Module 25-MIS-B3 (Re-)Negotiating Inclusive Education in Changing Societies

The module “(Re-)Negotiating Inclusive Education in Changing Societies” aims to provide students with the competencies required for theoretically informed analysis of societal issues related to inclusive education. By the end of the module, students will be able to apply classical and contemporary theories, such as theories of inequality, critical theories, theories of difference, postcolonial and decolonial perspectives, queer and feminist theories, to conduct case studies and analyse discourses, and structures of inequality in childhood and youth.
Students will be able to investigate systematically how educational structures, institutions, and practices, along with social policies and welfare systems, simultaneously produce and contest inequalities. They can articulate the ambivalences and paradoxes inherent in strategies of inclusion within changing societies.

Students are able to

• critically evaluate how normative orders — including gender, class, nationalism — become institutionalized in policies, pedagogical practices, and everyday routines.
• analyse how boundaries, privileges, and access to resources are created, sustained, and challenged through credentialing practices, categorization processes, and the (unequal) distribution of institutional support.
• reflect critically on their own professional roles and responsibilities in either reproducing or challenging the intersecting structures of domination that affect children and youth.
• consider how theory-informed, reflexive, and power-sensitive perspectives can inform more rights-based and inclusive approaches in educational settings, while remaining alert to the ways in which well-intentioned practices may inadvertently reproduce exclusion.

Learning Outcomes:
Upon completion of the module, students will be able to:

• apply classical and contemporary theories of inclusion and exclusion to analyse discourses and structures of inequality in the context of childhood and youth;
• systematically investigate how educational structures, institutions, and social policies produce and contest inequalities;
• critically evaluate the institutionalization of normative orders, such as gender and class, in policies and pedagogical practices, identifying their implications for inclusion;
• analyse the creation and maintenance of boundaries, privileges, and access to resources through credentialing practices and categorization processes within educational settings;
• reflect on their professional roles in relation to intersecting structures of domination, considering how theory-informed and power-sensitive approaches can foster rights-based and inclusive educational practices.

The module introduces students to theories of inequality in conjunction with social exclusion, social closure, and to theories of discrimination and constructivist approaches to difference and ethnicity through an interdisciplinary lens. Students examine how processes of inclusion and exclusion structure childhood and youth within educational institutions and other contexts, and how educational systems and society contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies. Students build an in-depth understanding of theories and research in this field, learning to analyse the production of inclusion and exclusion in conjunction with power structures. Using intersectional approaches, they examine systems of difference (race, class, gender, disability, nationalism etc.) and deconstruct normative orders that impact childhood or youth. A central focus lies on how specific notions of normality govern young people’s lives across a range of contexts and institutions. Students critically reflect on how policies and practices of (intended) inclusion can simultaneously stabilize exclusionary structures and reproduce social structures. They discuss their own roles, tasks, and responsibilities within educational fields of work.

Within Element E1 – Inclusion and Exclusion in Childhood and Youth, students receive an introduction to classical and contemporary theories of social exclusion, social closure, and social inequality through an interdisciplinary lens. They will study how various processes of inclusion and exclusion structure childhood and youth inside and outside educational institutions. The element focusses on how educational systems and other institutions contribute to the reproduction of social hierarchies, while simultaneously enabling young people to experience agency, develop resistance, and work towards changing society.
Furthermore, the students will build a solid understanding of theories of social closure and social exclusion, including (neo-)Weberian as well as rational choice approaches. Based on this understanding, students will analyse how boundaries and privileges are created, maintained, and contested in society, for example through credentialing practices, the distribution of resources, resilience and appropriation. Docents in this element will also draw intersectional approaches on theories of oppression to address sexism, racism, class rule, ableism, and age-based discrimination in the dominant generational order. In this context, normative orders are analysed in regard to how they shape experiences of recognition and misrecognition.
At the empirical level, a central focus in this element lies on how intersecting notions of normality and the resulting normativity – e.g., around gender, ethnicity, class – govern young people’s lives in online and offline contexts, families, peer groups, and institutions. The aforementioned normative orders are inscribed into policies, pedagogical practices and people’s everyday lives. This element offers a range of perspectives on the manifold ways, in which children and youths reproduce, negotiate, question or resist the power of normalization.

Within Element E2 – Citizenship and Education: Challenges of Inclusive Societies, theories of difference (theories of racism, postcolonial theories, decolonial theories, queer theories, feminist theories) and their educational perspectives are covered, as well as inequality research, critical citizenship perspectives, reflections on liberal, conservative and Marxist theories, just as theories of the nation state and questions of inclusion and exclusion.

Students examine systems of difference (focusing on educational structures, institutions, and practices; race, class, gender, disability, (trans-)nationalism etc.) as well as policies of producing both ‘inclusion’ and ‘unity’ as well as exclusion and subordination. They are able to reflect on the implications of these perspectives for educational fields of work and their own professional activities, to draw on them in order to analyse prevalent processes and discourses and to discuss them in a theory-based manner. Alongside a critical reflection on normative references and legitimated foundations of social orders (such as the nation state and citizenship) their historical and contextual relations and the structures of power and domination they imply, students discuss their own roles, tasks, and responsibilities, as well as the structural conditions of their work.

Successful completion of the first Master’s semester in Ostrava.

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