The slideshow below highlights some of our recent events we have been a part of. The first few pictures are of me when I won the Australian Human Rights Award for Individuals. That was a very exciting day. There are then pictures of the launch of Disability Action Week last year in Ipswich as well as Multicultural Week at the Roma Street Parklands in Brisbane.

Exciting News - Sharon won the Human Rights Award for Individuals 2008 for her contribution to Community. Here she is with Julian Morrow of  'Chaser's' fame and Graham Innis from HREOC.

You can have check out more details and listen to my acceptance speech from the Australian Human Rights Award ceremony here. 

"If we teach today's students as we taught yesterday's, we rob them of tomorrow." 
John Dewey

Discovery at Paradise Island - A Review by Chantal Watts

The book is interesting to read. it is about Alexandria and Sarah and the mum and dad going on a holiday to Paradise Island. Sarah thinks it is going to be boring because Alexandria's mum is in a wheelchair and Sarah thinks that she is not going to be able to do anything but she can actually do mostly everything that everyone else does. Just because she is in a wheelchair doesn't mean that she cannot do anything.my favourite part was when Alexandria' s mum fell out of her wheelchair she had to get three people to help her get back into her wheelchair.there is a mystery in the story to solve and you have to use code breaking skills.and the answer is in the back of the book but you should try to work it out yourself as it is more fun.you also can make up your own secret code and share it with your friends. we learnt that people in a wheelchair can do lots of things on their own they just have to do them differently.

My Rating:

People would like to read this book because it is interesting to read and it explains what happens when you are in a wheelchair.

I would like to give this 9 out of 10 because it has some funny bits and some happy and sad parts.

An evaluation of the discovering disability & Diversity professional development project (2003-2010)

ABSTRACT

This research report has been developed by Michael Furtado and Sharon Boyce on the basis of the impact of their professional development project, Discovering DisAbility & Diversity, which is their awareness-raising project for social and cultural inclusion. The DDD Project is now in its eighth year and an evaluation and reappraisal has long been overdue. Without dislocating its major emphasis on disability awareness, there have been many requests from our client base of over 1000 schools to move beyond basic and introductory approaches to introducing inclusion to the life of schools so that inclusive practices can become embedded in them.

The report is the product of discussions with several school principals, teachers (especially of learning support), academics, researchers, teacher aides, parents, students and education policy officers, as well as others who specialise in the field, and who have generously shared their feedback, knowledge and experience, understanding and wisdom with us. From what they and you have said it is clear that schools have a rich history in developing innovative practices for inclusion. These practices inspire and inform the following discussion.

Introduction

Social and Cultural Inclusion mean many different things to different people. For instance, some think of it as a discourse of morality and compassion, while others think of it as a political discourse requiring the redistribution of scarce resources to honour the human rights entitlements of excluded learners (Levitas 2000). Our view is not to take sides between those who enter this discussion on the basis of choosing between charity or justice, as the case may be, but to outlay what our research tells us that schools are doing so that our client base can assess for themselves where they fit in and want to go.

Another way of defining Social and Cultural Inclusion is to allude to the Achievement Gap (Green 2001), which refers to the observed disparity on a number of educational measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, ability/disability, and socioeconomic status. It can be observed on a variety of measures, including standardised test scores, grade point averages, dropout rates, and school and university enrollment and completion rates. While Australia registers relatively well in terms of overall educational outcomes there are massive ‘within’ differences in achievement gaps between urban and rural education outcomes, public and private schools and indigenous and other Australian school outcomes (OECD 2008).

Such gaps are believed by some to illustrate social injustice and discrimination against groups, and to justify actions and practices based on eradicating these gaps as a matter of public and educational policy and practice. Others disagree as to the structural causes of such gaps, e.g. as being rooted in class, history, culture, ethnicity, gender and disability or whether non-discriminatory, level-playing field policies and practices that directly target economics and education, or policies based on catch-up strategies with identity groups, such as through affirmative action, multicultural and progressive education initiatives, are more effective in closing the Achievement Gap. Whatever the disagreements between our respondents, it is clear that they share some characteristics in common. These include the following programs, initiatives and projects that we have worked on during the last seven years:

1. Whole-school models of inclusion
2. Specific curriculum models emphasising local and global citizenship
3. Specific teaching and learning projects (pedagogy) focussed on all aspects of inclusion
4. Specific curriculum initiatives to create new learning pathways for excluded learners
5. Specific and targeted Leadership Development and Formation for inclusive schools
6. Schools committed to inclusion as a matter of mission, vision, symbolism, rhetoric and philosophy
7. Schools committed to developing and sustaining inclusive communities of practice.

Our research findings suggest that schools may want to consider the development of a more particular, varied and strategic approaches to inclusion based on the above data.

