International Journal of Inclusive Education Vol. 13, No.

8, December 2009, 805815

Supporting inclusion in early childhood settings: some possibilities and problems for teacher education
Kerry Purduea*, Diane Gordon-Burnsa, Alexandra Gunna, Barbara Maddenb and Nicola Surteesa
aUniversity
kerry.purdue@canterbury.ac.nz KerryPurdue 0000002008 00 2008 & Francis Original Article 1360-3116 Francis International Journal of 10.1080/13603110802110743 TIED_A_311240.sgm Inclusive Education Taylor and (print)/1464-5173 (online)

of Canterbury College of Education, Christchurch, New Zealand; bMinistry of Education, Christchurch, New Zealand Aotearoa New Zealand, like other countries, has legislation and policies that support inclusion and promote the participation of all children and families in early childhood education. We might expect therefore to see a culture of inclusion resonating through policy and practice in early childhood settings. There are early childhood teachers who support such legislative and policy goals, who are committed to inclusion, and who are developing more inclusive early childhood services. Yet, it is also evident that discrimination and exclusion is experienced by many. Teacher education plays an important role in supporting inclusion and assisting teachers development of knowledge, skills and attitudes that will support them to teach all children. In this paper, we write as a group of teacher educators and demonstrate the challenges we took up to move beyond traditional approaches to inclusive education and to open up theoretically and practically diverse possibilities for thinking and doing inclusion differently in early childhood teacher education. Keywords: inclusive education; early childhood education; teacher education and social justice issues

Introduction In Aotearoa New Zealand, as in many other countries, all children and their families have a right to enrol, attend and participate in early childhood education. Our early childhood teachers and their services must be able to work with diverse children and families in ways that are respectful of different life experiences and cultural norms, and in doing so they must not disregard their own. This is no easy task. And we think it poses challenges to teacher education and to teacher educators like us who must contend with how our work might support teachers to address the rights and needs of all members of early childhood communities in ways that include them all. In this paper we write as a group of teacher educators who have been working to attend to our responsibilities towards inclusive early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand. Our sense of responsibility towards inclusive education stems first and foremost from a desire to teach ethically and in a manner that we consider to be in accord with principles of social justice (Canella 1997; Griffiths 1998; Rizvi 1998; Slee 2001). We are also responding to the legislative and policy context for inclusive education that exists in Aotearoa New Zealand (for example, New Zealand Government 1993, 1998; Ministry of Education 1996a, 1996b, 1996c, 1998; Minister for Disability
*Corresponding author. Email: kerry.purdue@canterbury.ac.nz
ISSN 1360-3116 print/ISSN 1464-5173 online 2009 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13603110802110743 http://www.informaworld.com

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Issues 2001). Finally, we are responding to the experiences of inclusion and exclusion from early childhood education that we have ourselves experienced, researched and read of in our lives as early childhood teachers and teacher educators. Following on from our early thinking about inclusive and exclusionary practices in early childhood (Gunn et al. 2004), we report here on the reform of a compulsory inclusive education course that final year pre-service and in-service bachelor and diploma-level early childhood teacher education students take with us. The course reforms have entailed a shift in course content from a focus on disability delivered by one or two voices, to a broader focus on multiple perspectives including disability, gender, sexualities, class/socio-economic status, bi-culturalism and multiculturalism delivered by multiple voices the voices of those who make up our group and beyond. These reforms represent one of the steps that we have taken towards addressing inclusion issues. We imagine that by reporting our work, we may enter into broader discussions in the teacher education community about successes and issues towards facilitating inclusive education and social justice in early childhood settings. The problem we are working to address To qualify as a teacher for early childhood education in Aotearoa New Zealand, a students course of study in an undergraduate initial teacher education programme will usually take place over three years (or for graduate students between 12 and 24 months). At the end of this period, supported with ongoing professional development, we might expect to see recently qualified teachers in early childhood settings who will be able to teach all children. However, this is not always the case. Research on inclusion, education, difference and diversity (Gunn et al. 2004; Purdue 2004; Davis et al. 2007; Surtees 2003, 2005) highlights that many children, families, and in some cases teachers too, experience discrimination and exclusion from early childhood education services in New Zealand. Although claims of a direct causal relationship between initial teacher education and exclusionary settings might be difficult to successfully defend, it does seem that for some teachers their inability to teach successfully all who would wish to exercise their rights to participate in their local education setting may in some ways be connected to their initial teacher education programme. In this view the success of teacher education in assisting the facilitation of inclusion in early childhood settings may well be questioned. For this reason it is important that those of us in teacher education look at how teachers can be supported to work towards inclusive practices in order that all children, families and teachers right to belong in their early childhood centre is acknowledged and upheld (Ministry of Education 1996a). Belonging, a concept central to Te Whariki, the early childhood curriculum (Ministry of Education 1996a) is for us, an apt metaphor for inclusion. We agree that the development of inclusion, and hence the fostering of belonging in education settings, depends in part on the way teachers are prepared for their work by teacher educators (Booth, Nes, and Stromstad 2003, 1).
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Our conceptualisation of inclusive education We note that inclusion or inclusive education courses in initial teacher education programmes in New Zealand are often centred on ideas about how teachers might include and teach children with disabilities in regular educational settings (Morton and Gordon 2006). However, it is our view and the view of others (for example, Ballard

