How do you define 'inclusion'? – when we talk of including, into what do we seek to include?

It is generally accepted that the notion of inclusion derived or evolved from the practices of mainstreaming or integrating students with disabilities into regular schools.

Whilst inclusive education is a relatively recent advance in our thinking about schooling and pedagogy, it is a rapidly establishing movement within both local and global contexts. Familiarity with the terminology of inclusive education has grown considerably, however, there are various, competing discourses through which meaning and understandings differ.

Perhaps the question now is not so much how do we move “towards inclusion” (original emphasis, but what do we do to disrupt the construction of the center from which exclusion derives? It is relatively easy to point to exclusion and the excluded.

However, when we do this we make visible the conditions of exclusion by pointing to exceptional characteristics as the markers of difference. And so we go around in circles, for the question to-come but which has not-yet-come in inclusive education research and scholarship is: Different to what? What we do not question (but should) are the assumptions that enable us to think in terms of exceptionalities.