Quality in Preschool: Inclusion- questions and answers

Inclusion has not been defined, eg in the Salamanca Statement, and is ‘like an island, considered as a separate territory from mainstream education, with its own discourses, policies and practices’ (Thomas, 2012: 3). Inclusion focuses on discrete groups of children, with, in Denmark, ‘a tsunami of diagnoses’, especially of ADHD (Langager, 2014: 1). Training of teachers for inclusion, and support materials, emphasize children’s deficits (Allan 2014). The project asks: What does inclusion do? Which opportunities do we offer our children? What’s an inclusive environment for all children and how do we see it? A pedagogical perspective of quality has to originate from research and documented evidence but must also inherit the children’s perspectives (Sommer et al, 2013). It has to be viewed interactively. Neither the objective (global) nor the subjective (or relative) perspective, with their limitations, should be dominant (Siraj-Blatchford & Mayo, 2012). In an interactionist perspective, dimensions of the society, the pedagogues, the children’s development and the learning environment continuously and dialectically influence and are influenced by each other (Bronfenbrenner & Morris, 2006; Sheridan, 2009).