Examples of inclusion

In general our data showed that while inclusion remained an inexplicit and undefined term our client base subscribed to the following inclusive educational models and categories in which all students and staff had enhanced opportunities to:

• Access new kinds of learning and employment pathways that challenged socio-economic class and other impediments to students' curriculum outcomes and life chances. The government school that fell into this category had made a concerted effort to increase and extend subject options for all its students rather than to restrict their curriculum to a set client base.
• Employ language and imagery, symbols, liturgy, art, sport, policy and cultural norms and practices to ensure that the entire school exuded all the atmospherics of an inclusive community, e.g., in the culturally and socially diverse Catholic school evidenced, students routinely learnt from this diversity to regard, communicate and collaborate with others using intercultural understandings across class and gender, nationality and sensibility. This was most evident in the tone of the school from the principal upwards.
• Explore global learning and problem solving by acquiring knowledge of the cultures, histories, geographies and languages of several other countries, including proficiency in two or more languages, instituting programs of student exchange between schools in those countries as well as becoming a global citizen with the skills to create cross-cultural ideas and understandings, including conflict resolution skilling. Several international independent schools subscribed to this view of inclusion.
• Participate in a dialogue about all aspects of school life, thus positioning empowerment of students in all decision-making and leadership skills. Several alternative schools subscribed to this description of the inclusive school as a democratic school.

What was common to all schools was the belief that exclusion was a mainstream problem that affected everyone in the school and as a consequence of which inclusion was everybody’s concern. 

Social background & The achievement gap: a major concern

Our data showed that educational achievement and life chances are strongly shaped by socio-economic background. A survey conducted at the University of Newcastle (Furtado, 1996) revealed that students from low SES backgrounds are up to 16 times less likely to gain entrance to a medical science degree than those from high SES categories. The comparative statistics are not much better for law and other high prestige qualifications. High SES students register about three years in advance of the reading literacy of same-aged low-SES students. No country can afford such obviously marginalising effects of poverty, resulting not simply in a polarised society of rich and poor but also a waste of human resources as well as a lack of opportunity.

Our view is that all schools should play a role in ameliorating this shocking waste as a matter of the common good and public spiritedness and we acknowledge the research of Professor Jack Keating of the University of Melbourne (2010) in this regard demonstrating that such exclusion is the main challenge facing contemporary education policy makers. It occurred to us that all of this had eventuated while Australia has imported education reform ideas from the United Kingdom and United States. However, the achievement gap is even greater in those countries and our literature review showed that a spirited critique of the education reform movement in them has been the mainstay of the educational equity policy discourse in Australia.

With such influences, the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ’have nots’ has continued while other countries are moving in the opposite direction. One such country is Finland, where the degree of inequality we experience would not be tolerated. Although our research showed that while most Australians favour school choice it also revealed that there are three independent school in Finland and none of them get government support (Furtado 2008), a matter that has escaped comment and critical scrutiny in Australia.

One deduction that we made from this was that the achievement gap cannot be reduced without reference to all schools actively engaging with inclusion at a whole school level, so as to close the achievement gap. At the time of writing this Report it seems likely that the Australian Government is at last prepared to do something about it by proposing to link all school funding with the SES profile of every school in Australia.

the need to Support inclusive schools in two ways

Because of NAPLAN and the MY SCHOOL website it is commonplace to attach the ‘underperforming’ label to schools and too many of them are caught up in the naming and shaming game instead of using performace indicators to draw attention to social background and the achievement gap. Recent data shows that it is schools at the higher end of the socio-economic scale that have done extremely well in national standardised testing. However, none of this precisely reveals what they have done about their achievement gap, even assuming that they have one. Only one of these schools in Queensland is thought to have a wide socio-economic demographic with no entrance test, viz. All Hallows’ School, a Catholic girls’ school in Brisbane, but even then the fee structure of the school while considerably lower than those within the same result percentile, is such as to exclude low SES students from being enrolled.

School funding and resourcing so that all schools can compete equally is the main issue addressing disadvantage so that national standardised testing can truly reveal the real responsibilities not simply of but  to these schools. Thus, if the achievement gap is taken into account schools can be supported in two key ways:

1. By pressurising school systems and governments to provide the necessary extra resources to enable the closing of the gap in achievement (which is closely linked to socio-economic background; and
2. By supporting schools and systems to develop new ways to include those who are not benefitting equally from schooling.

It should not come as any surprise that some schools have been pressurised by the unfair comparative effects of league tables to instruct low-performing students not to attend examinations and submit to national testing and that some have even been accused of cheating. Where injustice obtains cheating will follow. As Nicholas Abbey, President, Victorian Council of School Organisations (VICCSO) has recently stated, ‘The evidence is clear: more of the same in terms of resourcing, curriculum design and some teaching methods will not reduce the achievement gap. Copying what works for better-off schools is also a futile strategy. A different approach is needed.’ (2010)

WHAT the research is saying

As Levitas’s theorising shows, it is futile to treat inclusion as if everything currently being practiced is wrong and exclusive, no matter how diverse subjects utopian assumptions are. Our data shows that inclusion is a contested site which is subject to a diversity of interpretations depending on context. And no one way is wrong. To start with a comprehensive plan to close the achievement gap the first stage is to acknowledge that everyone is doing inclusion. The second stage is to run a forum so that teachers, parents and teacher aides can listen to one another say what they believe they are doing for inclusion. This kind of forum enables individual teachers and teacher aides as well as parents to widen their repertoire of inclusive understanding.

Through such forums schools learn to employ a variety of inclusive practices and strategies rather than just one or two, thereby changing and widening their school culture, policy and practice to make inclusion more central and mainstream rather than an optional extra. A later stage is to enable schools to band together to exchange information and ideas about what they are doing and this provides a further impetus for an even wider suite of teaching and learning practices to address the achievement gap.

