Carla DiGiorgio: A case study of the interaction between identity, power and inclusive practice in a minority-language school
Abstract: This study is an ethnographic case study of one school as it developed over the period of a year, in its early years of implementing an inclusion policy as set out by the provincial government. Through interviews, participant observation, and document analysis, data was gathered, and analyzed continuously using the “constant comparative method” of Glaser and Strauss (1967). This grounded theory approach led to a theory elaboration of sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social organization (1996, 1992, 1986, 1982). Bourdieu’s notions of habitus, capital, and field were applied to inclusion, and the results brought new insight into the relationship between individual and group experiences of school for all stakeholders involved in inclusion.
Keywords:
Issue: 2/2010
- Introduction
- Method
- Results
- Discussion
- References
1. Introduction
The movement toward inclusion of students with special needs in the regular classroom has evolved in the education systems of countries around the world. This is a result of government policy, legal battles, and society's changing response to the segregation of groups and the rights of individuals (Kavale and Forness, 2000). Inclusion involves not only placement, but as an ideal it promotes the belonging of all students as part of their neighbourhood learning communities, regardless of language, creed, color, race, or physical, social or mental ability. Research has found that the practice of inclusion has been more difficult to implement than its philosophy (Valentine, 2001; Clark et al, 1999). The practices at the school level are what ultimately determine the extent of inclusion of students with special needs- be those needs physical, academic, or social (Carrington, 1999).
These practices include not only those of teachers in classrooms, but also interactions between staff, parents, and students (Pearson, 2000). The experiences and beliefs that all participants in inclusion bring to these interactions influence the success of inclusion at the school level (Carrington, 1999). Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1986, 1990a and b, 1991, 1995, 1998) theorized that individuals act on their own self-perceptions of their worth, as compared to others in social groups within society. This theory underpins the approach I have taken to my research into better understanding the way that inclusion is implemented.
This research arose from an interest in the "how" of inclusion. I wanted to study the effect that identity and power of individuals and groups have on the implementation of inclusion at the school level. In doing so, I wanted to be open to the variety of special needs that students brought to one school, including learning, behavioural and social difficulties, speech and hearing issues, and physical and health challenges. I chose to do an ethnographic case study of one school's experience of inclusion, using the Bourdieuian notions of identity and power to structure my analysis.
This was my main research question:
How do identity and power impact the inclusion of students with special needs in the regular classroom, in this case in a second language school?
Bourdieu (1986, 1990a and b, 1991, 1998) referred to habitus, capital and field as the basic components of his theory on the 'structuration' or act of organization of society. Habitus refers to the identity that individuals and groups develop, as a result of their own experiences over the courses of their lives to date. Habitus reflects one’s capital, which consists of the resources one brings to everyday experience. Capital can be economic, cultural, intellectual, and eventually symbolic, and others perceive our power to rest in the capital that we own. We can use this capital to gain more capital. Fields are groups within society that have their own realms of knowledge and their own rules for their members.
The field of education has its own identities, capital and rules for its professional and student members (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1996). The home has its own for parents and children (Stigler, 1991). The law also provides principles and precedents for schools and society to follow to become more inclusive of people with differences (Dickinson, 1991). The media represent another field which open up the semi-private fields of education and home to one another (Oplatka et al, 2002). Inclusion requires that schools and homes cross borders in order to provide appropriate service for students with special needs (Blue-Banning et al, 2004). Identity and power became the lenses through which I examined the sources and means by which stakeholders at the school level took part in inclusive practices for students with special needs. The overlap between the jurisdictions of fields involved in inclusion led to the complexity of stakeholders’ experiences, and became a means to examine this complexity.
Inclusion
Inclusion encompasses all of society in its scope, and there have been struggles within schools and society as a whole to change the way that we view difference (Baker, 2002). In the past, students with special needs were separated from the mainstream and their differences were identified according to the medical model of disability (Kavale and Forness, 2000). As a result, they were labelled and treated according to the severity of their disability, and their options were to improve to the level of 'normalcy' or remain separated from their normally developing peers. Adult life for these people was similarly segregated. The source for the disability was seen to be intrinsic to the individual (Kavale and Forness, 2000).
Inclusion, on the other hand, conveys the message that all individuals have a right to be considered a part of society and equally valued (Valentine, 2001). They have equal access to regular institutions such as their neighbourhood schools. This ideal, as a principle, has been put forth and accepted by various governments across Canada and the world (Friend et al, 1998). However, the change that this requires for traditional approaches to education, and the shift in attitudes required for teachers, parents and students has been slower in taking place. The challenge of changing school organization, philosophy, and pedagogy to encompass this entirely different approach has been far more difficult than accepting its aims (Clark et al, 1999). This is because school inclusion policy threatens more than school practices. It also threatens the social structures that lay the foundation for school practice (Friend et al, 1998).