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1999; Canella 1997; MacNaughton 2005; Dau 2001) that inclusion is not only about children with disabilities rights to access and participate in high quality and nondiscriminatory early childhood education, but about all children, families and adults rights to participate in environments where diversity is assumed, welcomed and viewed as a rich resource rather than seen as a problem (Booth, Nes, and Stromstad 2003, 2). In particular, Booth and Ainscow (2002) suggest that inclusion is about increasing participation; restructuring cultures, policies and practices; and the learning and participation of all. Inclusion results in improving early childhood centres for all community members; childrens rights to education in their local early childhood centre being supported; and diversity being seen as a rich resource to support learning. In the language of Te Whariki (Ministry of Education 1996a) inclusive education means children and their families experience an environment where they know that they have a place (54) and their rights to participate are upheld.
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Exclusion: barriers to learning and participation Exclusion on the other hand, is about the barriers that get in the way of full acceptance, participation and learning in education (Booth and Ainscow 2002). They may include socio-cultural barriers (such as language and policy) or physical and material barriers (such as poor building design, insufficient finance, lack of adequate service) that enable discrimination towards some individuals and groups to occur. In other words, exclusion is closely related to issues involving attitudes, values, economics, minority status, politics, ideologies, empowerment, disempowerment and historical, cultural and social circumstances (Ballard 1994, 248). If teachers are to work towards inclusion we have to find ways to identify and remove barriers. Without this we impede the extent to which all children and their families are able to develop a feeling of belonging, [and are able to exercise] their right to belong in the early childhood setting (Ministry of Education 1996a, 58). As Allan (2005) points out:
inclusion starts with the premise that an individual has a right to belong to society and its institutions, which therefore implies that others have obligations to ensure that this happens. In particular, inclusion necessitates the removal of barriers that may prevent individuals from belonging. These barriers may deny individuals access to buildings or material or cultural resources, or may convey messages to individuals according to which they do not really belong . (282)

Ours and others research (Gunn et al. 2004; Ballard 1999; Gunn and Surtees 2004; Gunn 2002, 2003; Surtees 2003, 2005; Purdue 2004), has highlighted that removing such barriers in early childhood settings involves addressing some important attitudinal, theoretical, philosophical and pedagogical issues, as well as addressing issues around resourcing and systems change. If in teacher education we do not attend to this range of factors in our work with students, then teachers and early childhood centres will continue to have difficulties successfully including all children and families in early childhood education and providing quality environments for them (Purdue 2004). It is with these understandings that we have been worrying about issues related to the inclusion and exclusion of children, families and adults in early childhood settings within our reformed course. By taking seriously our responsibilities within teacher education and by examining inclusion and exclusion from a range of perspectives throughout this course, we now feel in a position to share some of the successes and