Also by banding individual teachers to find out what they are doing, schools can get a very good idea of writing up and thereby making explicit a school inclusion plan. This makes inclusion central to everything that a school does and fundamental to longer-term plans to regard inclusion as a never-ending discourse, which, of course, it is. This approach also avoids projectitis and enables inclusion to grow organically and osmotically rather than to be treated as a deliberate additional burden on schools.

Our research has already identified distinct models of inclusive policy and practice as follows:

1. Whole-school models of inclusion
2. Curriculum models emphasising local and global citizenship
3. Inclusive teaching and learning projects (inclusive pedagogy)
4. New learning pathways for excluded learners
5. Leadership Development and Formation for inclusive schools
6. Inclusion as a matter of school mission and vision
7. Inclusive communities of practice.

Each of these models is briefly discussed below. They may inform a school's diversity policy, which we plan to spend more time on in our workshops from 2011 onwards. In case our research has not involved you, you may have some additional ideas and practices about what inclusion means to you and/or your school.

1. WHOLE-SCHOOL MODELS OF INCLUSION

Australians originate from over 230 nations, speak approximately 180 different languages and follow at least 116 different religions. This diversity has led to differing educational responses in terms of how schools are organised. The student population of most schools represents broadly the character of the neighbourhood consistent with a culturally and socially diverse society. While Australia is a more heterogeneous society than, say, the United Kingdom, the reality is that home address is an indelible marker of the socio-economic status of Australians and ensures that Australian schools are relatively homogeneous and therefore exclusive.

Some schools, additionally, recruit students based on ethnicity, social class, gender or religious identity, though there are signs of this breaking down. (A decade ago 70% of Catholics attended Catholic schools; this figure is currently down to less than 50%). Although our findings do not have Catholic schools in mind, except that there is clear evidence of their becoming more middle-class (Furtado 2008), such identity-based schooling can also create a more or less homogeneous student body that also militates against an inclusive society. In sharp contrast to the overall diversity of Australian society itself, the emphasis is on students selected from and therefore learning apart from their peers from culturally and socially diverse backgrounds. As the transnational education scholar, Lingard, asks, if certain schools divide on the basis of gender, faith, social background, wealth, geography and so on, are they well placed to build bridging social capital? (Lingard 2008)

At the other end of the spectrum are schools characterised by cultural and social inclusion. Not only does the student body more or less reflect the broad mix of their community, these schools are also founded on the principle of students from diverse cultural, social and religious backgrounds learning together. However, these schools are often in low socio-economic areas and the kind of social capital that is in evidence when rich and poor students mix is generally not in evidence at such schools.

We repeat that this is not to suggest there is a clear divide between certain 'exclusive' private schools, on the one side, and 'inclusive' public schools, on the other, because our findings did not bear this out. Some low-fee private schools were surprising diverse, while a few selective state schools were not. The situation is therefore more complex than a matter of rich and poor schools: our data showed that there is no contradiction between schools with a particular identity and their pursuit of diversity in education. For instance, Catholic schools in the Northern Territory have offered enrolment to refugee children regardless of religious affiliation, most asylum seekers in the Northern Territory Detention Centre being of an Islamic faith background.

What appears to really matter is that inherent within the notion of an inclusive school is the powerful principle that it is both possible and desirable for educational and broad societal reasons, particularly connected with finding solutions to bridge the achievement gap, for all children and young people, regardless of their circumstances or differences, to learn together, because exposure of one group to one another, reminiscent of the comprehensive education principle, appears to exert a positive effect on the achievement gap.

While it is sometimes thought that in a more inclusive school, student forums may openly discuss the challenges presented by diversity, harmony and conflict resolution as well as the further steps necessary in their school’s continuing pursuit of the inclusive ideal, students in such a school routinely learn from diversity by rubbing shoulders with one another; they may communicate and collaborate with others using intercultural and cross-class understandings and be especially well-placed to become future leaders and global citizens, and the research shows that the academic outcomes of such schools are generally superior to those with a fixed demographic profile. In effect exposure to difference has a positive effect on the learning of all rather than some and much of the reason for this is that teachers automatically employ a raft of teaching and learning methods to accommodate such diversity.

While such schools can build and strengthen local communities and help to develop modern, inclusive societies, the secret to their inclusiveness is reflected in the comprehensiveness of their curriculum and their broad-repertoire pedagogy. One school that we noted portrayed all the characteristics of such inclusiveness was All Hallows School, which while a Catholic girls’ school demonstrated all the characteristics of an inclusive school through commitment to improving the life chances of girls, reducing the achievement gap between high achievers and others by offering a wide raft of curriculum subjects, and through eschewing selective entry through reference to wide-repertoire teaching and learning.

2. Curriculum models emphasising local and global citizenship

The Melbourne Declaration on Educational Goals for Young Australians (December 2008) affirms that all students should be supported to become global and local citizens. In accordance with the Learning Framework for this curriculum area it is important to provide all young people with opportunities to:

• Recognise and respond to specific challenges and situations which cultural and social diversity presents in their schools, local communities and the wider world, especially at a time when the national versus multicultural binary is on the wane and transnational and global identity are on the increase
• Recognise and exercise their rights and social responsibilities in relation to local, national and global issues
• Develop and practice understandings as to how to participate in democratic processes at school and beyond
• Positively and proactively counter any attitudes or behaviours that exhibit exclusion or prejudice and to do so in ways that recognise diversity and the uniqueness of each one

Local and global citizenship learning can already be supported:

• Across a range of key learning areas through the identification and explicit teaching of generic skills, such as through education for justice and peace and conflict resolution
• By whole school and community links, experiences, festivals and events that focus on an exploration and celebration of diverse cultures and identities within the school and community
• Through professional learning focused on exploring the meaning of, and opportunities for developing, local and global citizenship, especially through social education (Selby & Pyke, 2000).

