Harvard Graduate School of Education - Leadership: an Evolving Vision 2007

I thought I had a good handle on Inclusive Education - how wrong could I have been?!

Norman Kunc is a formidable personality who negotiated his own way into mainstream education at the age of the 13 having been educationally segregated from birth due to cerebral palsy.

My colleagues will focus on other aspects of his presentation but I thought I ‘d concentrate on how inclusive education relates to school culture for all.

Norman’s main premise is that the debate is not around the principle of inclusion - it’s about where that “line of inclusion” is - “we can take this child but we can’t take that child.” 

“But if there is a line you’d expect it to be the same everywhere” the reality is that this line varies hugely from school to school. 

 So Norman posed the $64,000 question

“Why do schools vary so much in the way in which they deal with variation?”

For Norman Kunc the answer is simple - Inclusion is about school culture “a school has to commit to all of it’s kids”

He wasn’t talking here about “benevolence” or “social kindness” but about a proactive commitment to promote a sense of belonging - for all children. Some schools have ot some don’t.

He used Maslow’s hierarchy to explore the relationship between self esteem  and belonging  i.e. we can only experience self esteem if we belong. Yet Norman Kunc would argue that our society reverses this by valuing self esteem - which relates to mastery and in turn such things as attainment - above belonging.  The extent to which we therefore feel a sense of belonging is therefore conditional upon how well we display mastery over the things which society values - his paper sets out more clearly

I was really taken by Norman’s assertion that we often replace belonging with allegiance - which is usually held together by focussing upon a common enemy - all to often leaders at all levels create a common enemy to build allegance but not belonging “it’s us against them” - whoever “they” might be.

So how do you go about build  a sense of belonging in your school? - for Norman Kunc you do it by asking yourself two questions:

Where does belonging get eroded in my school? and

What can I do about it?

For me it keeps coming back to unconditional positive regard - for every member of our school communities - so easy to say so difficult to achieve.

Last point - but as a consequence of this presentation I feel I need to come off the fence about one thing which I believe destroys a sense of belonging in many schools - and that’s setting or ability grouping - which we do to promote (without any evidence) academic attainment - i.e. valuing mastery over belonging.