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issues facing teacher educators like us who would want to help bring about change in early childhood in order that centres and teachers might build more inclusive and just early childhood settings. How did we begin to address issues of inclusion in teacher education? To enable us to ask questions of inclusion we considered it important to place our work with each other and later our students, within a theoretical landscape that would deliberately and continually provoke to us notions of difference, diversity and of looking beyond the status quo. Initially we (Gunn et al. 2004) turned to post-modernism as explored by Dahlberg, Moss and Pence (1999) and built from there a climate for our work together of welcoming uncertainty, complexity, diversity, non-linearity, subjectivity, multiple perspectives and temporal and spatial specificities (Dahlberg, Moss, and Pence 1999, 22). Basically almost anything went between us, even when we were opposed over ideas or issues remained unresolved. At the very basic level, our group represented an affirmation: yes we were present and yes we would listen to each other. On this basis we were able to look beyond our traditional approaches to thinking and teaching inclusion and to risk trying some new ideas. We had come to understand that each of us as individuals had a different take on what we were attempting but we had the same goal. Further, we had a heightened sense that by somehow remaining cognisant of this as a way to think inclusion, was primarily the point of what we were trying to do. From here, the transition into using theory that we had not previously utilised in our teacher education courses was relatively easy to effect. Shifting theoretical frameworks: poststructuralism Poststructuralism provided an entry point into thinking about inclusion in our reformed course because within poststructuralism, interconnections between individuals, the social worlds they inhibit and notions of knowledge and truth are to the fore. We argue that coming to understand such interconnections is a necessary step in understanding an individuals subjectivity and the impact of power relations, structural inequalities and discrimination on possibilities for inclusion. The poststructuralist view suggests knowledge is inherently and inevitably contradictory [and] that many different truths about the world are possible (MacNaughton 2005, 22). This means, for example, that the concept of inclusion is unavoidably contradictory and that numerous and varied truths about inclusion are conceivable, including the one that suggests that talking about inclusion is an exercise in exclusivity. Further, in poststructuralism it is posited that truths are influenced by discourse and that the particular truths someone might accept at a given point in time are influenced by that persons access to relevant discourses and his or her positioning in relation to these. To illustrate, in thinking with students about issues of bi-culturalism in our course, we mused on the teachings of things Ma ori that had characterised our own early schooling experiences as children predominantly in the 1960s and 1970s. Our experiences largely centred on activity like learning games and songs, and about traditional dress and the geography of the eighteenth-century Ma ori P a or village. This provided a useful discussion point for thinking about the multiplicity and partiality of truth. Some of us were able to point out that the experiences of things Ma ori that we might have experienced outside of school contrasted sharply with the version of Ma ori
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life portrayed within it. Yet as children we were able to accept the school version of Ma ori life as true because as learners we were positioned in an educational discourse as receivers of our teachers wisdom no matter how contradictory our teachers wisdom seemed to be. Through this discussion, we could entertain the possibility with students that their truths might change as their positioning within dominant discourses change, and that as a teacher, being open to the possibilities of this might be a clue to considering how to effect inclusion for themselves and others in early childhood settings.
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Discourse As well as thinking about multiplicity and the changeable subject, discourse and the analysis of discourses enable more complex understandings of teachers practices to emerge for us than the traditional frameworks of reflection and reflective practice had prior to our course reform. Discourses can be thought of as sets of words, actions and symbols that in some way come together to produce particular meanings about aspects of the world (Burr 1995). Discourses are situated within language and practices and they are visible through an analysis of the ways language and actions are used to order us and allow us to order ourselves. Heteronormative discourse, for example, orders language in ways that enable or privilege meanings that fall in accord with dominant heterosexuality. In our course, the concept of family provided a useful entry point into discussions of a discourse like heteronormativity. The word family brings to mind a number of variations of how families might look and be nuclear families, intergenerational families, lesbian families, and single parent families to name a few, however, the types of families that teachers practices are seemingly concerned with do not tend to capture such breadth of possibility. The families of early childhood practices tend towards one type: procreative opposite-sex adult-headed nuclear ones, even though many families within early childhood centres are not this (Gunn 2002). By thinking about discourse we were able to ask students to consider practices in centres that perpetuate heteronormativity. Enrolment practices, for example, which require the documentation of only a mothers and fathers details assume cohabitation (for example, Gunn 2002, 2003). We could think with students then, about the people included and excluded by those practices. By turning to discourse, we could work with students in ways that broadened possibilities for the analysis of situations of inclusion and exclusion that they might encounter in their work in early childhood education. Doing difference differently A third way we decided to work with students in our reformed course was to reposition the concept of difference away from the difference as deficit view and towards the idea that difference is a necessary component of all social systems. Research on difference, diversity and inclusion suggests that exclusion and discrimination against groups and individuals is regularly justified on the basis that they are, not like us (Booth and Ainscow 1998; Ainscow 1999; Ballard 1999; Allan 1999). When differences are viewed as deficits or problems to be overcome it allows teachers to position problems as the domain of children and families rather than recognising that in some early childhood centres, cultures, policies and practices can be troubling. Further, difference as deficit offers fruitful occupation for teachers who may try to focus on prevention and

