Actively Seeking Inclusion

Book excerpt: First Published in 2004. Research on special education has tended to focus on technical and professional aspects of provision and matters of placement. The voice of the pupil with special educational needs has tended to be silenced by professional discourses, reducing him or her to a passive recipient of specialist provision. This book attempts to undo some of this. This book is about 11 pupils with special needs, who were actively seeking inclusion in mainstream schools. The voices of the pupils and their mainstream peers are foregrounded and read alongside those of other interested parties—teachers, other professionals and parents—as well as the more formal discourses of special needs.