Often approaches to developing students as local and global citizens are interpreted as teaching them about society, culture and the globe. While such a content-based approach is highly valuable, our research shows that it is in how this is done that the real lessons of social and cultural inclusion, diversity and identity are learnt. If students learnt a great deal about the world but found through a focus on content at the exclusion of method, that they were locked out of it, no effective and empowering teaching for inclusion will have taken place (Rummery, 1986).

Consider how many of us from an older generation can rattle off the names of capital cities, rivers, mountains and oceans and the extent to which such knowledge has never translated into action and insight, interest and commitment to make a better world! Some years ago one of us was part of a curriculum taskforce that proposed a course in Educating Globally but it went nowhere fast. Perhaps now is the time to revisit such an idea.

3. inclusive teaching & Learning Projects (inclusive pedagogy)

One of the most insidious aspects of exclusive teaching that we encountered was through reproductive teaching (Willis 1977) By this we understood the employment of social and cultural practices in the classroom that favoured one group of students over another. Often unconsciously practiced, such curriculum choice and pedagogic methods simply serve to reproduce the existing power distribution in society and serve to disempower learners whose social and cultural practices did not conform with that of the school, teacher and those with social and cultural dominance in the class.

The answer to this when teachers become aware of the exclusive effects of reproductive practice is to widen curriculum as well as teaching and learning repertoire so that learners on the periphery can become engaged. We found that principals and teachers are wary of differentiating the curriculum for under-achieving students, mistakenly perceiving this to serve a segregating agenda. They know that streaming and second choice options are socially unjust and offer no long-term solution to underachievement. This is reinforced by international data which shows that countries with an improved standing are phasing out such practices (OECD 2008).

However, sometimes to treat learners equally it makes sense to teach them differently. This does not necessarily constitute segregation or streaming but calls on teachers to learn how to develop a wide repertoire of pedagogic practices within the same heterogeneous class. Unfortunately our data showed that a large number of non-government and a few government schools have approached solutions to a problem of diverse learning needs by streaming and separating their students according to stage-based learning.

All of this is counteracted by Professor Richard Teese's research into reducing the achievement gap (Teese & Lamb 2009), who argue for a diverse, inclusive curriculum and learning pathways that challenge the separation of students into academic and vocational tracks. So it is not necessarily the schools that learners attend but the staging and streaming within them that is responsible for the achievement gap.

Australia has never really addressed the question of the socially differentiating effects of streaming on the life-chances of students. While there is much research and a long history of awareness-raining among teachers about this in other countries, notably the United Kingdom, there is a naivety in Australia about the socially and culturally differentiating effects of streaming being discriminatory and prejudicial to the social and employment mobility and many other life-chances of students. As Professor Seymour Papert and David Capello observe:

“A long time ago, a distinction was made between working with one's hands and working with one's head. Much of the educational world treated this distinction as though children who could work with their hands could not work well with their heads, and a separate and quite unequal educational track was created. New technology absolutely demolishes the distinction, and creates new pathways for learning for those who think well with their hands" (2009).

Unfortunately the binary outlined above still lives with us and has frustrated the efforts to reverse it of several inquiries of global significance. The Newsom Report in the UK reported as such:

‘We can think of an area, typical of much of the country, in which up to about a quarter of all the pupils who leave the primary schools go on to secondary grammar or secondary technical schools. The remaining three quarters, apart from a small number who may be provided for in 'special' schools for the severely physically or mentally handicapped, will go to secondary modern schools. In the latter, there will be an 'above average' group, including some pupils who show themselves capable of doing work similar to that done by many pupils in a grammar school.

There will be a second group, generally much larger, who represent the 'average' boys and girls of their age; and a third, usually smaller, group, of those who have considerably more difficulty in remembering and applying what they learn, and who certainly work more slowly. Finally, we can pick out a fourth group of really backward pupils who have a struggle to attain an elementary mastery of reading, writing and calculation. No description of the size of these various groups will be accurate for all schools, but however uncertain the frontiers, all these territories have to be included in the educational map.’ (Newsom Report, 1963)

And in the ABC Radio National program, Life Matters, of October 8 2010, the presenter, Richard Aedy, interviewing Professor Denise Bradley, Chair of the Higher Education Review Expert Panel, reported on continued and alarming evidence of educational exclusion of students from low-SES backgrounds. There are still entire families in Australia whose children never get to university and whose life-chances are significantly reduced as a result.

In their consultancy report, Cultural and Social Inclusion, Nicholas Abbey and Keith Staples (2010) show that a school’s starting point is to see its role not as one of passively providing opportunities which students may or may not choose to take up, but rather as one of investigating who gets left out and then bringing about changes so that all students are included. They then propose that all students have unique life experiences and backgrounds and that educators must acknowledge and value this diversity in curriculum planning. This inclusion relates to enhancing the quality of learning of all students including those vulnerable to being excluded, through better curriculum and improved pedagogy.