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cure strategies in order to make children and families adapt to inflexible centre cultures, policies and practices (Booth and Ainscow 1998). We were also aware through our own and others research (Gunn et al. 2004; Purdue 2004; Surtees 2003, 2005; Ballard 1999; Booth and Ainscow 1998; Dau 2001) that the inclusion or exclusion of children, families and adults from minority groups in early childhood education, is often a consequence of peoples constructions of difference and diversity. It is often the case that those who are deemed different from the dominant majority in society can be rejected and excluded because such differences are viewed negatively and are therefore not valued or wanted. When a person is labelled and categorised in ways that negate their normality or when they become viewed as other, their rights to access and participate in ordinary education and community settings may not be considered as relevant to people not so labelled. Hence, we attempted to address the negative constructions surrounding differences and diversity, and to build positive attitudes and commitment toward the participation and inclusion of children, families and adults in early childhood settings. For example, we discussed different discourses surrounding disability with our students. If teachers define disability from a rights discourse they assert the view that all children should receive high quality early childhood education alongside one another in regular early childhood settings and they enact this in their everyday setting. However, if teachers construct disability from deficit or other exclusionary discourses, then, children with disabilities and their families can be labelled as different in the negative sense, unable to benefit from regular educational experiences, and not belonging in ordinary early childhood centres (Purdue 2004). By engaging with students about issues around difference as deficit or difference as diversity, we hoped to challenge students to think critically about their own constructions of, and responses to, difference and to reflect on whether they might be part of the problem or part of the solution when it comes to inclusion of children, families and adults in early childhood and community settings (MacArthur, Dight, and Purdue 2000). Respect
An essential ingredient of inclusive education is teacher respect for children, families and the contexts within which they exist. Inclusive education is concerned with issues of social justice. This means that graduates entering the teaching profession should understand how they might create classrooms and schools that address issues of respect, fairness and equity. (Ballard 2003, 59)

In working together, the notion of respect became a necessary but problematic principle in our course reforms. How to work in a way that would help us to demonstrate respect for each others positions, understandings and knowledge was constantly in our minds. And how to achieve this with our students too was a question regularly to the fore. Within the academic discourse, the student group and we, occupy particular subject positions that enable and constrain what each of us might imagine possible of ourselves, and each other. To try and achieve a climate where respect was reciprocated was a tall order, especially when we, the lecturers, held final say over our students success or otherwise in the course. While as a lecturer group we shared a vision to work respectfully together, this did not mean that we shared a sense of how this could best be achieved. Nor did it mean

