Session Information
23 SES 07 B, Politics of Equity and Inclusion
Paper Session
Contribution
During a 1.5 year comparative investigation of two urban education systems (Parktown and Birdtown), we have concentrated on educational task management in institutional settings, with the intention to describe how national level policy initiatives are adopted on municipal level, and how municipal policies are adopted by local schools in practice. In this paper we investigate how the new professions of itinerant special education teachers (or travelling remedial pedagogues) are created and organized in the context of urban education systems, and how local interpretations of such new professions may influence the appropriation of inclusive education policy.
Since 2003, in tune with expectations from supranational bodies and transnational agencies, educational governance in Hungary adopted an inclusive approach and launched new measures for diagnosing, (re)placing and rehabilitating students with special educational needs (SEN). Students, especially those diagnosed with mild mental retardation, are oriented to study in integrated school settings. However, local municipalities still have wide manoeuvring possibilities in shaping their own ‘inclusion’ policies, producing a highly variegated filed of service provision for SEN students. In connection to a set of municipal level policy measures aiming at the re-organization of urban special education services we describe and compare municipal strategies in the two towns with respect to 1) the diverging local regulations concerning the placement of students 2) the division of labour among local special education institutions, and 3) through the town-specific evaluation practices of rehabilitation work.
The framework of the research was inspired by studies focusing on the contextualization of global policies and national, local institutional conditions (Baker & LeTendre 2005, Ball 1998, Schriewer 2003, Simons et al, 2009), and by the literature on policy change and shifts in policy programs (Hall 1993). In order to conceptualize the huge differences between the selected towns in the formation and implementation of town level SEN policy measures, here we have followed an anthropology of policy approach to describe the actual practices of policy formation (Shore&Wright, 1997, Sutton&Levinson, 2001). Building on the concept of policy appropriation (Levinson et al, 2009), we highlight the different meanings that authorized and non-authorized actors attach to urban policy. The role of semi-official experts and leading service providers is emphasized, who adopt differently the global and national expectations about what an "itinerant special educator" is, and what “inclusion” means. They create new occupational ideologies in the two towns in different ways, which serves as the bases for their active involvement in the formation of policy texts in both sites, and motivates them to shape, even more actively, a series of interconnected practices through which a new system of service provision is set up.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Baker, D., & LeTendre, G (2005). National differences, global similarities: World Culture and the future of schooling. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press. Ball, S. J. (1998), Big Policies/Small World: An Introduction to International Perspectives in Education Policy, Comparative Education, 34, 2, Special Number (20): Comparative Perspective in Education Policy (June), pp. 119-130. Hall, P. A. (1993), Policy Paradigms, Social Learning, and the State: The Case of Economic Policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics, 25, 3, pp. 275-296. Levinson, Bradley A. U., Sutton, M & Winstead, T (2009): Education Policy as a Practice of Power: Theoretical Tools, Ethnographic Methods, Democratic Options. In Educational Policy, Volume 23 Number 6, pp. 767-795. Shore, C., & Wright, S. (1997). Anthropology of policy: Critical perspectives on governance and power. New York: Routledge. Sutton, M., & Levinson, B. A. U. (Eds.). (2001). Policy as practice:Toward a comparative sociocultural analysis of educational policy. Westport, CT: Ablex.
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