This volume focuses on professional ethics and the moral dimensions of inclusive education. Grounded in an examination of international conceptualizations of ethics and inclusion, this book will provide a comprehensive analysis of current understandings of professional ethics in the context of inclusive education.

This volume focuses on professional ethics and the moral dimensions of inclusive education. Grounded in an examination of international conceptualizations of ethics and inclusion, this book will provide a comprehensive analysis of current understandings of professional ethics in the context of inclusive education.

Around the world, countries are searching for ways of making their schools more effective for all children and young people. This book offers a new way of thinking about how to address this challenge. It sees improvement as requiring a collective effort that involves contributions from all members of a school community. Crucial to this is the idea of ethical leadership. Promoting Equity in Schools is written by a team of academic researchers who had a most unusual opportunity to work with a network of schools over three years, experimenting to find more effective ways of including hard to reach learners. Bringing together practitioner knowledge and ideas from research carried out from a variety of perspectives, the authors provide rich accounts of what happened when the schools attempted to become more inclusive and fairer. In so doing, they throw light on the challenges this presents for school leaders. The accounts presented in the book are located in Queensland, Australia, where the school system faces significant difficulties in relation to equity that resonate with similar difficulties around the world. These difficulties relate to policies that emphasize high-stakes testing and school choice, which tend to promote increased segregation, to the particular disadvantage of young people from low income and minority backgrounds. The arguments presented suggest that even where worrying policies are in place, with leadership driven by a commitment to equity, schools can still find space to develop more equitable ways of working.

The Ethics of Inclusive Education clarifies the idea of inclusion and its normative content, and presents a coherent theoretical framework for inclusion and inclusive education. It serves as one of the first extended philosophical defenses in the field of inclusive education that goes beyond a simple assertion of educational value. Integrating perspectives from the history, sociology and psychology of inclusive education, this book develops a holistic concept of inclusion, while clearly and systematically examining the ethical-normative content of inclusive education. It also offers: an interdisciplinary analysis of inclusion and inclusive schooling, ranging from historical to sociological analysis of their predecessors and preconditions, to the investigation of their philosophical and educational content, an in-depth analysis of the moral significance of exclusion, the value of inclusion and inclusive education from an analytical point of view, and practice-oriented investigations of the individual and social conditions for inclusion and inclusive education. The Ethics of Inclusive Education serves researchers, practitioners and politicians, to make key educational decisions about how to understand, explore or realize inclusive educational aims, especially with respect to disability and special needs.

This timely book offers a critically important contribution to debates around the meeting place of religious and secular worldviews in education. Edited by five leading figures in the field, and drawing on expert international scholarship and research, the book provides cutting-edge analysis that bridges the religious and secular in global educational contexts. Considering the role of the United Nations, UNESCO, OECD and PISA in varied international contexts, the book draws on critical analysis of primary empirical research and secondary critique to offer a coherent blend of theoretically complex yet practical analysis of policy implementation. Throughout this accessible and logically structured volume, the authors assert that the meeting place of religious and secular worldviews is one of the most important and pressing issues for religion in education. As a field-defining work of research into education, religion and worldviews, the book will be essential reading for scholars, researchers and postgraduate students in the fields of religious education, religious studies, philosophy of education and international education.

Lise Claiborne and Vishalache Balakrishnan share views of educators and policy-makers from Asia-Pacific and Europe that have seldom been heard in international debates on inclusion.

Now available in Open Access thanks to the support of the University of Helsinki. Teachers’ Professional Ethics: Theoretical Frameworks and Empirical Research from Finland is intended for international readers in education who want to learn the theoretical frameworks that guide teachers’ ethics and that help them address concrete challenges in their everyday work. Scholars and teachers from different countries can use this book to widen their understanding of the Finnish educational system and teacher ethics. The authors provide examples of concrete moral dilemmas in teaching that can be more effectively navigated with the rational principles and guidelines that philosophies of different ethical frameworks can provide. They argue that teachers require ethical skills, especially ethical sensitivity, in order to select the most beneficial course of action concerning diverse students in inclusive education. They should be purposeful in their profession to develop the motivation and resilience to continue their demanding but fulfilling work with long-term goals. Moreover, they should acknowledge their implicit beliefs and possible stereotypes to be able to provide equal learning opportunities to their students and to build democratic moral communities in their schools. In this book, ethical sensitivity, purposeful teaching, and incremental beliefs concerning learning are seen as important prerequisites for teachers’ professional ethics. We discuss these aspects with examples from our empirical studies in Finnish schools.

An exploration of how design might be led by marginalized communities, dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival. What is the relationship between design, power, and social justice? “Design justice” is an approach to design that is led by marginalized communities and that aims expilcitly to challenge, rather than reproduce, structural inequalities. It has emerged from a growing community of designers in various fields who work closely with social movements and community-based organizations around the world. This book explores the theory and practice of design justice, demonstrates how universalist design principles and practices erase certain groups of people—specifically, those who are intersectionally disadvantaged or multiply burdened under the matrix of domination (white supremacist heteropatriarchy, ableism, capitalism, and settler colonialism)—and invites readers to “build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability.” Along the way, the book documents a multitude of real-world community-led design practices, each grounded in a particular social movement. Design Justice goes beyond recent calls for design for good, user-centered design, and employment diversity in the technology and design professions; it connects design to larger struggles for collective liberation and ecological survival.

This book provides a global and social examination of how disabilities are played out and experienced around the world. It presents auto-ethnographic perspectives on disability across cultures, societies, and countries by documenting individuals’ personal narratives, thought processes and reflections. Chapter authors share cross-cultural perspectives within and across various countries, such as India, Australia, United States, Sri Lanka, United Kingdom, Croatia, Brazil, South Africa, and Qatar. Adopting a self-reflective stance following qualitative research methodology, the chapter authors discuss the current challenges in the field. Next, they deconstruct disability identities, explore the complexities of communication with differently abled persons, examine inclusive policies, practices and interventions and present insights from caregivers. The book concludes with critical reflections and a look to the future of global diversity and inclusion.