‘We therefore deduce that a socially just, inclusive curriculum seamlessly combines academic knowledge, concepts, theories and principles with applied learning and real world problem solving. The curriculum is then opened up to a wider range of students who may otherwise be streamed into narrowly academic and applied learning and technical pathways.’ (Abbey & Staples 2010)

Such findings show that many teachers, reflecting on their own backgrounds as academic subject specialists who were largely disconnected from more applied learning, especially in the middle and secondary years, have led the way in developing an optimum mix of academic and applied (or practical) learning. This mix, determined to break down the binary between academic and vocational education, is readily embraced by many young people and at the core of a 21st century curriculum.

4. new learning pathways for excluded learners

Developing students’ personalised learning pathways can be a powerful means to move from exclusion to inclusion and disengagement to engagement. This enables students to freely mix and match subjects which favour their own personal blend of both deep academic knowledge and practical and applied learning - rather than being typecast and squeezed into narrow vocational, occupational or academic study pathways.

The traditional and even pastoral way of dealing with this has been to advise parents and carers to withdraw a student on the basis of resistant behaviour or lack of performance and to direct the student to a more ‘appropriate’ school. This practice used to be widely observed in the non-government sector and especially in Catholic schools. While a ‘new start’ is often an opportunity for non-performing students to ‘lift their game’, one can see that the mind-set informing this thinking assumes that compliance is the key to effective learning, rather than a focus on the provision of a curriculum and pedagogy that engages the learner.

In general, where non-performance is an issue it is ethically and professionally improper as well as increasingly economically unsustainable for students to be asked to leave: only evidence of criminality and a resort to the courts should constitute the kind of behaviour that poses such a threat to the school that there is no option but to exclude or expel. In fairness, even in the Catholic system there is provision in alternative schools for disengaged learners to be accommodated and several non-government schools are linked with religious and other social justice traditions that ought not, at least ethically and morally, to sanction such exclusion-related policy and practice.

Indeed, as school funding policy moves to reward those who enrol anybody, especially students from backgrounds in which life-chances, of employment, education and self-sustainability, are predictably drawn from low SES areas, the key to providing a solution to this problem lies in re-vamping the curriculum and widening pedagogy. In general then the resort to behaviourist solutions to cope with resistance in learners should be regarded as falling outside the parameters of schools qua schools. Schools regarding themselves as reformatories and shapers of ‘character’ are therefore on a hiding to nowhere simply because they are locked into a mindset that is determined not to critique their own narrow reproductive practice.

An additional consideration is that many more students are creating their own pathways into and out of education and work at quite a young age. Some may begin with university and then attend a TAFE college, and vice versa. Others are widely known to express a view from the age of twelve or earlier about what they wish to do with their productive lives. There is a danger in this of ‘peaking early’ because narrowing learning options at too young an age without the opportunity to explore options can be a trap later on in life.

Thus, periods of changing employment needs (and therefore of work patterns) and preparedness to engage in lifelong learning to accommodate up to five careers per person will be the 21^st century norm. For schools to effectively cater for this, learning opportunities need to be spread increasingly throughout life rather than concentrated in a preparatory stage. And part of this paradigm shift is to support teachers in being more flexible and user-friendly through giving them the resources to parcel their teaching and learning expertise in ways that meet immediate rather than long-term needs. Such is the substance of inclusion!

For educators, parents and students, this turns attention to the need for an overarching structure of unified learning pathways that consider senior school, VET and higher education as part of an accessible, coherent learning framework. This strategy can improve the quality of learning for all students and increase access to ‘academic’ learning for students who may be initially more ‘practical’ than ‘conceptual’ in their learning - especially when educators skilfully exploit these links in-between.

In our own work we see this happening with many teacher aides initially drawn into paraprofessional work because of an immediate and pressing interest in the welfare of their own or other people’s children and later, once their practical experience has been consolidated, making transitions into pre-service education courses, eventuating in their becoming teachers. Therefore, by adopting a whole-of-life approach to students’ life and learning, schools can assist many more students to successfully plan, navigate and develop their own unified education, training and work pathways, without necessarily being restricted by what is available or required at any one institution.

5. leadership development & formation for inclusive schools

Equipping schools personnel to handle the demands of more inclusive approaches and providing the necessary time for professional visioning and planning is really the responsibility of education leadership. If inclusion is at the core of all that a school does, then its place on the PD agenda is obviously a given. However, nothing much in inclusion will make any headway without the active support of the Principal and/or other movers and shakers in the school. It follows that one of the major challenges in inclusive education is to create a kind of corps of inclusive educators with the power, responsibility and initiative to drive inclusion through all aspects of the life of the school.

To attract such a cohort to sign on to a course requires some special strategies, given how busy we all are and the competing attention for time and decision-making in the life of the school that is the bane of the existence of so many school leaders. We are currently in negotiation with a university that will partner any initiative on our part to develop and accredit an Inclusive Leadership Formation course, initially one that allows for some credits for a Graduate Diploma in Leadership Studies, or, depending on course outcomes, standards and level as well as course work, perhaps even for a Master’s degree in Leadership Studies.

