Uppeldi og menntun - 01.06.2015, Qupperneq 77

Uppeldi og menntUn/icelandic JoUrnal of edUcation 24(1) 2015 77
ólAFUr pál l JónssOn
Practices of inclusion
All the cases described in Learning Spaces for Social Justice focus on inclusion in one
way or another. The questions of inclusion arise as responses to apparent cases of
exclusion or to obvious danger of exclusion. And the responses – the sincere attempts
to include the marginalized – are varied and telling. I want to begin by mentioning
chapter six which discusses fieldwork at Meadows School in Oslo. One could describe
the work at Meadows School as successful assimilation as “it had increased the pro-
portion of linguistic minority pupils responding to mainstream instruction” (p. 105).
This is actually the reason why the case was selected for study. But at the same time, it
brings out the shortcomings of such a programme. The researchers remark about the
Meadows School project:
Even when it is well implemented, an individualized programme such as that used
at Meadows School tends to take for granted the majority culture and language. This
may explain why the academic performance of the linguistic minority pupils was
significantly lower than that of their Norwegian-speaking peers. (p. 104)
The researchers also remark:
Apparently, neither the school management, the teachers, nor the community author-
ities really believed that scores closer to those of their highest-performing schools
were realistic at schools with a relatively large proportion of minority pupils. (p. 105)
What is characteristic of assimilation as an educational response to diversity is that
difference, not least ethnic and linguistic diversity, is seen as a problem which the
educational response aims at solving or else sidestepping (see pp. 11–12, 29). This
seems to have been the case in Meadows School. Diversity is seen as an interruption
to the ‘normal’ work at the school (p. 31).
The experience at Meadows School contrasts sharply with that which is described
in the next chapter of the book where we read about educational responses at two
schools in Glasgow which received a substantial number of students of asylum seek-
ing parents. The researchers describe their task in the following way:
This research aimed to investigate the creative ways in which teachers were respond-
ing to a new demographic and the creativity employed by pupils as they attempted
to adapt to a new school culture and new language environment. (p. 119)
Apparently, the teachers did not see the arrival of ‘different’ students as a problem but
as an opportunity to reclaim lost professional authority.
Teachers’ agency was constrained by a highly structured curriculum and regular
testing. … As [the new] pupils could not be expected to compete in monolingual,
monocultural assessments, teachers had to find new ways of working – and were
thus given an opportunity to regain the professional capital that they had lost with
the introduction of curricular guidelines for children aged 5 to 14. (p. 119)