Inclusion and Integration: The Meaning o Concepts and Their Influence on Social Politics and Education
An open educational HSE seminar will take place online on March 30, 16:00. Link for registration and broadcasting: https://events.webinar.ru/1116217/6105071.
Inclusion today is an important part of social politics agenda - it influences decisions and legislation acts, programmes’ and projects’ lexis. A whole new movement and mythology were created around it. Someone may think that 'inclusion' may be related only to disabled kids and adults. Or that in education 'inclusion' is better and more suitable than 'integration', with the second term being usually understood as a rejection to address the needs of students through transformation. Inclusion is also a zone of fears and uncertainty. According to research, there is no consensus about it in school. Nearly a half of teachers are afraid of difficulties connected with inclusion programmes - teaching loads increasement, learning process complication and resource shortage.
At the seminar we will discuss:
- What does “inclusion” mean, besides the ordinary ideas of “something right” and “an aim to achieve”? Availability, understanding, shared values - what else can inclusion present and how different can it be?
- How were inclusion and integration created and shaped as concepts? What meanings did they have in the past and into which cliches and metaphors with new meanings are they transformed nowadays?
- How flexible can be the concept of inclusion in social politics and education today? Can we overcome it’s restrictions, search for latent meanings and functions and apply new ideas to it?
Speaker: Elena R. Iarskaia-Smirnova, Laboratory Head of International Laboratory for Social Integration Research
Moderator: Evgeniy Terentev, Senior Research Fellow and Director of Sociology of Higher Education Centre
Broadcasting: March 30, 16:00