Chapter 1: Inclusive Practice: Pushing Against Persistent Structures and Comfortable Routines

This chapter provides a brief conceptual discussion of what inclusive practice means and the conditions in schools that appear to support (or impede) it. Drawing on a communitarian foundation, it treats inclusive practice as a form of democratic education and therefore sees inclusive practice as a necessary and constitutive part of democracy (Tam, 1998). Dickson (2012) characterizes this perspective as follows:

This view of democratic education fits better with what some political theorists call “strong democracy” (Barber, 1984) than with weaker alternatives—liberal or procedural democracy. The grounding for strong democracy is a shared (although not necessarily unitary) understanding of the common good along with the willingness to act on its behalf (Theobald, 1997). Strong democracy is participatory and deliberative, and some theorists argue that, to be strong, it must be inclusive (e.g., Fotopoulis, 1997). A more procedural approach, by contrast, grounds democracy in a set of rights and responsibilities that protects individuals, to the greatest extent possible, from the interference of their neighbors and even, for that matter, their governments (e.g., Berlin, 1969; Pabst, 2016).