Geographic/historic context
Canada has had inclusive policies in place for students with special needs in most of its provinces since its constitution adopted the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982. Within this document is the statement that:
Every individual is equal before and under the law and has a right to the equal protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age, or mental or physical disability (Section 15.1).
As early as 1989, Canadian researchers wrote that inclusion or inclusive education represents the belief that students with disabilities should be educated alongside their peers in their own neighbourhood schools, regardless of whether they could meet traditional curricular standards. Since the 1990s, most Canadian provinces have revised their education policies to address the inclusion of students with special needs. Although each jurisdiction has its own policies, most provinces have adopted inclusive policies to apply to students with special needs (Friend et al, 1998). My site school was located in Nova Scotia.
In Nova Scotia, according to policy, an inclusive school is one "where every child is respected as part of the school community, and where each child is encouraged to learn and achieve as much as possible" (N.S. Dept. of Education and Culture, 1996, p. 13). Nova Scotia’s Special Education Policy was put in place in 1996. As part of the policy, students were entitled to non-discrimination, access to schooling, identification, placement, participation of their parents, and service delivery (Friend et al, 1998). Children with special needs or physical disabilities were taken from segregated classrooms in specific schools and put back in their own neighbourhood schools, some for the first time in their educational careers. They were placed in regular classrooms with age-matched peers, and provided with school-based resource teachers and in some cases paraprofessional assistance. Program planning teams made up of teachers, administrators, and helped by parents, were to develop and carry out adaptations to the regular curriculum, and if necessary, develop individual program plans (IPPs) for the student if the regular curriculum was inappropriate for their needs. In order to provide as much inclusion as possible, the principle of 'only as special as necessary' was to be considered before any changes were made to a child's educational program.
Stakeholder views
Many studies have looked to stakeholder views to analyze the particular effects that inclusion has on the people involved. Teachers, resource personnel, principals, teacher assistants, parents and students have been explored as sources of information on their experience with inclusion (Priestley and Rabiee, 2002; Daniello et al, 1998; Frederickson et al, 2004). Stakeholder views have provided the opportunity to examine individuals' and groups' identities as they relate to their positions in the school society (Reid and Button, 1995; Spillane, 1999; Kugelmass, 2001). They have revealed shared experiences that reflect the perspectives of various participants in inclusion. This provided a valuable starting point for me to explore the stakeholder positions at my study school, Royale Education Centre, in order to further understand the potential that participants felt the school offered them, and the influence they used to get what they needed from the school. In effect, the inclusion of students with special needs can be seen to require the inclusion of all participants. In this case, it is necessary to understand groups' perspectives and analyze within-group differences in order to appreciate the effects of communication and power exchange between individuals and groups.
However, few studies have connected the experiences of stakeholders in order to holistically understand the combined experience of inclusion at the school level. My study did connect these identities in order to see how they result in power play that impacts inclusive practice. According to these divisions of identity according to role and vested interest in the school's inclusion practices, I wanted to ask questions about how stakeholders identified themselves, their intentions, and their practices related to each other.
Change and power exchange in the school environment
As Fullan (with Stiegelbauer, 1991), Duemer and Mendez-Morse (2002), and Cimbricz (2002) have found, a sudden change such as inclusion policy is bound to cause alarm in schools. Change can bring out varied responses in staff, especially in schools that are already faced with other changes. As well, the institution of paraprofessionals in greater numbers than ever before, and the invitation of policy to include parents in planning for their children's education, have added new dimensions to the regular classroom and school (Giangreco et al, 2001; Special Education Implementation Review Committee, 2001). Schools that never had paraprofessionals before, because they had never had students with special needs, were faced with this new addition to their staff. Schools also needed to be open to the rights of children with special needs and their parents, to access regular education. Cooperation between regular teachers, administration, paraprofessionals, resource teachers and families is crucial in inclusion as schools are often left to implement this new approach without substantial input from government or school boards (Goodman et al, 2001; Benavot and Resh, 2003). The ways that staff cope, in the face of a lack of resources such as time, materials, and consultation to deal with the change, is dependent on whether they are part of the planning of the change, or simply the ones left to implement it (Fullan, 2000).
This is relevant to my study because the way people react to their situations, be they professional or personal, relates to their own beliefs, experiences and resilience to change (Sergiovanni and Starratt, 1988; Fullan with Stiegelbauer, 1991). As described in the previous section, stakeholders have been found to share common identities based on the power granted them in the inclusion process, and the education process in general. Bourdieu and Passeron (1996) posited that identity led to power in sites such as schools, and that fields such as education, home, and media all had a part to play in how people valued and acted upon their own identities and those of others. In the setting of inclusive schools, groups and individuals with more power, such as principals and tenured staff, have been found to sway the practices of the school (Benavot and Resh, 2003; Blase and Anderson, 1995; Hargreaves, 1992). On the other hand, groups and individuals with less power, such as some parents, students, and teacher assistants, have been left out of decision-making, and subjected to the decisions of others (Bagley et al, 2001; Brooker and Macdonald, 1999; Ashbaker and Morgan, 2001).