What we plan to do initially is to set up an informal Inclusive Leadership Forum during 2011, with membership for those who have been so instrumental in supporting and accessing our professional learning. We will shortly be setting up a website for expressions of interest in how such a network is to operate and the kind of topics and outcomes, supports and opportunities to meet and exchange that it will require. Obviously our intention is not to reinvent the wheel or to take over the work of a variety of bodies that so usefully service and resource disability aspects of special education.

Moreover we need a strategy that will draw the kind of participation and action that will demonstrate to potential accrediting bodies, such as universities and professional associations that we are serious, well-informed, viable and keen to do business with them to support their and our mutual interest in progressing social inclusion. Some of our interesting professional development sessions in inclusive leadership will accordingly involve educators discussing practical strategies about:

• identifying the qualities of an inclusive leader
• tracking the links between those qualities and effective leadership envisioning
• developing capacity to translate such envisioning into inclusive goals
• linking such inclusive goals with effective inclusion policy and planning
• identifying successful inclusive leaders and inviting them to share their wisdom and experience
• creating culturally and socially inclusive learning environments for staff, parents and students
• counteracting deficit thinking in relation to students of diverse backgrounds, including culture, gender and disability
• ensuring that all inclusive learning builds on staff and students’ backgrounds and experiences
• ensuring that all inclusive learning and teaching makes explicit one’s identity, culture and background
• being constantly aware of how cultural bias and prejudice are manifested in education
• emphasising at all times the importance for inclusion of links between experiential and theoretical learning
• being prepared at all times to share with others the wealth of strategies and methods employed to establish an inclusive learning environment

Subsequent network meetings can review progress and identify learnings, successes, barriers encountered and resources required for further expansion. To enable this to happen, network or forum membership will be conditional on confidentiality agreements being honoured and a code of professional ethics will be devised to support this.

One of the growing new areas for discussion and implementation will be The Early Years National Curriculum, which enshrines inclusion in all aspects of its framework. This inclusive intention will eventually be driven through all the later stages of learning and has dramatic consequences for the Middle Years, when the Achievement Gap is at its most insidiously evident and many learners drop out of school for lack of alternative pathways. It would appear that such a focus would eminently suit a leadership group with the objective of consolidating inclusion.

We are conscious here of a possible conflation of two ideas – about leadership and about inclusion - which in the minds of some may not work. Let us say that we work from definitions and concepts, mainly drawn from Greenleaf (2002), Sergiovanni & Starratt (2002), Parker Palmer (2007) and others, that frame leadership in terms that privilege service, ownership, sharing, spirituality (or interiority and character for the agnostic), opportunity, sacrifice and authenticity, rather than appropriation, position, status and just simple social engineering. From our experience everyone can become a leader and everybody wants to and deserves to be one!

Moreover, inclusion cannot be instrumentally, mechanistically and technically driven, especially when the law mandates such a thing, for fear of outward compliance but no attitudinal change. While not every policy initiative should be left to education or the dictates of consensus, good leadership is not just a matter of leading or following public opinion, but engaging with it, and we have no interest in pushing inclusion so hard as to set up those we support and value professionally for burning at the stake of high-minded but wasted ideology. Inclusion will come to nowt without personal commitment!

6. INCLUSIon as a thrust of school mission, vision, DIALOGUE AND PLANNING

One of the major pieces of feedback that we got was to explore the possibilities for ensconcing inclusion within the Mission or Vision Statement of a school. While the suggestion came from the non-government sector there is much value in this, given the increased search for identity that is the hallmark of education in a postmodern age.

The thinking behind this goes as follows: no two schools, even in a system that privileges itself on its uniformity and equality, are exactly the same and, as market factors and competition to enrol students – a matter that is set to drive school funding and resourcing policy in years to come – becomes fierce, schools are seeking to express their cultural and social identity and uniqueness through their enunciation and commitment to a Mission or Vision Statement.

Given that so many secondary schools have become specialist schools (or schools of excellence in some states and territories) there is a case for groups of parents, teachers and students meeting together to nail their colours to a mast, in terms of their values and aspirations. While the use of the word ‘ensconcing’ suggested the establishment or settlement of someone or something in a comfortable, safe, or secret place, those who championed this approach insisted that the last thing on their mind was to lock up their values in places so secure and impossible to reach that they were inaccessible and therefore ignored. 

Mission or Vision Statements, it appears, are precisely the opposite and employed as yardsticks by which to measure the everyday business of schools so as to hold them to account against a set of values agreed to through consensus. Of course, Mission or Vision Statements, while general and all-embracing, are used to influence and determine all aspects of school policy and practice, and it was this personalised aspect of commitment to a key set of school values that our respondents found so appealing.

One logical next step for next year is to shift professional learning into a higher gear in which we encourage and facilitate a school community dialogue based on enunciating a Mission or Vision Statement. A community dialogue draws participants from as many parts of the school community as possible to exchange dreams, visions, aspirations and information face-to-face, share experiences, honestly express perspectives, clarify viewpoints and promote the next stage of cultural and social inclusion within the school. Our experience tells us that it cannot be done piecemeal or individually but through facilitative work – a group process!

Nor, our research shows, do we have to insist on an all or nothing approach. In carefully answering the question ‘Which voices need to be included?’ the diversity necessary for a successful dialogue will be achieved. The event may start with answering the five ‘Ws’ (Who are we? What are we currently doing? Where do we want to go? When do we want to get there? And why do we want to do it?).

