The focus of this enquiry was the interplay between policy and principles of
inclusion, resource and class teachers’ interpretations of this, and the manner in which
policy and principles are enacted in their practice. The enquiry’s purpose was to provide
insight into inclusive practice from teachers’ perspectives and to increase understanding
of inclusion by systematically documenting teachers’ intentions and pedagogical
routines, Additionally, it was anticipated that documenting these ‘realities’ had potential
to inform, refine and alter existing policies while also providing insights relating to
improvement of practice.
Within the constructivist paradigm, an emergent, two-phased, interpretive
research design espousing a grounded theory approach was adopted. Based on nine
resource teachers and nine class teachers each pairing in a particular school, interviews
to elicit teachers’ interpretations combined with observations to document the detail of
practice generated data from which nine case studies were crafted.
Findings indicate that inclusion is highly complex and dilemmatic. Inclusion has
to evolve further as learners with SEN are accommodated only to the extent that they
can be included within the needs of the mainstream class. The significant contribution of
this enquiry to understanding inclusion is that teachers’ interpretations and constructions
of inclusive practice are grounded in the central tenets of communicative routines,
attunement and coherence-ffagmentation. The pedagogical practices central to
facilitating inclusion are as follows: mediated talk and questions to assess learning;
transactional teaching-learning actions and interactions contributing to transformational
teaching-learning episodes; and, optimal interfacing of resource and class teachers.
Mediated talk and practices of attunement are associated with context and are more
likely to occur during either teaching involving smaller groups withdrawn to the
resource room or co-teaching within the mainstream class. Recommendations relating to
policy and professional preparation are made as a means of supporting the developments
to practice critical to securing and sustaining inclusion.