Pearson (2000) and others have studied the interactions between stakeholders and tied inclusive processes to their participants' relative power. The resulting inclusion is a combination of all of these interactions. I wanted to see whether these researched patterns took place in my inclusion site, and if so, what were the effects on students with special needs?
Culture
Culture has been studied as it pertains to inclusion. Studies have found that the culture of a school can influence greatly the type of inclusion that takes place there (Carrington and Elkins, 2002; Kugelmass, 2001). Culture in this sense refers to the way that people at the school interact with each other professionally and socially (Angelides and Ainscow, 2000). Cultures usually develop over years as participants get to know each other. They are influenced by leadership, characteristics of teachers, and the relationship to the community (Hargreaves, 1992). The way that staff and families negotiate school goals, through communication patterns, and shared beliefs, establishes the shared culture (Pearson, 2000). Studies of inclusive school cultures have been focused on exemplary schools where a culture of inclusivity has had the time to develop (Carrington and Elkins, 2002; Zollers et al, 1999; Maes et al, 1999). Very few studies have explored schools that are still in the midst of becoming inclusive, and have not had the time to establish their cultures, or schools where the development of inclusivity has been less than ideal (Mamlin, 1999). This study focused on a school that was in the midst of cultural and inclusive change. I felt that this development phase was a more realistic and hence potentially useful way to study how cultures are actually created and recreated over time (Angelides and Ainscow, 2000).
The anthropological nature of culture as reflective of a group of society, identifying with a nation, is also relevant to my study (Fairclough, 2003). Studies have found that students from minority cultures, languages, and races have been over-represented in special education due to a perceived difference in their behaviour, learning styles, language acquisition, home support, or attitude toward school (McCray and Garcia, 2002; Gay, 2002). Likewise, students in bilingual and second language education have had issues with segregation from the mainstream education system (Cummins, 2000; Gutierrez et al, 1999). Some systems have been set up to allow students to have access to second language, while others have tried to limit education to one language. In doing so, the latter have restricted students’ learning to the hegemonic state language rather than building on the language and literacy skills learned at home and in the community (Cummins, 2000; Gutierrez, 2002). The interplay between these two types of culture, school culture and the traditional understanding of culture as an anthropological concept, has implications for this study.
2. Method
Qualitative research aims to explain complexities in the field by using multiple direct interactions between researcher and participants to make sense of daily experience (Gudmundsdottir, 1996). In approaching the question of how inclusion is developed at the school level, I chose to do a case study of one school. I felt this was the best way to fully explore all of the aspects of the school as they were being lived (Stake, 1994). As an ethnography, this case study would differ from others in the literature as it was not intended to be evaluative. I wanted to spend months, as a participant observer, getting to know the school very well on the inside. As a fellow teacher and parent from the greater community, I wanted to be able to speak with participants and understand their varied perspectives. As the school I studied was from a different school board than my own, however, I was able to compare my observations to my own experience (Atkinson and Hammersley, 1994).
My study builds on the interplay between ethnography and case study in recent research. Several ethnographies have been done in school settings in order to explore different aspects of inclusion. Some have involved participants who were already working in the setting as teachers, or university liaison (Benjamin, 2002a and b; Hertzog, 1997). Other studies utilized researchers to observe classroom practices without getting involved in classroom activity (Gormley and McDermott, 1994). Some studies (e.g. Hertzog, 1997, and Demereth, 1994) have focused on one school and some have compared two or more schools (e.g. Carrington and Elkins, 2002; Clark et al, 1999). Some researchers have chosen their school sites for particular characteristics such as grade level (Mamlin, 1999), experience with inclusion (Avramidas et al, 2002) and/or proven success or lack of success with inclusion (Zollers et al, 1999). Many of these case studies have been less exploratory and more evaluative in nature, choosing to study a school based on previous hypotheses about what makes a school successful. My study has instead focused on what happens in a school, allowing both positive and negative aspects of the process to be explored (Clark et al, 1999).