Good facilitation is critical to a successful dialogue. Schools use an experienced facilitator or someone who is a good listener and can inspire conversation while remaining neutral. It is obviously important for the facilitator to carefully think through the purpose of the dialogue, the questions to be asked and the best ways to stimulate conversation. It is also important that the facilitator is familiar with key documents, analyses, data and trends pertaining to the school community and the issue of inclusion. Such a dialogue can be progressed through a whole-day workshop, involving all staff, parents and students in the morning and those with a commitment to constructing the Mission Statement in the afternoon.

From an effective and consultative Mission Statement, goals and strategies to improve equitable learning outcomes and ensure that responsibility for achieving this is shared by all participants. Whatever the Mission Statement outcome, there must be a commitment to follow-up in terms of policy and planning. This may take the form of specific action research plans including reporting back to other participants at regular intervals and the wider school community on what has transpired, what is next intended, and what has been achieved. Coverage in a school broadsheet would also be necessary as would celebration of success.

The dialogue should have generated conversations about the current adequacy of strategies used for school-home communications and parent participation in pursuit of enhancing inclusion in the school, taking into account the cultural, linguistic and other backgrounds present in the school. Our consultancy is committed to assisting whole-school communities from 2011 to develop Mission or Vision Statements with social and cultural inclusion as the centrepiece of their policy, planning and teaching.

7. inclusive communities of practice

Kambara (2009) uses this term to describe participants in complex organisations, like schools, as social actors, rather than passive underlings, who produce content, decentre existing social institutions, and renew them and their culture. Lave &Wenger (1990) are also major contributors to the discourse of schools as communities of praxis, which proposes that real learning eventuates and new knowledge results when participants voluntarily coalesce to share experiences, interests, ideas and practices in ways that make learning ‘situated’ and which privileges the use of forms of teaching and learning language that is ‘structured’.

Because structured talk focuses on how students deeply understand what is presented to them, it is said to have the potential to overcome barriers between the intent of the curriculum and way it is received by students. Through structured talk it is often argued that a school aims to ensure that all students, regardless of social background, acquire a highly-developed capacity to speak clearly, publicly, competently and confidently, and at length, about key themes and topics.

Structured language enthusiasts also claim that more schools can more systematically embrace dialogic teaching and the pedagogy of the spoken word and become leaders in developing students’ language and communication skills and articulateness. Their view is that dialogic teaching focuses on using talk and fertile questions to develop all students' understanding in a consistently sustained, structured, profound, conceptually rich and collaborative way.

However there is some evidence from critical literacy (Freire 2000) that the use of such skills is socially and culturally constructed and that language itself, as a social construct should not be too glibly shoehorned into categories of excellence or illiteracy. Put simply there are different types of language, and with language codes being culturally ordained it does not help for one type to be privileged over another. In fact the use of elaborate language codes can sometimes come across as prosaic and constitute a barrier to effective user-friendly communication.

It therefore makes more sense that schools widen their definitions of literacy to encompass a much broader repertoire of symbolism and signage so that inclusive teachers become signifiers of an inclusive semiotic that includes liturgy, celebration, posters, dramaturgy, culture, art, music and dancing. Thus, communities of practice are not just defined by their capacity to excel in structured talk but by a multiply-layered discourse of inclusion. Some boys’ and girls’ schools do this exceedingly well, using their identity to shape their common purpose, while others need to employ their creative imagination to get started on this.

While structured formalised instruction plays a strong and explicit role in making teaching and learning in the early years precise, measured and deliberate, which is a skill that all educators should exercise, there is some doubt that a reliance on such methods sufficiently exploits the strong association that exists between oracy (oral skills), literacy and numeracy and so will provide possibilities for significantly improving learning outcomes, thus reducing the huge achievement gap based on students’ social, cultural, ability or identity background.

What is in fact needed is teachers with fluency and therefore adaptability in using both elaborate and restricted communication codes because elaborate codes sometimes exclude low-SES learners, while equipping them to develop fluency and recognition of contexts in which switching from one code to another is necessary as well as appropriate.

At the core of culturally and socially inclusive learning, such adaptive and dialogic teaching benefits all students, not only those who may be vulnerable to being excluded. Inclusion is thus not an 'add-on' but is fundamental to a high-quality education for all learners, including, nay, especially, the gifted and talented, who often betray resistance to teacher reproductive practice by being silent, distracted, interruptive or switched off.

Understanding this assists us all to ensure that excluded socio-economic, gendered, ethno-specific and disablist backgrounds eventually cease to be significant determinants of educational outcomes. The challenge, we propose, is to better exploit the power of dialogue to improve learning outcomes for all students and to better understand the strong correlation between oracy, literacy and numeracy.

In light of this, it is our view that the balance of reading, writing and structured talk across the curriculum may need to be reviewed in many schools and education systems. It is pertinent, therefore, as the major focus of a Social and Cultural Inclusion Vision, to discuss what a school is already doing well with dialogic teaching and building students’ language and communication skills as well as to consider how this important work may be further developed over time throughout the curriculum.