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that we held a coherent view about how we might achieve respectful teaching when we knew the issues we would raise would be deeply challenging to some of the students in our class. At times, our work has been problematic. Evidence of this is included in the following section of the paper. However, by adhering to the principle that we would refrain from injuring, insulting, degrading or talking on behalf of, we at least had some sort of framework to build our practice upon. A shared language developed across our talk about inclusion in the course. Words like welcoming, celebrating, valuing, difference, possibly and maybe were used. We shared our uncertainties and our hopes, and we drew attention to the contradictions we posed to each other and each others ideas. For some students this was most challenging. The academic discourse typical to teacherstudent interactions would not allow for such transgressions and apparent incoherencies. Yet, we were bound to persist. We ensured students heard different voices with regards to the issues in the course. We listened to the research, to a panel of individuals who talked of their different experiences of being or working with oppressed peoples, to the contrary views of members in the class and we tried to make sense of these diverse perspectives in relation to inclusion and peoples sense of belonging. Central to our practice has been a dogged belief in the importance and value of humanity in all its shapes and forms and an understanding that respect goes hand in hand with how genuinely committed we are to learning how to live with difference and, learning how to learn from difference (Ainscow and Tweedle 2003, 173). The extent to which we have achieved our aims for respectful practice depends on who is talking. To be sure though, there has been a great deal to think about and discuss as we have worked at this problem of inclusive education in our reformed course. What we are learning We started the course with excitement and enthusiasm. This appeared to be reflected by the student group. By the course mid-point however, a subtle shift in dynamics appeared to have occurred. Some dissatisfaction about the course was now evident. Students no longer seemed as engaged in the whole group lectures and small group tutorials. At times students appeared resistant to lecturers and/or content and class absences became more noticeable. Students assignment work, and the results of a mid-course evaluation, also proved provocative. As we discussed the meanings we each took from our readings of the situation, we found ourselves asking: what went wrong? Two aspects of our course work emerged as particularly problematic. Perhaps ironically, the first aspect of our course work that proved troubling related to respect. Throughout the course we have sought to make known our own divergent views and to model respect for these. We set the scene for this in the first lecture where we were all present. The lecture included this statement:
As your lecturers, we want to try and model inclusion. We are a diverse group. We have our own teaching styles, beliefs and values. Sometimes this means we will not agree with each other and youll hear about that in and out of class. Rather than seeing this as confusing, we hope you learn to see our multiple voices as positive. That is, after all, what inclusion is all about.

This stood out for one student, who later reflected on this in an assignment. She wrote:

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It was my first time to see so many lecturers involved in one course. This is a vivid example that influenced my understanding about inclusion: six teachers might have different ideas about one topic, they very obviously have different styles of teaching, I am really curious on what they are going to show us about sharing ideas, respecting each others views about issues around inclusion in early childhood education.

At the same time, we have encouraged the expression of students differing views and endeavoured to accept all such expressions with respect. This does not mean we have agreed with the totality of student views, but we have acknowledged that they exist. If we perceived that views in the class might prove challenging to inclusion, for example, a comment like, if they dont have a car seat, they cant go on the trip, it would be usual for us to respond in one of two ways. We either commented, you need to consider how your view will impact on your ability to meet your professional obligations in relation to inclusion or the view you hold limits the scope for understanding, and therefore responding, to difference and diversity in ways that promote inclusion. Our practice has been viewed at times as anything but respectful as student comments indicate:
I am sick of being told that if we dont necessarily believe the lecturers point of view we are not being inclusive of others. In regards to the group discussions you are not free to speak, or have your own ideas. There is passion and there is shoving your particular passion down a persons throat. I feel like some lecturers rode roughshod over anyones opinion but their own. Inclusion can be very difficult. People should be able to ventilate their worries, maybe even feelings of powerlessness, concern etc. Seems to be little opportunity for that, youre basically told that thats not the way. I feel quite threatened during all of the classes as I feel like all of the lecturers are quite biased. It is a shame I feel this way, as I cant answer questions.

Some significant questions about our classroom practice have come to the fore. Have our responses negated the very messages about respect that we hoped to impart? Did students read our questioning of some points of view as a denial of their validity? Had we inadvertently set up a binary of our views of inclusion good/others views bad, thus reinforcing dualism (and dualistic thinking), as opposed to multiplicity (and reflexive, critical ways of knowing)? And if so, how does this fit with both our adoption of poststructuralism in the course and, life in the postmodern era, where pluralistic styles, ambivalence and ambiguity are to the fore? We harboured an agenda, to be sure, a commitment to the view that inclusion is a continual process of questioning, responding and change. Perhaps our fixedness to this idea obscured other points of view. As two of our group have argued elsewhere, the potential for teacher education is stunted when we decide in advance on a single fixed body of knowledge or what the endpoint of our discussions, deliberations and debates with student teachers are (Gunn and Surtees 2004, 88). In hindsight, perhaps the showing of respect in ways meaningful to those with viewpoints at odds with our own requires the absence of an agenda like ours. But therein lies a challenge: how do we create possibilities for inclusion without it? The second aspect of our course work that proved troubling was our naming of six perspectives to be addressed in the course. In doing so, inclusion became fixed to

