Jonathan Rix

This chapter explores how the author's hopes for his son (and many other young people including his daughter) have fared within the everyday realities of the English education and support systems. It is situated in the author's wider work as a researcher and teacher who has spent his working life examining the ideas of special and inclusion. It draws upon stories and literature from across the world to show how special and inclusion are messy spaces made worse for families by people and systems that are fighting for their own interests, whilst claiming to welcome parents. He considers how processes and spaces can change but practices re-emerge, with particular world views dominating how children and their parents are regarded. He shows how certain priorities remain regardless of policy rhetoric, creating unavoidable contradictions that make supporting children far harder. He suggests that the problem is a purported focus upon the individual, alongside the stubborn nature of our school systems and the communities that support them. It concludes by pointing to solutions that would allow us to embrace the messiness of the spaces in which parents find themselves and in which their children are supported.

This paper explores research associated with WhatsApp, to see if there are lessons to be learned about the use of WhatsApp in educational settings. The research emerged from the researcher’s experiences as a parent of a child with various labels, including Down syndrome, and his experiences with WhatsApp. The background is a long period of investment in information technology which has not brought the anticipated returns. Alongside this lack of progress is a clear digital divide for disabled learners and an ongoing lack of expertise amongst teachers. Data for this study was collected through a systematic search of the literature, and analysed thematically through open-coding and constant comparison. Only 8 studies met the inclusion/exclusion criteria, despite these being broad in nature, and many of these studies were outside school and involved an adult population. Evidently WhatsApp has the potential to be an accessible and useful pedagogic tool, but there is very little guidance or research to inform the practice of class teachers and to influence the decisions of policy makers. As a parent and experienced academic, the researcher felt surprise at trying to understand something that was conspicuous by its absence. The lack of consideration of this issue raises fundamental questions about how we draw boundaries around the possible and the practical, providing an insight into how institutional discrimination can arise and be sustained.

Background: The terms idiot, imbecile, and moron are generally associated with notions of intelligence, having served both scientific and mundane roles across cultural‐historical contexts and in many different countries. This study seeks to explore the degree to which the use of these terms is an everyday part of our lives and to map out the meanings being attached to them.Methods: This study reports on their current usage in two arenas: within 29 academic papers published from 2016 to 2021, reporting on interviews or observations undertaken in educational contexts; and within 134 articles from four English language newspapers published in the first three months of 2021. Using a discursive and thematic approach to the analysis, it considers the degree to which these may be considered slur or taboo words, and whether they can be linked to discriminatory practices frequently experienced by groups with whom they are associated.Findings: It is evident is that people use the terms differently in different arenas. However, they see them as negative, associate them with stereotypical characteristics, are happy to apply them to others, but want to avoid having them applied to themselves.Conclusion: This study shows how widely these words are used across social contexts, and suggests that as with other historical terms for marginalized populations we need to regard them as slurs and treat them as taboo.

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the experience of working with different conceptualisations of participation and participatory practice. This is done through an examination of the involvement of a technology company within a multinational, 3-years participatory research project involving 13 partners and over 200 disabled people.Design/methodology/approach: This paper provides a case study, narrative account of a range of activities undertaken within the project, presenting a rare and much-needed explicit insight into the emergence of participatory ways of working and the reasoning and tensions behind them.Findings: Through the case study gaze of one of the technology companies involved, it explicates the underpinning processes of the participatory approach and how these challenged the notions of various partners.Originality/value: This paper shows how engaging in meaningfully participatory research creates profound institutional challenges for technology developers. The subsequent need to make hard decisions and compromises throughout disrupts traditional ways of working and anticipated outcomes. However, it also reveals opportunities for delivering unanticipated and transformative outcomes, highlighting the need for greater flexibility in funding research that aims to be participatory.

The involvement of all participants within all aspects of the research process is a well-established challenge for participatory research. This is particularly evident in relation to data analysis and dissemination. A novel way of understanding and approaching this challenge emerged through a large-scale international, 3-year participatory research project involving over 200 disabled people. This approach enabled people to be involved at all stages of the research in a manner that was collectively recognised to be participatory and also delivered high-quality findings. At the heart of this emergent approach to participatory research is an engagement with risk. This research note explores the types of risks involved in delivering research that seeks to be authentically participatory.

Despite decades of effort to achieve inclusive education systems, the emphasis on special education persists. This article explores the contradictory impulses that underpin these two concepts and considers whether they can be brought together. It does this through the development of two models; a model of certainty and a ‘model of uncertainty’. These models seek to represent and create a platform for thinking about the emergence and perpetuation of these two contradictory impulses and how these contradictions are experienced and might be resolved.

Authentic participation involving jointly undertaken analysis of data and dissemination of findings is rarely evident in participatory research involving disabled people. This paper examines analysis and dissemination which offers greater participation, providing a theoretical underpinning for this approach. This conceptualization arises from ARCHES, a museum education and access research project involving over 200 disabled people and a systematic review undertaken as part of this project. A few studies, including ARCHES, have moved beyond traditional research analysis to recognize the evolving nature of the ‘messy space’ and how this may inform approaches to data and dissemination. This paper frames this space as the While of participation, a concept which emerged from the systematic literature review and from working within ARCHES. It explores how the While of participation is experienced in practice, in relation to analysis and dissemination. In particular it focuses upon its emergent nature. Within this project and occasionally elsewhere in the literature, data analysis and dissemination are not retrospective or separated activities, but arise as part of the ongoing participatory process, where immersion and dialogue are at the root of all knowledge development and sharing.

In this paper, we will describe, justify and critique a participatory approach that we have developed in order to evaluate the success of a participatory research project that was exploring ways of making museum learning experiences more inclusive for adults who have a diverse range of access preferences. Because we were researching in a unique space at the intersection of inclusive museum education, inclusive technologies and participatory research, we have needed to develop an original evaluation approach, informed by methods and frameworks derived from other fields. We present examples of the kind of evaluation information that the framework elicited and use this as a basis to critique the strengths and weaknesses of the framework. Our experience of using creative methods for eliciting evaluation data suggest that useful information about participation can be revealed but that further improvements can be made in order to make the research experience more participatory.

This article reports on a study of practitioners’ use of In-the-Picture – a reflective, observational approach – when delivering early intervention programmes to young disabled children. To date, In-the-Picture has been used mainly by researchers to study interactions and learning between young children, practitioners and the children’s parents in home and early childhood settings. Practitioners involved in this early research had expressed an interest in using the tool themselves. This project aimed to engage such potential users, support them in using the approach and gain evidence of its impact upon their practice. In-the-Picture facilitates listening and communication between adults and children with learning disabilities. It is based upon a sociocultural understanding of learning, seeing the parents, children and practitioners as agents participating in an emerging teaching and learning process. It derives from a qualitative grounded research method which enables the researcher to consider the child’s perspective, through the use of first-person narrative observation, photography of the child’s focus of attention and reflective discussion with the child, practitioners and family. This study involved 10 Portage services in England, who provide weekly home visits with a focus on supporting play and communication with their child. Training was delivered to over 80 Portage Home Visitors across these 10 services. A selected sample of 20 practitioners, 2 from each service, was interviewed after 6 weeks and again within focus groups after 3 months. All interviewees used the approach in their own way and identified challenges in its use, but In-the-Picture was seen as relevant and valuable by all the participants, producing changes in thinking and practice, while proving flexible and simple to use. The study also exemplified how current early-intervention working practices in England limit the opportunity to engage with the child’s perspective and how practitioners value having the opportunity to do so.