Towards Inclusive Schooling

Mel Ainscow, Professor of Special Education at the University of Manchester, is the third of the new professors to articulate his views on the future of special education as the millennium approaches.
He speculates on some of the reasons for the apparent lack of overall progress towards a more inclusive school system in order to identify some possible ways forward.     

Taking an inclusive turn

This special edition of the journal focuses on what is, arguably, the biggest challenge facing education systems, that of developing practices that will reach out to those learners who are failed by existing arrangements. Specifically, the papers look at ways of using the views of stakeholders in order to move schools and other centres of learning in a more inclusive direction.
My own contribution is to provide an overall context for the ideas presented by the authors. I do this by first reflecting on what inclusion in education means and then outlining my own thoughts on what research suggests about strategies for moving thinking and practice forward. This leads me to stress the importance of evidence as a 'lever for change' ( Ainscow, 2005 , p. 111).     

Age and sex influences on running mechanics and coordination variability

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of age on running mechanics separately for male and female runners and to quantify sex differences in running mechanics and coordination variability for older runners. Kinematics and kinetics were captured for 20 younger (10 male) and 20 older (10 male) adults running overground at 3.5 m · s^?1. A modified vector coding technique was used to calculate segment coordination variability. Lower extremity joint angles, moments and segment coordination variability were compared between age and sex groups. Significant sex–age interaction effects were found for heel-strike hip flexion and ankle in/eversion angles and peak ankle dorsiflexion angle. In older adults, mid-stance knee flexion angle, ankle inversion and abduction moments and hip abduction and external rotation moments differed by sex. Older compared with younger females had reduced coordination variability in the thigh–shank transverse plane couple but greater coordination variability for the shank rotation–foot eversion couple in early stance. These results suggest there may be a non-equivalent aging process in the movement mechanics for males and females. The age and sex differences in running mechanics and coordination variability highlight the need for sex-based analyses for future studies examining injury risk with age.     

Making sense of the development of inclusive practices

Schools in England are currently being asked to pay greater attention to the issue of educational inclusion. This paper reports some of the findings of a collaborative action research Network that was set up to address the implications of this trend. The Network involves teams of university researchers in working with practitioners in order to encourage the development of inclusive practices. As a result of this work, it is argued that the development of such practices is not about adopting ‘recipes’ of the sort described in much of the existing literature. Rather, it involves social learning processes that occur within a given workplace. The paper attempts to provide deeper understandings of what these processes involve. To assist in this analysis use is made of the idea of ‘communities of practice’, as developed by Etienne Wenger, focusing specifically on the way he sees learning as a characteristic of practice. It is argued that the development of inclusive practices involves collaborative working arrangements; that they can be encouraged by engagement with various forms of evidence that interrupt ways of thinking; and that the space that is created through such interruptions can enable those involved to recognize overlooked or, indeed, new possibilities for moving practice forward.