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disability, gender, sexualities, class/socio-economic status, bi-culturalism and multiculturalism. Many students, in their assignment work began defining inclusion in terms of these perspectives alone. This problem was compounded when some students noted in evaluations that they believed that they had already done some of the perspectives in other courses. This was troubling in light of the agenda we noted above. It was also troubling in other ways. Did our investment in the perspectives of the course, (an investment born solely of the teaching and research interests of the individuals making up our group) serve to reinscribe exclusion for those not represented? And if so, which perspectives and how many perspectives (if any) should be addressed? As one student wrote in a reflective statement:
Inclusion raises many questions for me. How do you include all perspectives equally so not to devalue or place a higher value on one perspective? How do you include all of these perspectives without it being a form of tokenism?

And did this fixedness assist some student disengagement therefore jeopardising our hopes for more complex understandings of inclusion to occur? Had we simply shifted the boundaries of inclusive education beyond a single focus on disability and reestablished them across a broader terrain? Did our mapping of the course in line with these detract from the theoretical and process aspects of it? The questions and dilemmas put forward in this section continue to challenge us.

Conclusion Ballard (2003) contends that teachers should understand the historical, socio-cultural, and ideological contexts that create discriminatory and oppressive educational environments. He suggests that teacher education for inclusion requires teachers to obtain the necessary skills to be able to analyse dominant discourses critically and the implications of these for policy and practice. He also argues for the importance of teachers having an ongoing commitment to interrogating their ideas about children, differences and diversity. Teachers who can access theoretical tools to help them to see injustice and understand the origins of exclusion may be more able to find or create alternatives in practice that would see all included. One way to move towards this is to include in teacher education, a wider range of theoretical and conceptual tools with which different understandings of the world might come to the fore. Using poststructuralism to resist the truth, thinking about discourses and the knowledge, concepts, people and practices these enable and obscure, conceptualising difference as a necessary aspect of the social world and focusing on respect are four such tools that we are trying out in order to support inclusion in early childhood settings:
He matakahi maire1 With a wedge made of maire, a strong and hard wood, it is possible to fell large trees.

Note
1. Our inclusive education course whakatauki (Ma ori proverb).
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Notes on contributors
Kerry Purdue is a lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of Canterbury College of Education. As an early childhood teacher Kerry is interested in a wide range of issues related to policy and practice in early childhood education including, the early childhood curriculum, quality early childhood environments, the teacher as a researcher, inclusion, childrens rights and social justice issues. Her PhD research was in the area of disability, inclusion and exclusion in early childhood education. Before teaching at the University of Canterbury in 2007, Diane Gordon-Burns lectured and was bicultural advisor in the School of Early Childhood at the Christchurch College of Education. Prior to this, Di taught or supervised in early childhood centres in Takaka including Te Waikoropupu Te K ahanga Reo. She also had teaching responsibilities in the regions primary and secondary schools where she taught te reo M aori me nga tikanga. Dianes research inter ests include Maori oral tradition, Maori tribal histories, inclusive education/equity issues, mana wahine Maori and second language acquisition theories and issues.
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Alexandra Gunn is a lecturer in the School of Educational Studies and Human Development at the University of Canterbury. As a teacher in childcare, before coming to the university, Alex worked with children and families from birth to school age in urban and rural settings. Now working in the university, Alex researches, teaches and writes in the areas of inclusive education, educational assessment and social justice. Her doctoral work inquires into heteronormative discourses and early childhood practices. At the time the article was written, Barbara Madden was employed as a lecturer at the Christchurch College of Education. Her teaching interests included legal issues and social justice and inclusive education. She is currently employed by the Ministry of Education in the early childhood team and remains a staunch advocate for inclusion of access and participation. Nicola Surtees is a lecturer in early childhood teacher education at the University of Canterbury. She is currently teaching in the areas of inclusive education, curriculum and assessment for learning. Previously, Nicola has held supervisory and teaching positions in early childhood centres for children from birth to school age. Nicolas research interests include social justice, inclusion and curriculum in early childhood education. Recent research explored teacher discourses of sexuality in early childhood, the ways teachers used their understandings of sexuality to regulate sexualities and the exclusionary implications of such regulation.

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