Translating the Rhetoric of Inclusion into Reality

This book has traced the autobiographical factors which have shaped the development of an inclusive teacher identity. Additionally, it has examined how the changing discourses of inclusion have shaped its realization in practice across a teaching career which spans in excess of thirty years. Life history method is used to examine the biography and teaching career of one informant. Additionally, an auto-ethnographic approach is employed to consider the effects of inclusion on the school in which the participant currently works. This is not a study which seeks to generalize. The data suggest that personal experiences of exclusion during childhood have significantly shaped the development of an inclusive teacher identity in both me and the participant. Foucault’s concept of transgression is applied to the narrative. Throughout the narrative it has been possible to identify acts of transgression by the informant, both within personal and professional contexts. The narrative and auto-ethnographic account illustrate how it was possible for the informant to develop a more inclusive pedagogy under the previous discourse of integration in comparison to subsequent discourses of inclusion.