The school site
The school I chose for the study has a particular identity which makes its culture and relationship to the community that much more relevant. It is a minority-language school, where students must have French ancestry in order to attend. Besides facing the commonly researched issues of implementing inclusion, this school also has the additional challenges associated with maintaining its own culture in an environment that is essentially first language English (Gilbert et al, 2004). The issues of language, culture, power, and identity are all the more immediate in this school. As such, my study became a very useful case study not only of inclusion in general, but also of the less-studied phenomenon of inclusion in second language education (Cummins, 2000). Studying the repercussions of including students with special needs in a school with only second language offers many insights into the choices of parents, and the views and practices of staff with regard to special education (Fairclough, 2003; Phillion, 2002). The needs of students juxtaposed against the choices schools make in order to accommodate them are all the more complex (Hornberger, 2004). The special needs that students brought to the school ranged from medical, social, and behavioural difficulties, to learning disabilities. I was particularly interested in the special needs that students brought to their schooling.
A few studies of the interaction between language and inclusive education for students with special needs have been done, but this is a relatively new field, and one that seems to reveal much about how inclusion is interpreted and carried out in different school and societal communities (Hanson and Gutierrez, 1997; McCray and Garcia, 2002). The decision on the part of a school to make one language dominant over the other affects students’ inclusion (Hones, 2002; Gay, 2002). The hegemony of minority language in my subject school offered a new perspective on the effect of language choice on students’ inclusion. My study explored whether a minority culture used the same strategies to include students as other hegemonic structures, or whether new relationships between cultures ensued.
The implications of studying inclusion at this site
Besides the language and cultural issues mentioned earlier, this site offered an alternative setting to an English school. As it was relatively new, it allowed me to study a school in the process of developing practice. As competition for the English system, it provided the opportunity to study the practices of a school which was very aware of parents' and the media's perceptions of its merit. Stakeholders in inclusion include parents, students, and staff. As embodying a minority culture and language, this site provided the opportunity to study the effect of dominant culture on stakeholders' interaction and students' inclusion in a minority environment. It also provided the opportunity to look at language as a potential determinant and effect of inclusive practice (Cummins, 2000). Exclusive and inclusive aspects of this school's practice could provide alternative views of the challenges of inclusion given the individual goals of teachers, students and parents.
As this site was surrounded by the English community yet maintained a French identity, it could be predicted to house an uncommon hybrid of identity (Manyak, 2002). The alternative pedagogy, curriculum, staff development and leadership style suggested by the school's isolation and self-reliance offered to explain the connection between stakeholders' identities and practices in a way that may not be as easy to pinpoint in the regular English education system. All in all, the French school provided the opportunity to study the politics of inclusion implementation, as it took place inside the school, and outside it as well. I was able to see the individual, group and societal effects of inclusion, as a principle and a practice. As such, this study offered a deeper understanding of inclusion in terms of not only minority settings, but as representative of the political and personal processes at play in heterogeneous schools everywhere.
Data collection and analysis
I analyzed interviews, observations, and school and provincial board documents on a continual basis throughout the study (following Glaser and Strauss' "constant comparison" method, 1967). By coding data for themes reflecting how stakeholders experienced and implemented the inclusion policy, I found that the processes of identity, power and inclusive practice arose most significantly. These three processes became the main vehicles through which I was able to understand the complexity of inclusion in this school.
I used the sociological work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyze these beliefs and actions as presented by the participants in my study. I aimed to relate the identities of individuals and groups, as based on their particular group membership, and personal experiences, and explore how these identities resulted in particular power and actions. These processes are thought not to be static but continually evolving (Bourdieu and Passeron, 1996). As a result, identity and power would be expected to be constantly changing according to the participants in the school's inclusive practice, and the evolving mandate of the school.
With the help of Bourdieu’s theory, I was able to articulate a process whereby identity and power relationships were able to help explain and connect the beliefs, experiences and practices which study participants had shared with me. The three areas of identity, power and inclusive practice were set up to represent the main foci of the study. The three were inseparable and multidirectional, affecting each other in the process of inclusion over time (fig. 1):
Figure 1: The relationship between identity, power, and inclusive practice
Theory elaboration
Vaughan (1992) advocates looking to extant grounded theories in order to supplement one’s own grounded theory development, and calls this “theoretical elaboration”. Pierre Bourdieu’s theories were explored as they pertained not only to culture but to language as well. As communication was the basis for my data, I wanted to find a way to connect the communication I received and observed with the beliefs they represented. How were individual motives tied to those of groups? How did groups jostle to position themselves in the school arena? What were the histories behind this and what were the results for students with special needs? In the end, I wanted to see how all of these processes affected students' inclusion in school.
The effect of inclusion on students with special needs has been a crucial but difficult result to measure in past research. Some studies have attempted to measure student achievement, while others have called for a more personal involvement of students in their own reporting of the effects of inclusion on their lives in schools (Avramidas et al, 2002; Reid and Button, 1995). As stakeholders who receive the least amount of attention in the inclusion literature, students with special needs needed to be part of the discussion of power and identity for my study. The difficulties surrounding collecting data from students with special needs were evident, but the end result of inclusion was the learning of students, and I wanted to include these students as participants.
3. Results
Identity
The relationships between all of the players at this school were based in part on their own self-perceptions, as people and as professionals, which were based on their backgrounds, and their perceptions of the roles of others. Issues such as language, education, family, childhood, single-hood, gender, money, status, and age, all intersected with each other. Yet they all pointed to particular though complex and ever-changing effects on students with special needs. The school in its inclusivity/exclusivity to the outside world, was trying to establish a different way of approaching inclusion of students with special needs which was conducive to its other goals, while being amenable to parents’ demands. The outside identity of the school only scratched the surface of what was going on inside.
The school’s members were not only trying to figure out their own combined identity, but that of other members. People wanted to know about each other and themselves: Are they French, and if so, how French? Are they English? Do they learn pretty “normally”? Or do they have difficulty? Are they rich? Poor? Isolated? Socially connected? Parents? Single? What kind of teacher? A leader or a follower? The groups to which they were insider or outsider guided their futures in the school, so identity was very important.
The identity of the school as a place where language is the key distinguisher was complicated by issues of special needs, high academic standards, and individual attention as provided by caring teachers in small settings. The media and school documents represented the school as addressing a multitude of parents’ demands in this modern competitive educational environment. The principal attempted to balance several seemingly conflicting goals for the school: inclusion versus exclusion; French versus English identity for its members; high academic standards versus student-centred environments; and secondary versus elementary pedagogies. However, the different habitus between and within stakeholder groups of parents and staff revealed that maintaining these goals of identity for the school was an ongoing challenge for the leaders of the school. Because the pride and antagonism that separated the school from others are based on different motivations on the part of staff and parents, it was difficult to maintain a singular identity for the entire population of Royale’s membership. As a result, it was difficult for students to identify what identity they should have as members of the school, yet also members of society outside the school. Since the identity of staff and some parents was so different, the students, especially those with special needs, felt confused about their reasons for attending the school. Was it for the French? Or the small classes? The individual attention? Or the promise of better services in the future? The issues that concerned parents and staff were very different from those of students.
The economic, cultural/linguistic, and educational habitus of parents and staff were found to correspond to key findings in the literature. Especially as some parents were also staff members, and both populations moved a great deal in and out of the school, there was a great deal of change and overlap in members’ identities. Their habitus could be affected by their economic and cultural habitus, which also fed into gender differences. Families with both parents contributing to children’s education were more able than single parents to provide the home support required for the challenging duality of learning a second language in French and English homes. Staff who were inexperienced and lacked job stability, as well as those who did not identify with the school’s adapted language rules, were less able to apply themselves to the challenges that students with special needs presented.
In keeping with my reading of Bourdieuian theory, people acting in hierarchical structures such as schools were always trying to improve their status in the game, in order to better acquire the things they need, be they economic, cultural, social or symbolic capital (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). The next section will relate the individuals and groups to one another, to show how power affected the practice of inclusion in the school.
Power: The Wielding of Capital
Capital consists of the resources one brings to everyday experience (Bourdieu, 1998). There are several forms of capital which members of the school community wielded in order to get what they needed from their school. Economic capital was found to influence parents and staff in the way hierarchies of power were set up. Parents with less economic capital were found to be limited in their ability to provide for their children’s education. The independence and language requirements of the school, as well as the school’s limited yet developing extracurricular activities required that parents provide additional supports outside of school, including sports and cultural activities. The participation of parents in growing social activities put on by the school also required money. However, the advantage of individualized transportation and special services costs looked after by the school made Royale a top choice for parents with French heritage who also had children with special needs. In this way, the extra costs associated with special needs were looked after by the school and allowed parents who would not be able to access additional services, the opportunity to allow Royale to look after these for them. Many parents with physical, educational, professional, mental, and family difficulties experienced economic difficulties as well. Children felt these effects not only in their basic needs but also in the way their economic difficulties influenced communication between parents and staff. Parents with limited access to school rightly perceived their image in the school’s eye as being less than favourable. Staff saw parents with less involvement with the school as being less interested in their child’s learning, and made less contact with these parents as a result.
The difficulties that staff with insecure job situations faced also affected students’ learning. Newer teachers were given more difficult workloads and classes with more students with special needs. As a result, students with special needs were seen by these struggling new teachers as being one more thing they had to deal with. The lack of support for new teachers from the senior staff was followed by avoidance of help seeking. The pressure to seem to be managing well in the eyes of senior staff kept newer teachers from expressing their concerns. As a result, the inclusion of students with special needs was limited by teachers’ inability to respond in a qualified and experienced manner to their needs.
Social and cultural capital also separated parents and teachers from each other, this time dependent on their French or English heritage. French parents were much more able to access services at the school simply through their ability to speak the same language as staff, and also by way of the male associations made between administration and fathers. Perhaps as a result of the stability of two-parent families, French families with French fathers tended to have more powerful, positive associations with the school than those with single and/or divorced French parents. Those families with English parents may have economic capital but were disadvantaged socially and culturally as they could not participate fully in the experience of their child’s education. This was felt in particular by English mothers who wanted to volunteer and become more involved in their children’s education but could not due to language barriers and the French male leadership which served to further alienate them from the school. As a result, many students with special needs did not enjoy a connection between home and school that supported their learning. Many felt a dual identity as French students during the day yet English children at night. Many did not enjoy this separation from their own culture and wanted to leave the school and go to English school. The pull from the school and parents to remain at the school for the supports and safety it offered went counter to their own feelings of ambiguity and ambivalence toward the school’s place in their personal identity and home culture.
Social and cultural capital were also felt by staff, as they came from a myriad of backgrounds, and Francophone communities. The difference between Quebecois, Acadian cultures, and the culture of France was always in the conversations of individuals as they communicated their own identities to each other. The hierarchy of this linguistic culture affected relations with parents as well as other staff members. The results of discussions on the school’s institutional cultural capital were apt to change as staff changed often and their mandate reflected the values and identities of staff members. The goals of the school reflected a preference for France’s academic curriculum, yet mirrored the political will of Acadians to regain their French pride through artistic endeavours. Yet the only significant experience of French heritage for students was when they were able to define their own identities as being part French, and express these through their own artistic creations. In this way, the definition of French identity by staff was not conducive to allowing students the freedom to define their own developing identities.
The conflict between traditional and modern senses of Frenchness kept the school back from fully developing student voice. This was experienced particularly strikingly by students with special needs, who had limited linguistic resources, and tended not to participate as much in social and cultural activities. The participation of parents with more invested in the school due to their appreciation of Royale’s welcome of their children despite their needs, resulted in a positive experience for these students. But the isolation of many students, especially those in the higher grades who did not have access to a large population of peers, and as a result did not have the opportunity to socialize normally, led to many students leaving the school and going to English schools instead. The frustration of students who remained, led to discipline problems and bullying. The principal did not address many of these issues because of his avoidance of pushing students away. However, the school’s preference for the next generation of young French students in the elementary grades did not encourage the older students to be proud of their identity. Many of them had special needs, and they knew that that was the real reason for their staying at the school.
Finally, symbolic capital represents all of the forms of capital mentioned above, in that symbols communicate immediate value to the members of a particular field. Fields intertwined at Royale as the symbols of wealth, intelligence, culture, language, profession and education had significance in not only the home, school, but also in the media. The addition of the field of disability to this picture, caused conflict as inclusion and competition were not synonymous. The physical symbols of the success of the school, while slow in developing due to its youth, presented a formidable message to its competition. Parents wanted the school to show its strength, through parades, sports fields, community cultural events, concerts, graduations, technology access, etc. The school as well strove to present as strong a message as possible to the community, including other schools, cultures, potential students and their families. It attempted to apply its symbols to multiple cultural groups (French and English), and multiple academic groups (independent and special needs).
As a result, the symbolic messages were sometimes conflicting and were not perceived simply or necessarily appreciated by potential and current clients. This caused difficulty for the school’s staff but also provided additional sources of support. It compromised some of the school’s attempts to provide inclusive and exclusive educations for its students. The inclusion of students with special needs in some cases was better than they experienced or may experience in English schools, as perceived by their parents. Some families participated and enjoyed the membership in the school culture that Royale offered despite their special needs. However, it was also less than ideal for many students who had to endure linguistic and cultural handicaps as a result of the school’s demands in those areas. The development of facilities and approaches that might encourage students with special needs to develop their strengths, such as artistic and sports were delayed, and many students suffered seriously from lack of social acceptance, severe discipline, and linguistic challenges.
These power relationships set up inclusive and exclusive situations for parents, teachers and students, based not only on special needs. The overlap of groups with different but meaningful types of capital showed the complexity of inclusion of students with special needs. Having a learning difficulty was not always a negative, depending on the other capital that the student brought to the school. Multiple language and cultural, school and home values interacted to create different outlooks on children’s schooling. The next section will further explore these power relationships as they related to the inclusive experiences of students with special needs and their fellow school participants.
Inclusive Practice
On the whole, the school depended on interrelationships between staff to make inclusion a relative possibility. Although the principal and some staff did not see the benefit of sharing their expertise, some sharing among teachers and teacher assistants took place on their own accord. Students were welcomed and planned for on an ad hoc basis. The resource program was limited to the lower grades, and teachers in higher grades had to cope with making adaptations on their own. This differentiation between grade levels has been found by other researchers (Priestley and Rabiee, 2002).
Often psycho-educational assessments of students’ needs were not done early so teachers had to improvise. Students who followed individual program plans were very rare, and this was probably due to the school’s hesitancy to take on a reputation as a special school, as well as its lack of experience. Its involvement of parents was limited to the product rather than the process of program planning, again in an effort to present an impressive face to the public. However, in the meantime, teachers faced their responsibilities day by day, and those without access or time with resource personnel faced their role alone. A lack of professional development beyond the school level was daunting, as staff relied on the principal and resource teacher for information (Avramidas et al, 2002, also reported this in their study).
Many teachers wished for the days when students were able to speak French and their parents supported this at home. Now, parents had greater expectations for staff, and the principal was taking on challenges for staff without providing them with the resources and time they needed to do a good job. The communication between parents and teachers was lessening, depending on parents’ ability to speak French. Special needs were becoming another added challenge to the school, and some teachers resented this. Their lack of training and understanding of how to teach children with special needs added to their frustration (Rainforth, 1992). This left some students isolated and reliant on teacher assistants (Jones and Bender, 1993).
The larger problems of lack of time and resources, mitigated by power relationships within the school, made inclusion a daily challenge. The pressure on the school to present a positive attitude toward all potential students meant taking on challenges to its identity, mission, and practice. The way the school coped was to communicate differently with parents and staff. People who fell into both groups- parents and staff- got preferential treatment due to their extra knowledge of the way the site really functioned. Those with the language of the culture, which is French, or the language of the economy, which is English, got their way through these different forms of capital, and the results varied according to habitus. In this site, Bourdieu’s levels of capital do not build on each other in an orderly fashion. The principal of the school was the conduit through which these contrasting forces were precariously balanced. The students and staff often paid the price in terms of poorer practice, learning, collaboration and socialization.
Although inclusion was professed in the school’s welcome to students with varying language and learning backgrounds, once students were in the school, they were segregated according to language, behaviour, and learning needs. As students got older, they were expected to achieve in order to improve the school’s image. As higher grade levels intensified the expectations of students and teachers, the focus was less on adaptations and more on the narrowing of curriculum to promote academic success. This finding is also prominent in studies in high school inclusion (Carrington and Elkins, 2002).
Even in the early grades at this school, I saw that inclusion was not as important as academic success. The loose approach in the kindergarten class, aptly called “Maternelle” or maternal, quickly gave way to separation of students with problems from those who were independent learners. The justification for this approach seemed harmless: students were divided according to language needs. But the language represented the continuation not only of cultural capital, but symbolic, social, and economic capital as well. Not only were these able children able to speak French; they were able to learn faster, and had more experienced teachers, who received more administrative support. These students received more positive rather than negative reinforcement from staff, socialized with each other, and felt part of the extended community of French compatriots to whom the school felt most loyal. This pattern continued through the years, resulting in a widening gap between students with and without capital in the school.
Students with difficulties in school became more problematic as they learned poor social skills from each other, had less experienced teachers, learned less academic material, and were disconnected from their school and community because their parents and school did not communicate with each other. It was very early in the school’s life to see this happening in full force. However, if this trend of splitting of student identities continued, English and French parents could become dissatisfied with the school, and it may have to shift its priorities once again. This conscious separation of students according to language has resulted in a possibly unintentional separation due to ability and habitus. The effect is similar to that found in other settings and research, in which students who are less able academically, less cultured in the ways of the school, and less economically resourceful, are left out of choice membership in its society (Gay, 2002; Hanson and Gutierrez, 1997; McCray and Garcia, 2002).
4. Discussion
This paper has set out to examine the inclusive practice of a school through the lenses of identity and power as adapted from Pierre Bourdieu’s social theory (1986, 1990 a and b, 1991, 1995, 1998). I have endeavoured to understand how practice stems from the individual and group habitus and capital. Bourdieu’s theory has been very useful and quite often correct in its prediction of the traditional patterns of staff and parent behaviour with regard to their roles and responsibilities. Nevertheless, several unexpected patterns were observed in this study, leading me to surmise that modern day education systems are perhaps more complex than those that Bourdieu himself studied.
Bourdieu addressed the issues of gender, socioeconomic status, language and culture, but their combination was not fully explored in a modern context. In a changing environment such as inclusion has brought about, beliefs in the roles of school, home and students themselves have been forced to undergo massive upheaval (Kavale and Forness, 2000). The very concepts of the inherent ‘exclusivity’ of schools with particular purpose have called into question the applicability of ‘inclusion’ in such environments (Clark et al, 1999). Bourdieu admitted that “crises” enable individuals to call into question their preconceived notions and undergo change (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 131). Perhaps inclusion represents just such a crisis for its participants, in that it forces them to change their traditional notions of schooling, teachers’ roles, and the rights of individuals in society. No longer are a select few able to graduate from high school, and aim for post-secondary study, as in Bourdieu’s described post-revolutionary France, or even up to recent times. Now everyone in Canada, at least in theory, has the right to an education (N. S. Dept. of Education and Culture, 1996).
Yet inclusion by its nature is not as practical a possibility as it is a hypothetical one. As Clark et al (1999) identified, the very nature of inclusion of students with special needs requires attention to their individual needs and appropriate accommodations. This distinction actually separates individual students from each other, forcing teachers to plan according to individual rather than common shared experience of groups of students. So too was inclusion a relative term in my study, as inclusion of one group required exclusion of another. In a site where multiple goals were being set, a balance of demands necessitated compromise of the complete fulfillment of any one goal in particular (see also Kugelmass, 2001).
In terms of Bourdieu’s focus on economic and cultural habitus, for example, the two together in one environment made adversary pairings of power (Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992). The result was an uneasy tension and there were repercussions for practice and student experience. A school such as Royale, in wishing to take advantage of the economic and cultural capital of various parent groups, conveyed a different image to its public and its participants depending on their point of view. The public persona of the school as one of academic and cultural mandates seemed to fly in the face of accepting students with special needs. Yet as the school responded to parents’ demands for specialized services for their children, the role of the school changed as well (see Brain and Reid, 2003). Over time, the dynamic of the school identity did change according to its willingness to accept diverse students in order to keep its cultural mandate alive. Yet as its reputation as a responsive and attentive school grew, its reputation as an academic establishment decreased (as in Avramidas et al, 2002).
This discussion calls into question the notion of inclusion, and whether it is ever possible in its pure state (Ballard, 1995). After all, inclusion of one requires exclusion of another, as I have found in this study, and as research has argued in the past (Clark et al, 1999). The result is the need for schools and society to maintain a delicate balance between inclusion and exclusion in order to sustain the access to education for all students regardless of learning ability (Kugelmass, 2001). This points to the need for options, such as this French school, for students, parents and teachers to express and develop their own culture. Whereas cultures in the past may have eliminated each other in competition for survival, today multiple cultures coexist in locales and have the political power to assert themselves (Gilbert et al, 2004). When cultural competition meets economic capital acquisition, however, the result in schools is more competition for clientele, more inclusivity, and less exclusivity, at least on the surface. In allowing students of different linguistic and learning identities to join the school community, Royale increased its economic capital but compromised its cultural capital to its French constituents. The result was a struggle for balance between clientele, stakeholder groups, and home/school roles at the school.
Inclusion is a wonderful opportunity through which to explore the interplay between forces of society as they play out in the identities of home and school. As they reflect what we want for the future for our children, who are the products of our labour and identity, schools are a mirror of the ideals of our society (Bourdieu, 1991; Bourdieu and Passeron, 1996). However so too are schools the reflections of present dilemmas in which we find ourselves. Schools are at the intersections of hypothetical and real, future and past, possible and impossible. In this way, schools are primary sites of change for adults and children, and inclusion is one of the issues in which societal goals and daily interactions seek to reconcile themselves to each other. Through Bourdieu’s lens, I have found my site to represent a never-ending progression of changes in beliefs and practices, which are tied to capital and habitus. They are always seeking to resolve themselves, but can never permanently solve the conflicts that arise. Perhaps this is due to the multiplicity of viewpoints and cultures, which can no longer be subjugated by one dominant educational voice (Ahonen, 2000).
Yet with this challenge has come the difficulty of keeping unity and focus at the forefront of schools and the communities they represent (Oplatka, Foskett and Hemsley-Brown, 2002). These new communities require their leaders to be even more willing to share power and allow creative collaboration to take place (Carrington, 1999; Mamlin, 1999). As society becomes more used to the notion of inclusivity, schools may also relax their focus on academic standards and allow more social inclusion to take place in the classroom. However, while the economy continues to drive the educational marketplace, schools will continue to follow rather traditional roles (MacKenzie et al, 2003). Parents have the potential to change the school system from within, through their economic, political, and cultural will (Hogan, 1999). This study has found that through participation, parents can make schools more inclusive toward students. The success of inclusion seems to rely on the connection between home and school. In this way, Bourdieu’s notion of the possibility of predicting student success by linking parental habitus to that of the school is ultimately correct. However Bourdieu would not have predicted the types of habitus that parents of children with special needs bring to schools to be advantageous. In this way, practices may be catching up to laws. The future will show how liberal and conservative notions of education in Canada and the rest of the world, continue to coexist in the scholastic lives of students with special needs.
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