Conversations and Key Debates on Inclusive and Special Education: Global Insights from ’The Inclusion Dialogue’

Based on the second series of the popular Inclusion Dialogue podcasts, Joanne Banks explores the tensions, debates and understandings of inclusive education in context of current policy changes. Featuring in-depth interviews with 12 world-renown academics, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the current tensions and conceptual understandings in the field.

Delving further into diverse viewpoints around special education, and how mainstream education includes and excludes students, Banks broadens the discussions started in the first podcast series by highlighting nuanced alternative perspectives, national contexts and historical developments. Given the diversity of the authors themselves in terms of their geography, career stage and views on inclusive education, the chapters highlight key issues around how we theorise inclusive education, the diversity of views on how inclusion can be measured and the intersections between disability and other student characteristics such as socio-economic background, gender, ethnicity, race and sexuality. Using the informal interviews as its springboard, the book offers practical insights into universally designed pedagogies and the role of the school community in fostering inclusive education.

This book is ideal for academics, researchers and educators working in inclusive and special education, who wish to create more inclusive environments for their students. It is also a key resource for policymakers seeking to understand inclusive education and address its manifestation in learning environments on ground.

Joanne Banks is a lecturer and researcher in Inclusive Education at the School of Education, Trinity College Dublin. She has previously published The Inclusion Dialogue (2023, Routledge).