Binary Thinking

The inclusion/exclusion dichotomy

Education discourse in Australia appears to be embedded in an inclusion/exclusion dichotomy, resulting in the binary constructs of ‘mainstream school’ and ‘alternative setting’. This has created a significant gap in contemporary thinking and the educational policies we have, in turn reinforcing the idea that schools and alternative learning settings are mutually exclusive.

As a policy artefact the terminology of ‘social exclusion’ first emerged in France in the 1970s to describe the marginality experienced by people in poverty; by the 1980s the term ‘social inclusion’ was adopted to counteract these patterns of exclusion (Allman, 2013). Social policy writers predominantly focus on the effects of exclusion and its relationship to social inclusion, often viewed as two ends of a continuum. Historically, anthropologists and then later post-colonial theorists problematised the inclusion/exclusion construct as producing a social ontology that is consistent with certain social groups within a hierarchically structured society (Pocock 1957, Sibley 1995), and unless social policy writers challenge the central premise of these constructs, they become quasi-facts that help shape the world they ostensibly describe. As a result, this dualistic approach to understanding social life focuses attention on the categories identified and draws attention away from the gaps they may create, thereby invisibly placing limitations on what is thought to be possible.

The social inclusion/exclusion problematic has been interrogated more deeply in post-modern and post-colonial theory, which is mostly predicated on boundary debates between centre and periphery. To borrow from Anzaldua, inclusion/exclusion constructs are ‘two self-consistent but habitually incompatible frames of reference’ (1999, 100), and while there is merit in focusing on whose interests are served by these orientative constructions, doing so can obscure and reinforce false binary divisions by failing to challenge the categories themselves and exploring other ways of framing both the problem and what might be possible.

Arguably a discussion about inclusion/exclusion is also a discussion about status and location in time, space and place. Social policy debates are predominantly concerned with differential access and who defines others as excluded, and the latent biases within conceptualisations of social inclusion and exclusion. Part of this is an acknowledgement that focusing on the excluded ignores an analysis of the influences that keep the included actually included. There is a need to resist the temptation to buy into this integrationist discourse and to rethink such approaches and what is possible.

When applied to a school setting, the inclusion/exclusion dichotomy means that discussions around social inclusion/exclusion are problematic as they routinely create a condition by which there can only be two implications, cast as who is includable and who is excludable. Much of the thinking, particularly in the policy spaces, revolves around the effects (experiences) or root causes (blame) of social exclusion. The actual categories themselves remain unproblematic as social exclusion becomes a value-laden concept that needs to be resolved while social inclusion becomes the unproblematic other. Meanwhile less attention is paid to the internal logic – the dialectic between inclusion and exclusion – that sustains these mutually constituting categories. A more fruitful approach to recognising such binary constructs can be to move beyond these limited and limiting understandings and challenge both their ontological and epistemological assumptions by asking ‘What does this approach leave out?’ and; What blind spots are being created by this way of thinking and approach to social issues?

This has implications for school practice if other options and alternatives are opened up. Rather than focussing on the included/excluded, it places a whole set of relationships – and what supports them – into sharper focus. The case study below explains one practice that identifies those students enroute to exclusion and provides a way to re-include them by expanding the ways in which schools operate, effectively creating an enabling space within an enabling space.