welcome everyone and a very warm welcome to all of you from near and far my name is Rena Asad I'm the head of the school of education here at the University and it's my great pleasure to be able to chair and introduce Professor Lani Florian's in overal lecture to you no fire alarms so um if it happens it's for real so you know the drill orderly and calmly there are exit points in the room as I was coming in somebody said what's the Bell chair well the Bell chair of Education was founded in 1876 those of you who want to know more there's lots of information on the University of edinburgh's website and it was funded by uh funds by the Reverend Andrew Bell now the professorships um were for professorships in theory history and print and practice of education and it was awarded to actually Edinburgh as well as St Andrews University first professorship in any englishspeaking country now this next fact gives me great pleasure Lani is the eighth Bell chair but most significantly the first [Applause] woman incredible um from 1876 to 2012 so well done and also very proud she is our director of research and knowledge exchange at the school of education now I didn't know this until I looked at the notes beforehand that you were born in Hawaii and educated in the US but of course um has family here in the UK so in fact um has live lives in two two parts of the world Lani is lo known to many of us in this room and beyond for her passion for social justice and inclusive education particularly more precisely I think in how teaching practice can create inclusive Schools she's the sole editor of the sage Handbook of special education now in the second addition I can't possibly go through Lan's accomplishments if you are interested do a Google Search and lots and lots of um entries pop up and you can read about Lani to your pleasure however what is special I think about Lani and for me since I've be I've got to know her is actually she's able to communicate her rigorous research findings to a range of communities and that's not easy to do to take research and to create it and to speak that makes sense for policy makers that makes sense for teachers that makes sense for school leaders for parents and for community and those of us here at high education will know how important that skill and that ability is to cross these different U perspectives for impact and for change in terms of timing we have quite a bit of time and I'll keep an eye because at the end it would be quite nice if we have some time for um questions but I don't want to Cil Lani you it's your time so take the time you need to present your inaugural and if we don't have the time at the end then I will repeat it again at the end but there will be a reception upstairs where we can continue the conversation so without further Ado lannie over to you thank you thank you very much um it's true I was born in Hawaii Lonnie is a Hawaiian name I did not live there but I was born there and a few years ago when I was returning to the UK after a trip abroad an immigration officer said to me you were born in Hawaii and I said yes he said you live in Scotland I said yes he said you have some explaining to do but I love my adopted country of Scotland and it's a real pleasure to be here tonight thank you all so much for coming in this lecture I want to share with you some of the journey both historical and personal that has informed my work on the concept of inclusive pedagogy this journey is reflected in the questions that formed the abstract for this lecture why do so many children struggle to achieve good results in school to what extent does a focus on individual differences help in understanding such outcomes and are there other ways of thinking about difference and which differences matter in answering these questions I will locate my remarks in some of the experiences and research projects that have shaped my thinking and I will conclude with a few words about what I think is the transformative power of an inclusive pedagogical approach but first I would like to thank Rowena our head of school for her generous introduction thank you Rowena I'd like to thank the many colleagues students and friends who have come from Murray house school of Education as well as those who have come from across Scotland and The Wider UK to this somewhat belated inaugural lecture so many of you have contributed in so many different ways to what I have to say uh it would take the hour for me to name you all and to uh uh uh uh reflect on how you've influenced me but for now I will just say thank you so much for coming and thank you for waiting for this belated lecture and thank you for for coming to a lecture with what in a way is an uninspiring title as those of you who know me well know creative titles are not my strong suit uh here are some of the books that I have um uh uh produced over the years and of course the second addition now these covers reveal that riveting uh title is not the phrase that comes to mind so when the college asked me to submit my abstract for this lecture I was terrified and so I Googled uh creative titles for inspiration and here are a few of the suggestions that I was offered what everybody else does when it comes to inclusive pedagogy and what you should do differently the lowdown on inclusive pedagogy exposed who else else is lying to us about inclusive pedagogy the idiot's guide to inclusive pedagogy explained and the dirty truth about inclusive pedagogy on reflection it was the first title that comes closest to what I will talk about tonight what everybody else does and what we should be doing differently so perhaps I should have chosen that title however before I get into the substance of the lecture I'd like to pay some tributes first to Andrew Bell for whom this first professorship of Education in the English-speaking world is named and secondly to my predecessors the previous holders of the Bell chair and last but not least to my partner ameritus Professor Martin Rouse in 1876 when the bell professorship in the theory history and practice of Education was founded Benjamin D was prime minister Alexander granell was Grand Ed a patent for the telephone a UK medical act enabled women to obtain medical qualifications for the first time my ancestors in New York were about to become founding members of the Hebrew Technical Institute a Vocational High School established for the education of the many Jewish immigrants who were arriving in the city at the time and Mahatma Gandhi was beginning Primary School how things have changed and yet still resonate nearly a Cy and a half later today a British conservative is again prime minister technological developments continue to expand our Horizons as we heard last week from my colleague Shan Bane women carry on breaking gender barriers though there is still more to be done education is more universally available but not to all and somewhere out there a child beginning primary school hopefully will continue the nonviolent struggle for civil rights the Bell chair is named in honor of Andrew Bell who not only as Rowena said left the Legacy which led to the foundation of the professorship but made significant contributions to the field of Education through the development of the monitorial system which some of you may remember learning about an educational procedure that we might recognize today as an early form of teacher education where older children would receive lessons from school Masters and in turn teach others though Bell was a deacon in the Church of England he was superintendent of a seminary for Orphans in India at a time when the idea of universal access to education was taking hold and responsibility for it was passing from the church to the state as Educational Opportunity expanded so did the need for more teachers and Bell's monitorial system was a significant development that responded to the demands of his time since then the seven holders of the Bell chair before me have also engaged with significant issues and have made distinctive contributions to education the first Bell chair Simon lri was a well-known expert on education he wrote influential texts on educational principles for for trainee teachers and he was an early advocate of university-based teacher education Godfrey Thompson is remembered for his work on intelligence testing the the Murray house tests and the Scottish mental surveys Thompson's early interest in intelligence testing was to enable children from disadvantage disadvantaged backgrounds in his day children from rural areas who were underrepresented in selective secondary education to be able to demonstrate their natural intelligence in order to secure a place in school rather than be turned away because they were considered less able Thompson's work has helped to establish the field of cognitive epidemiology a flourishing area of research in the University today led by Professor Ian deir who by the way will give the annual Godfrey Thompson lecture in the school of education on March 23rd so that's a plug for the lecture and I hope to see some of you there others who have held the Bel chair will be well known to this audience for their contributions to Educational Theory ameritus Professor Noel Entwistle has made significant contributions to the field of higher education and the work of educational sociologist Bob lingard has been highly influential in the education policy arena in reading the history of the Bell chair I have been struck by the extent to which the founder and those who have held the chair have supported and influen to things the expansion of good quality educational opportunity to all children particularly those from different classes in society and the importance of university-based teacher education it is my ambition to continue this tradition and in this I am grateful for the support of my colleague and partner Martin not only do we navigate the EB and flow of married life as an academic couple but Martin manages to combine unconditional support with an unparalleled zest for life and a great capacity to balance the personal and the professional I am the appreciative beneficiary of a great partnership and that partnership has involved a number of the projects that I will draw upon in my remarks tonight these include effective inclusive schools a project that explored how schools made sense of a policy of inclusive education teaching strategies and approaches was a department for education and skills uh funded project with colleagues in Cambridge and Manchester that responded to debates about whether or not there such a thing as a special pedagogy for children with different kinds of learning needs achievement and inclusion in schools explored whether or not the inclusion of some held back the progress of others a commonly held belief that has been identified to a as a barrier to inclusive education and the inclusive practice project which was which was a Scottish government funded project undertaken with colleagues at the University of Aberdine to reform teacher education so that beginning teachers have a greater awareness and understanding of the educational and social problems that can affect children's learning and have developed strategies they can use to support and deal with such difficulties today it is widely acknowledged that differences in educational opportunities for children depend not only on their individual cultural economic health or disability circumstances but also on where they live the schools they attend and the ways in which Educational Systems are structured regulated and supported in their home country country in developed countries such as Scotland which have a long history of compulsory School attendance concerns about Equity remain relevant because despite the long standing commitment to education for all disparities still exist not all children are in school and even when they are they do not necessarily have a positive experience of Education nor do some have much to show for their time there the so-called achievement gap between those who achieve most and those who achieve least is a major concern in Scotland as it is in many other countries in a broad review of equality and equity in Scotland schools the oecd highlighted The Chronic underachievement as for a significant number of young people this report Point pointed out the very high levels of achievement for the highest performing 20% of pupils coexisted with a persistent long taale of underachievement for the bottom 20% a finding that remains of concern to many my own engagement with this concern reflects my professional experiences which are located in the evolving idea of inclusive education and that is the idea of all children being educated together in a unified education system regardless of any differences between them now this idea was originally concerned with the inclusion of students with disabilities many of whom had historically been excluded from mainstream schools and often received their education in a separate system of special education created for the purpose of helping them however in many Western countries this became cons this came to be considered unjust by those who considered a separate system unequal because of the way it w in which it marginalized students problems with disability classification and identification of special needs and because of the poor outcomes for students who were placed in special education provision relative to those who were in The mainstream but inclusive education has evolved to become a broad rights-based concept that encompasses anyone who may be excluded from or have limited access to the educational system within a country this Evolution reflects National and Regional differences in who has access and who is excluded in different parts of the world in many countries it will be children with disabilities but in other countries it may be Street children or child workers or girls the focus of inclusive education is on ensuring that all children have access to a good quality education however while the International Community has embraced the broad concept of inclusive education to include any marginalized group this idea has had less currency within National jurisdictions where responsibility for Education resides this is because of its origins in Special Needs education as a principled anti-discrimination position that said a child with a disability should attend the school that would have been attended If the child did not have the disability coupled with the international standard of a rights-based approach to education for all this has led to multiple interpretations of what it means to provide inclusive education as was the case in the days of bell Lori and Thompson the education landscape today is one of change in the globalized world in which we live the growing diversity of national populations resulting from economic and enforced migration means that school populations are increasingly Multicultural and multilingual the unprecedented movement of people throughout the world means the demographic profile of students in schools in many parts of the world is more complex than ever before and the concept of identity is changing from a single unitary notion to one of Multiplicity where people are thought to have many overlapping identities that are fundamental to their individual to their individuality a recent UK government office for science report Maps these as social biographical and biometric at the same time there is greater sensitivity to the exclusionary pressures associated with migration Mobility language ethnicity and intergenerational poverty and growing awareness that too many children in Britain and elsewhere are regularly exposed to violence abuse and exploitation so in addition to rights-based policies and demographic changes the recent scandals in places like rotheram and Oxfordshire remind us that any child may be vulnerable and far too many are living with its effects including educational underachievement Today class teachers can routinely expect to encounter a wide range of students in their classrooms where they are also expected to achieve pre-specified national standards of academic performance regardless of differences in Prior experience languages spoken and other factors that combine to create individual differences between students and I would like to thank my grandson Joshua Campbell mcandrew for his permission to illustrate some of his multiple and overlapping identities as history tells us the traditional response to increasing diversity in student populations has been to seek more and more specialization in the form of different kinds of provision for different kinds of Learners this addon approach of more and different responses positions difference as a problem and teachers often report that they do not feel adequately prepared to deal with this problem particularly with regard to the demands of catering to a wide range of differences between Learners which they often see as additional work that they are not qualified to undertake clearly the increasing diversity of student populations and an increasing awareness of the vulnerability of many students requires some new thinking about how a good Educational Opportunity can be provided to everyone as the oecd report on equality and equity in Scotland pointed out attempts to improve achievement of the bottom 20% have been largely unsuccessful despite pro- inclusion policies and anti-discrimination legislation because efforts to help the bottom 20% have been targeted on this group and left the rest of the education system unchanged many years ago I trained as a teacher of students with special educational needs and as my teaching career progressed the variability in who was identified as in need of special education services and where they received those Services fascinated and Disturbed me the theories I had learned about a Continuum of services where different forms of provision were required for different types of need did not seem to hold up in practice my observation that all kinds of students were found in all forms of provision seemed to have more to do with what was available in the schools and communities where the students came from and where identified as problems that than anything that may or may not have had differentiated them from others and because what was available in school was highly variable all kinds of students ended up in all kinds of provision it was not the students but the quality of provision in schools that held explanatory power for me as a young teacher I worked in two schools for students with special educational needs one was a residential school for children with autism this was a very significant experience for me because the school was pioneering interventions for children who at the time many thought could not learn in this school we taught children with severe cognitive and behavioral impairments which included self-injurious behavior and other unusual and atypical conditions these children were not allowed to attend mainstream schools where most other children were educated and although there were special classes for disabled children in many schools at the time they catered for children with less severe disabilities and were administered as a separate system of special education conventional wisdom dictated that the inherent differences between Learners required a separate system for some that would cater to their unique needs during the same formative period my next teaching job was in an alternative school for children with emotional and behavioral difficulties who had been excluded from mainstream schools these students were troubled and they were in trouble educationally and socially their academic achievement lagged behind what was expected of them based on psychological assessments which included IQ and other ability tests and it lagged behind what was achieved by others of similar age however even with all of this assessment data I never could work out what was inherently different about these students they all had been identified as emotionally disturbed but the differences between them and others of similar age was that they were somehow disenfranchised and lacked the social capital and social skills required to successfully navigate school life for me it seemed there was something wrong with a system that pathologized some children in a way my early teaching career reflects the troubled and contested history of special needs education and in this lecture I'm going to use special education as an example of what can occur when when difference is positioned as a problem it is the example I know best but it is only one example and my main points apply to other specialized and targeted interventions as well on the one hand special education is defined as something additional to or different from that which is available to others of similar age and it is intended to support students who need something different or additional as the children in the special schools I worked in certainly did but a system of Education that separates some Learners in order to provide different and additional Services based on assumptions about those differences between people depends on reliable methods of identifying educationally relevant differences and these methods have proved notoriously hard to develop part of the reason why and I know what I'm going to say will be controversial is because of the ways that schools rely on Norm referenced assumptions of a ability to make predictions about performance and learning potential this is problematic because ability is not something that is directly measured but is inferred from test performance as scholarly reviews of the concept of IQ remind us intelligence is an attribute that reflects what a person has learned and because past learning has proved to be a good though imperfect predictor of future learning many people believe or at least do not question the idea that so-called ability tests measure it directly and because the tests are reliable ability is assumed to be fixed what needs to be remembered is that their validity as a direct measure of mental ability is less certain however many educational practices are based on a tacit Assumption of fixed ability and the belief that it is normally distributed within the population sorting students by ability and the use of Norm reference tests are part of the pathway by which judgments about students learning capacity are made and by which some students and some groups of students are deemed less able and or become eligible for additional support tests that reliable reliably measure past learning may be good predictors of future learning but they are subject to different forms of cultural bias and although many efforts have been made to address the issue of bias in test construction other cultural factors and experiences can also affect performance thus one of the unintended consequences associated with efforts to identify differences between Learners is the disproportionate statistical representation of certain groups in Special Needs education as Dyson and keski have pointed out although students from any social group can be and are identified as a need of special education members of some groups are more likely than others to be identified groups whose members tend to do badly in the general education system Supply more students to the special education system these are moreover moreover precisely the groups who do least well in terms of a whole range of social indicators Health employment income encounters with the penal system and so on disproportionality is a particular problem because a School Equity experts have noted in some jurisdictions large numbers of struggling minority students are being identified as in need of additional Support Services many of these students are also disadvantaged by poverty and have lower educational attainment levels than children from middle class backgrounds however others have found that poverty and gender have stronger associations than ethnicity with the overall prevalence of special educational needs for example in some cases white workingclass boys are over represented in statis in statistics on special educational needs and there is cross-national research suggesting that children's social Origins can have a significant effect on educational attainment even when so-called cognitive ability is taken into account consequently the nature of educational disadvantage and what should be done about it presents a conundrum for Education as it is currently constructed the problem is that while the reciprocal links between poverty identification of additional needs and underachievement are clearer than they ever have been before they are still not fully understood in practice many children are referred for additional support because they underachieve or present a challenge of some kind to their teachers many who are identified as having additional support needs are also affected by poverty people with disabilities are also more more likely to be poor but they may or may not underachieve in school one of the more problematic legacies of ability testing in education is deficit thinking about what some children cannot do compared to others of similar age and the lowering of expectations for performance that accompany this today although culture gender and other aspects of difference are acknowledged the structures of schooling that developed with the idea of universal access to education at the end of the Victorian era are still with us the intelligence tests that were initially developed to help determine which students should attend selective schools and which students might need additional support have encouraged the practice of more and more targeted interventions specially designed for different kinds of Learners and as of and as I have suggested targeted interventions present a dilemma on the one hand specialist support is needed in many cases for example without it many people with disabilities would be excluded from opportunities for Meaningful participation in the activities that typ typify everyday life because impairment by definition is something that limits functioning unless it is mediated in some way on the other hand providing something different for some calls attention to difference and it reinforces the problem that intervention is trying to solve this dilemma of difference is partly a result of the common assumption that it is acceptable that what is generally available in school will meet the needs of most learners but not everyone the policy framework which guides targeted interventions for the so-called bottom 20% or the one in five students generally thought to need some additional support of some kind or at some point often requires that differences are isolated in some way hence the students I taught in the early years of my career became pathologized by the assumption that what is generally available to most Learners is normal in education ideas about what is normal and what is not normal are based on the bell curve model of distribution this underpins many educational practices such as streaming banding and ability grouping while schools group students by AG and phase they are also structured in ways that positions the center of the distribution as the ideal place where schooling occurs and marginalizes that which is outside of it this is the structural problem of inequality in education as fendler and musafar have argued the bell curve model of distribution has been taken for granted in education because because it is generally accepted to be a fact of life they argue that the Naturalization of the bell curve as a structural feature of schooling is inherently unjust because it perpetuates the inevitability of failure and I would add limits the possibilities for learning after all the laws of the bell curve require that virtually 50% of students will be below average yet such such a statistic is considered unacceptable in the era of standards-based reform and the global competition to achieve better and better educational outcomes for all and this accounts for at least part one part of the answer to the question about why so many children struggle to learn in school of course bell curve thinking does not mean there are not other reasons why some children struggle but it does shape the way we think about and respond to difference for example the Assumption of inherent differences has retained currency and supports the view that difficulties in learning are the result of internal differences in how people learn and it is also used to justify the idea that different types of interventions are needed for different types of Learners however research on the question of specialist teaching has shown that to date pedagogical approaches based on inherent cognitive differences have proved to be very modest in their effectiveness while this is not to say that such differences do not exist many psychologists cognitive neuroscientists and educationalists agree their relationship to learning is not sufficiently developed to support current pedagogical practice while technological developments have stimulated new and Innovative Innovative basic research about cognitive processing and learning the results of which might change our view of this relationship current educational reviews of this question including the teaching strategies and approaches studies that I co-directed concluded that certain teaching strategies and approaches are associated with but not necessarily related directly to specific categories of need these teaching strategies and approaches are not sufficiently differentiated from those that are used to teach all children to justify a distinctive pedagogy sound practices in teaching and learning in both mainstream and special education literatures are often informed by the same basic research and teaching strategies developed for one purpose can be effectively applied to other groups of children with different patterns of educational need indeed when one begins to systematically interrogate what is distinctive about targeted interventions for different groups of Learners whether they identified as having additional needs or belonging to some other marginalized group more similarities than differences are found and So my answer to the second question to what extent does a focus on individual differences help in understanding why so many children fail to achieve good results in school is that targeting responses to addressed differences is limited whatever can be known know about a particular category or group of Learners will be limited in the educational purposes it can serve because the variations between members of any group make it difficult to predict or evaluate provision for each of the individuals within it and yet judgments about individual Learners are often made on an assumption that they possess all of the characteristics of group membership to the same degree in practice the appealing simple idea of matching interventions to the characteristics of Learners has not proved so simple or necessarily been helpful as the following example from a colleague with dyslexia for whom textto speech software was recommended to compensate for his learning difficulties illustrates he says having struggled for many years with reading and writing I was advised that textto speech software would help me I found the main difficulty with the software was its adap ability to Contex specific tasks particularly tasks involving collaboration with others also having the text on the screen read aloud did not help me to understand the text any better with the text being highlighted on the screen I found myself following the words and not the dialogue by the end of the paragraph I was able to recall what words had been spoken but not the message being conveyed furthermore it was in working collaboratively with colleagues where such tools Prov provided the greatest challenge because of the way that the tool determines how reading and writing tasks should be carried out while I would say the tool sometimes helped me to learn and verbalize specialized vocabulary it did not help my reading and writing consequently I do not use such tools this is an important example that demonstrates how an assistive technology device served as a barrier to participation rather than an enhancement the device did not become the cognitive prosthesis that was promp promised by the technology nor was the device un nor was the device helpful it actually unhelpful it actually function to exclude my colleague from the working collaboratively with his team it is easy to see how such examples can occur in school settings when the focus is on matching interventions to difficulties rather than to the demands of the task the limitations of focusing on differences between Learners suggest that alternative approaches for responding to them are needed needed and this brings me to the third question are there other ways of thinking about difference and which differences matter as was seen in the text to speech example an assistive technology device intended to support an individual with dyslexia interfered with rather than supported my colleague in completing the reading and writing task as his story showed focusing on individual difficulty rather than the demands of the task in his case contributing to a report did not lead to meaningful engagement with the task at hand if this case were approached from the requirement of writing the report rather than generalized assumptions about the nature of the difficulty of one of the individuals undertaking it a different and ultimately more productive course of action may have been possible thinking about learning as a shared activity where a single lesson is a different experience for each participant encourages a shift away from deficit thinking about most and some Learners to thinking about learning as an open-ended opportunity for everyone and this is the heart of the transformative potential of inclusive pedagogy inclusive pedagogy as I describe it is a concept that has emerged from studies my colleagues and I have undertaken over a period of time to understand how some schools have been able to raise achievement levels while safeguarding the inclusion of those who are vulnerable to exclusion and other forms of marginalization while our early work explored schools as institutions and considered how values and beliefs within a school's culture shape the teaching and learning that takes place subsequent studies focused on pedagogy following Robin Alexander's notion of pedagogy as the act of teaching and its attendant discourse and focused on how teachers and schools extend what's generally available to all this was supplemented by findings from another project that explored how teachers can be prepared to use an inclusive pedagogical Approach at the outset of this lecture I described inclusive education as the idea of all children being educated together regardless of any differences between them and although initially addressing concerns about the marginalization of students with disabilities the concept was broaden for the reasons I've been discussing to include anyone who might be excluded or marginalized or have limited access to the educational system within a country but the the practice of inclusive education varies widely and also coexists with the practices of those who disagree or resist the idea on the grounds that it will disrupt the education of others this variability also suggests that much can be learned from studying the practice of teachers who do not share this view what is it that they are doing differently and how can we use what we learn from these teachers to help prepare and support others we have learned that the teachers who who participate in our Studies have found respectful ways to respond to difference that include Learners in rather than exclude them from what is ordinarily available in the daily life of the classroom it is the way that they do the work rather than what they do that has that is important these teachers are Adept at embedding responsiveness to individual need within the process of whole class teaching a finding that has been reported in other studies however our analysis of this embedded responsiveness has foregrounded the importance of participation in classroom activities in terms of choice the demands of the task and relationships with others for example rather than setting work for a student based on teacher judgment a teacher might make available to the whole class a range of differentiated lesson options based on knowledge of the range of students in the class their interests previous experiences needs and abilities though through a process of thinking about and planning for everyone individual needs were met without predetermining or limiting the learning that was possible for everyone what teachers in our studies had done was shift their thinking from planning for most students and differentiating for some to thinking about everybody taking account that each each student has a different prior experience of learning in so doing they actively avoided situations that Mark some students as different different or perpetuate The Dilemma of difference within the classroom they did not rule out the use of Specialists or specialist knowledge but where Specialists were consulted it was in support of the teacher's efforts to ensure that the learner would be meaningfully engaged in the community of the classroom we use this phrase purposefully to avoid the idea that the approach is merely advocating whole class teaching it is in the ways that teachers respond to individual choices that they to individual differ es the choices that they make about group work and how they utilize specialist specialist knowledge that distinguishes the inclusive pedagogical from other approaches now I'm aware that what I just described is subtle and I hope that in this short time I've conveyed the essence of it inclusive pedagogy is not something that is added to what is already happening but a practice that develops as a result in a shift in thinking about teaching and its attendant discourse focusing on how teachers extend what is generally available in a lesson or activity taking account of all that all Learners differ is the inverse of bell curve approaches that assume most Learners are the same and some are different it offers an alternative perspective from which to consider inclusive educational practice to those who are T to those that are targeted only on individual need or presumed group differences our work on the academic achievement of students in schools that Focus instead on extending what's generally available to all suggest that an inclusive pedagogical approach can produce good results for everybody in particular it does not hold back the progress of others a common concern and the academic attainment gains that we have seen in these schools are not only gains for those who struggle but for everyone this is consistent with research in the Netherlands and elsewhere that has examined the relationship between inclusion and academic achievement and I suggest that this finding would hold for other groups as well as long as students continue to be marginalized by schooling practices that are determined for them by others on the basis of judgments about what they cannot do or have not yet learned disparities and outcome are likely to persist this is particularly the case for students who obtain low scores on ability tests underachieve or are referred for special support because the expectations for future performance are lowered improving the quality of an education system that is responsive to a diverse multiplicity of Learners is important because this is where educational successes and failures occur as more is being learned about the processes that maintain and potentially change educational outcomes it must also be acknowledged that disparities are associated with powerful factors beyond the school such as poverty however teachers are known to be significant in school factors influencing student achievement and they have a role Ro to play in reducing inequality in educational outcomes by the choices that they make and the ways that they respond to learner differences schools are contradictory sites they reproduce the larger society while containing spaces for transformation preparing teachers to recognize and work in these spaces was a key element of the inclusive practice project which enabled us to focus on how we might use what we had learned from the study of experienced teachers practice in preparing new teachers to enter the profession in this project we found that new teachers are able to adopt an inclusive pedagogical approach based on the shift in thinking from most and some Learners to everybody we found that teacher education can help enrich what is generally available in schools by preparing teachers to respond to the challenges of diversity by replacing bell curve thinking and deficit approaches with others that are with other equally powerful ideas that account for the complex world of teaching but encourage an open-ended rather than a fixed view of learning potential so in considering what everybody else does and what we should be doing differently I have a few comments first we must stop seeing some students as less able less worthy and extra work for teachers differences between students are to be expected and the range of these differences occur across many Dimensions perspectives on teaching and learning that perpetuate the idea of education's normative Center where most students learn and Su our extra work undermine the human dignity of children and those who teach them what we have been doing targeted interventions for underachieving groups or providing additional support based on individual need for some have not had the desired effect on underachievement in part because it leaves the ideal Center unchanged what we need to do differently is recognize that bellur thinking about most and some Learners that sustains this ideal Center is no longer fit for purpose it should be replaced with an alternative perspective that promotes a different view the changing demographic of schooling brings a diverse range of students characterized by many overlapping identities that account for individual differences into school but claiming a school is inclusive because it enrolls a divers student population or a high proportion of students with special educational needs is insufficient to affect achievement there were differences in practice and in outcome for the schools we studied and what we are calling inclusive pedagogy reflects our articulation of the practices of teachers in schools that have been able to maintain a commitment to both inclusion and high achievement the lessons learned from the studies of teachers inclusive practice have important implications for how new teachers can be prepared and practicing teachers can be supported the inclusive pedagogical approach represents one way of reconceptualizing difference between Learners as opportunities for teaching that may lead to different outcomes for underachieving students we are now at a point where we think the concept is sufficiently developed to be able to study its effects on achievement on a broader scale and this work is currently in development for now an appreciation of the important role that teachers play in influencing student achievement despite other powerful factors that impede it have implications for practice that may not immediately alter the structure of schooling or Society but may help to close the achievement Gap in classrooms and schools where teachers assume that a difference that difference is an ordinary aspect of human development and the capacity to learn is open-ended thank you [Applause] thank you very much Lani um each one of us will have taken something different perhaps the same things for me I took away that very first slide well I've taken a more than that but I'll start with the very first one which was the transformative power power of inclusive pedagogy and I have to say that the it's a Jingo I know and I'm so sorry to reduce it to Super WS supermarket.com or whatever but that Jingo it's it's so 21st century and why are we not doing this as routine and not as a bolon so that was the first thing I took away the second I think was you were challenged to make a difference for the bottom 20% we have to change the system to disrupt systems and practices that pathologize some young people and the final thing I took away was the need to disrupt normative thinking tests and practices so that's what I took away and there's a lot more in that and of course the powerful thing of it all was that you are able to say this confidently from the many projects and research that you have carried out over the years and it's evidence-based so thank you for that as when you were putting up the names of the previous Bell chairs I suddenly thought Ah that's where Simon lorri house was called and Ah that's where Godfrey Thompson Hall was called called and I thought actually we should Mark the first woman Bell chair with the Lani Florian building some can I ask you to join me in thanking Lonnie very much for her lecture [Applause]