We therefore propose to offer a series of workshops from 2011 that explore the significance of symbol, art, dancing, drama, music and liturgy in bringing life and significance to the work of inclusion in schools, thereby progressing their development as communities of inclusive practice, not simply in teaching and learning but in the whole life of the school.

conclusion: CLOSING THE achievement in AUSTRALIAN education

Because social and cultural inclusion is a never-ending discourse some people are inclined to see it as a gabfest. The danger in this is that while participants derive deep comfort in knowing that there are others like them who worry about the place of inclusion in education, nothing practical or achieving will or can in the end be done about it. The answer is not just to set targets but to commence experimental projects. Our consultancy is not entirely wedded to the notion that plans are the best ways of achieving progress and so this Report outlines several initiatives that have been successfully undertaken and which provide an opportunity for encouragement and impetus for all schools to make progress on this front.

This Report is being published at a time when the Commonwealth Games are being held in New Delhi, where for fifty years after India’s independence a planning regime achieved precisely nothing for most Indians. Since then an almost pathological suspicion of plans and, instead, dramatic incentives to unleash the creative potential of individuals has resulted in India developing the second fastest economic growth on the globe. Most of us will have noticed the extraordinary completion from start to finish of the entire Commonwealth Games Village and sporting facilities within six months before the commencement of the Games, despite predictions of failure for the entire project. There is a lesson for us all to be learnt here.

In selecting from one of the above proposals, schools might not just involve teachers, but also teacher aides, parents and students to decide what should be done about inclusion. In the end, however, no evaluation is as precise and telling as overall improvements for all in school results. Through such a thing schools can reconcile their plans and concerns to improve their standing and status on the My School website, without feeling that the key to doing this is to become more exclusive! Over the next few months, Sharon and I plan to release several brochures advertising workshops that fit in with the findings of the Evaluation. We both hope that they are of interest to you and your school and that somewhere in this Report is a finding that resonates with the needs of your school and your joint decision-making about PD to support your targets for next year.

REFERENCES

Abbey, N. & Staples, K. (2010) Cultural and Social Inclusion http://www.edu.org.au/content/keyissues

Freire, P. (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed New York: Continuum Books

Furtado, M. (2008) ‘Towards inclusive pedagogies: Meanings emerging in practice from MUD, SID and RED!’ Refereed paper, Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove Campus, November 28 - December 2.

Green, R. (2001) ‘Closing the Achievement Gap: Lessons Learned and Challenges Ahead.’ Teaching and Change (Winter 2001): 215-224.

Greenleaf, R. (2002) Servant Leadership: A journey into the nature of legitimate power and greatness, Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press.

Kambara, K. (2009) ‘Structured Talk and Web 2.0: Blogs and Community Formation’ Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Hilton San Francisco, San Francisco, CA, Aug 08.

Lave, J., & Wenger, E. (1990). Situated Learning: Legitimate Periperal Participation Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Levitas, R. (2000) 'What is Social Exclusion?' in David Gordon and Peter Townsend (Eds) Breadline Europe: The Measurement of Poverty Bristol: Polity Press: 154-168

Lingard, R., Everett, G., Furtado, M. Vickers, M. & Watson, L. (2008) Report on the Research Symposium on Australian School Funding Policy  International Education Research Conference of the Australian Association for Research in Education, Brisbane: Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove Campus, November 28 – December 2.

Palmer, P. (2007) The Courage to Teach: Exploring the inner landscape of a teacher’s life San Francisco: Jossey-Bass

Sergiovanni, T. & Starratt, R. (2002) Supervision: A redefinition NY: McGraw-Hill

Teese, R. and Lamb, S. (2009) ‘Low achievement and social background: patterns, processes and interventions’ Discussion paper University of Melbourne Centre for Post-Compulsory Education & Lifelong Learning

Biographical Note

Sharon Boyce started Discovering DisAbility & Diversity as a Professional Development project to raise awareness of disability within all sections of the community. She is doing her PhD in various aspects of professional development through narrative analysis and is a successful children’s author as well as an artist and creator of the popular disability awareness resource, ‘A Day in the Life of Sharon Boyce’. Sharon was a recipient of the Human Rights & Equal Opportunity Commission’s Human Rights Award (2008) and also of the Queensland Disability Action Week Award (2003).

Dr Michael Furtado was Education Officer (Mission & Justice), Brisbane Catholic Education, where he co-ordinated the Teaching for Human Rights (Qld) project. He has taught in state, Catholic and independent schools in Australia and overseas as well as held lectureships at the University of Southern Queensland and the University of Newcastle. Michael’s research is on how to make schools socially and culturally inclusive through access to a diverse curriculum and the exercise of a wide suite of teaching and learning practices. His PhD is on more equitable ways of funding all Australian schools.

Discovering Disability and Diversity (DDD) is a Professional Development project that commenced in 2003 and which has been accessed by over 1000 schools, colleges, universities, the health care sector, the child care industry and various aged care services across Queensland. It works on the basic principle of awareness-raising through active experiential learning, followed up by a process of critical reflection. Details of its programs can be sourced at http://www.discoveringdisability.com.au.

Now in its eighth year, DDD is shifting gear from 2011 to support strategies learnt by individuals attending its workshops to embed socially inclusive cultural, curriculum and pedagogic practices in Queensland schools. While continuing to offer its usual workshops, DDD will from 2011 extend its professional learning services to support and sustain an Inclusive Leadership Forum as well as to facilitate whole-school Mission Statements in support of diversity and inclusive education practice.

© Boyce Furtado Consultants 2010         Email contacts: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ; This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .