Summary and Conclusion

Chapter 3 of this work argued that a cultural stronghold of essentialist discourse based on positivist epistemologies had established itself within the inclusion education movement and that his has proven stubbornly resistant to change. The essentialist

perspective asserts that there are specific essential qualities that attach to students deemed to have disabilities and that these require specific and exceptional responses, one of which is team-teaching. However, this chapter has argued that there is little distinctive about pedagogies that work for learners deemed to have disability that do not work equally well for

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others and vice versa. It has also interrogated claims about the benefits of team-teaching for those deemed to have disability and found only equivocal evidence for these, usually

gleaned from qualitative studies. Yet in comparison to the empirical evidence it noted that policy rhetoric within the field of Irish was disproportionately positive. It concluded that this was more the result of ideological commitment to where learners deemed to have disability should be educated than any empirical evidence of the effectiveness of team-teaching as a pedagogical approach that supported the inclusion of those with special educational needs, especially disability.

From a Critical Disabilities Studies perspective, challenging the cultural stronghold of positivism and essentialism represents necessary work for the field of inclusive education, if the interests of marginalised learners, including those deemed to have disability, are to be protected. Central to this work, is the disruption of traditional power relations inherent in the Faustian pact that is thought to exist between special education and mainstream education (Florian 2014). Within this pact, the two fields are thought to collude to reproduce positivist views of difference, including differences around disability, and with the disciplinary

technologies that operationalise these and obscure the inherently political nature of schooling. This allows mainstream education to continue to maintain and protect ableist interests over those of marginalised learners, including students deemed to have disability (Slee, 2001: Graham & Slee, 2008; Baglieri et al., 2011; Florian 2014).

The first step in challenging essentialist discourse and the positivist epistemologies on which they are based, involves understanding how these discourses are produced, consumed, redistributed or resisted in the everyday interactions of discourse participants in schools. This requires genealogical analyses of the ”micro-physics of power” (Allan et al., 1998, p. 28) that operating around learners deemed to have disability in these institutions. It requires the analyst to pay close attention to role of language to see how it works to

represent learners deemed to have disability and how teachers use these constructions to frame their thinking about team-teaching that is deployed to support their inclusion. The work considers, inter alia, whether team-teaching works to reproduce traditional networks of power associated with special and mainstream education, or whether it comprises a practice within which these collaborative networks of power are disrupted in the interest of

marginalised learners, including those deemed to have disability.

A substantive part of the remainder of this research will focus on such questions. Using Fairclough’s Dialectical-Relational Model of critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 2003; Fairclough & Chouliaraki, 1999), the study will identify and problematise the

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will provide an interpretation of how these discourses influence their conceptualisations of team-teaching as a support to these learners.

On the one hand, it will offer an analysis whether teachers’ use of discourse to represent learners deemed to have disability led them to:

 conceptualise team-teaching in ways that reproduced traditional power relations of special and mainstream education (Allan, 1996; Florian 2014),  suggest that there have been structural changes where no such changes

have occurred (Skrtic, 1991, 1995)

 limit their thinking about inclusive provision, to a “narrowly circumscribed set of possibilities” (Hart, 1996), that were less to do with supporting the inclusion of diverse learners and more to do with protecting ableist interests and the normative centre of mainstream education from which all exclusion derives (Florian, 2014; Graham & Slee, 2008; Slee, 2014).

On the other hand, it will ask whether teachers representations of learners deemed to have disability led them to conceptualise team-teaching as a space in which

 oppressive discourses of disability could be challenged

 traditional power relations of special and mainstream education could be subverted, along with the disciplinary technologies that supported these  the identities of learners deemed to have disability could be reimagined in

positive and emancipatory ways

Consideration of these issues led to the development of the dissertation’s main research questions, which were as follows:

1. What discourses deployed within team-teaching meetings in the schools studied, dominated mainstream post-primary teachers’ representations of learners

deemed to have disability?

2. Did dominant discourses reinforce the cultural stronghold of essentialism or were they congruent with the new epistemological base of inclusive education? 3. Did teachers’ discursive representations of students deemed to have disability

influence how they conceptualised team-teaching as a support to the inclusion of these learners? If so, how?

4. Did teachers challenge hegemonic discourses of disability during team-teaching meetings? If so, could examples of this be used to chart possible ways past the oppressive use of discourse in the future?

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