred discourse style. Many such scholars continue to ply the aesthetics, language games, and form of literacy that they mastered as graduate students and untenured assistant professors. Despite recent experimentation, most academic writers still convey their lived experience in the vastly impoverished aesthetics and deferential forms of a bourgeois academic discourse."
(p.111)
What Sort of Knowledge?
Philosopher Anthony Flew in 1979 described three types of knowledge;
"Knowledge that…. Factual knowledge"
"Knowledge how… Practical knowledge"
"Knowledge of…….Knowledge of people and places"
My study began with an emphasis on the first two and ended with a concentration on the last with an emphasis on the motives and understandings of the fascinating people I met. I hope that the resulting story allows for the possibility that the understanding and knowledge I gained will do more than stand on a shelf alongside other PhDs. I wanted to make my research useful to others, believing with Barton and others that there is a moral imperative so to do (2). I hope that the understanding that I incorporated into SCSC (as it developed under the influence of my parallel research work) will thereby also become accessible to other practitioners.
In making my work accessible as a story the following mechanisms seemed congruent and appropriate;
An Accessible Writing System
Footnotes which did not interrupt the flow of the story seemed a "best fit” in terms of the aim of the study (and the exhortations of Barton (op. cit.) and others). The use of referencing with no detail in the text (e.g. Jones 1999, Beaver 2000 etc.) did not seem helpful and I came to believe that references would be of most use if they allowed the reader to interact directly with the work being quoted. Similarly, if information from someone else was relevant, then it seemed appropriate to include it either in the text or in the footnotes as far as possible. A separate Literature Review was therefore felt to be an inappropriate mechanism. This ensured that all relevant developments in the field were referred to, and that my discoveries in the literature were available for direct scrutiny.
For ease of access to the whole story, each chapter is preceded by a synopsis and all of these are collated in Appendix A. Sample extracts from Field Notes, Personal Journal and school/LEA documentation are presented in Appendices E, F and G.
Participant Storying.
My active participation in a number of the situations in the study “gave life” to the potential story that was unfolding. This was particularly the case when I analysed the development of SCSC as it evolved from my research experiences; I later came to describe this as "emergence", as I came to analyse it following my understanding of Chaos Theory as applied to social situations.
As I moved from investigational study into action and application, via SCSC in particular, my work in the schools began to stagnate, except where I was also involved with a school in an SCSC initiative. As the study matured to this late stage, I came to believe, like May (Shacklock and Smyth 1999) that;
"After all, an external researcher where time in the school is invariably limited cannot hope to shape the educational agenda in the same way as an ongoing participant"
(p.166)
I began the research with the intention of mapping out developments and had no intention of intervention or assistance to the schools. Indeed, at that time, I would not have known how I could possibly have been of use! I became, though, an "ongoing participant" within the development of SCSC and was then able to contrast and compare my experience there with that as a "external researcher" in schools. My SCSC involvement was of a different intensity to that in the schools, even though I became very well known, accepted and used in all of these. This challenged my understanding of validity - was my intense study of a small number of cases going to be reliable and useful as well as valid? It eventually became important to think of the validity-reliability issue in the following ways;
Validity;
I was led to think, during the study, about different interpretations of validity. There appeared, for example, to be a continuum from objective to subjective validity. Carspecken and Macgillivray (1999) refer to the following useful definitions of the extremes of the range. They see Objective Validity as structured by "multiple access" (many cases, cross-checking possible) and Subjective Validity as about privileged access and where cross-checking is either not possible or would not make sense anyway. They also think that there is a;
"Normative/evaluative validity structured by the most rudimentary forms of inter-subjectivity".
(“Raising Consciousness about Reflection, Validity and Meaning” in Shacklock and Smyth 1999 p. 184).
Interestingly, I always felt pressured by the PhD process into reaching for "proof" of objectivity. This was as if educational research had not escaped from the influence of natural and physical science and moved to a situation where its most crucial questions are best answered with congruent methodologies and appropriate reporting systems (or, where appropriate, a mixed methodology as used to produce this story).
Since my research question was about the values in Inclusion (who valued what and why?), it was reassuring to be reminded by Bauman that we should not be swayed from congruence. After all, as he put it, the pressure is always on for;
"…contemporary intellectuals …(to)…stick unswervingly to the Western injunction of keeping the poetry of values away from the prose of bureaucratically useful expertise".
(p. 16-17 quoted in Jarvis 1999 p. 167)
For me, the values espoused by the individuals and organisations that I encountered were central; it appeared likely at the outset that it was these and not rhetoric or governance that was furthering Inclusion.
The story told in the following chapters, then, unfolds from the learning process that I went through, and reports the story from my own perspective. Triangulation and referral to evidence collected from the friends I made in the process is made where this is relevant and appropriate.
The story demonstrates, in particular through the Chapter ‘Second City Action’, that it is the combination of the "Poetry of Values" with "What works" (the "bureaucratically useful expertise") that can make a difference. The former would appear to be useless without the latter and the latter sterile and potentially misleading without the former. It would appear to be immoral not to act and Durkheim has a useful definition of morality in this context (3).
The study incorporates action research, comparative case studies and ethnography, at appropriate times and for different parts of the whole Inclusion question. However it is Action Research that is at the heart of the methodology, with a fundamental aim of this process being;
"…to improve practice rather than to produce knowledge. The production and utilisation of knowledge is subordinate to, and conditioned by, this fundamental aim".
(Elliott 1989 p.4.)
Chapters One and Two explore the methodological issues in depth, while the Case Study Chapters describe Action Research findings. Elliott's "utilisation of knowledge" is apparent in the Chapter ‘Second City Action’ in particular, although it will be clear to the reader that my work was also part of the background to changes at the school known as Five Houses. Subsequent to this research Five Houses and St Edna's became very involved in the refinement of the inclusionary programmes developed by SCSC.
Footnotes
1In "On Writing Qualitative Research, Living by Words", Margaret Ely and collaborators detail a large number of studies where the story has been the appropriate way of conveying the message. In this Inclusion story, to parallel the words of Marshall McLuhan; "the medium is the message".
2Len Barton argues the moral imperative for action in his book with Peter Clough (1995). He suggest three questions (in his Conclusion, entitled “Many Urgent Voices”);
"What responsibilities arise from the privileges I have as a result of my social position?"
"How can I use my knowledge and skills to challenge, for example, the forms of oppression disabled people experience?"
and
"Does my writing and speaking reproduce a system of domination or challenge that system?"
He also talks of the following, each being of relevance in the current study;
- The Researcher as Learner
- The Researcher as Teacher
- The Researcher as Subject
3Hargreaves (1982 p.107) quotes Durkheim (1933);
"Everything which is a source of solidarity is moral, everything which forces man to take account of other men is moral, everything which forces him to regulate his conduct through something other than the striving of his own ego is moral, and morality is as solid as these tiesare numerous and strong"
CHAPTER ONE
THE SCENE
Synopsis
This chapter examines in detail the setting in which the researcher operated and ways in which practitioners have interpreted "Inclusion" or operated to produce it. The research process is described as having much in common with non- "deliberation-mode" thinking (as in ‘Hare Brain Tortoise Mind’ by Guy Claxton, 1997). The latter process was aided by the fact that the study was carried out over a four-year period on a part-time basis, leaving scope for reflection and the opportunity to observe changes over a significant period of time.