The challenges of inclusive schooling in France:From expectations to concrete procedures

Institut de Recherche en Santé Publique contract (2014-2017) | Cermes3
Coordinator: Isabelle Ville, Cermes3

This program questions the concept of inclusive schooling based on the relevant regulatory texts, the discourses, and the protagonists’ experience, confronting these different understandings of inclusion and the expectations associated with its practical implementation procedures in the French context.The approach is one of pragmatic and comprehensive sociology, with a focus on the actors, their resources, constraints, and motivations, as well as the meanings they elaborate.The perspective is to be inductive, free of preconceptions, and based on the principle that actors always have “good reasons” to think and act as they do.

The research comprises three complementary parts:1) Contextualization and historical anchoring; 2) Policy into action:constitution and content analysis of a corpus of the documents including those produced by the actors in the field since 2005, as well as those related to inclusive schooling originating in the current preparation of a new law on school organization; 3) ethnographic observations of about thirty different inclusion situations of elementary-school and middle-school children with three types of difficulties: intellectual and cognitive disorders, mental-health disorders, and language and speech difficulties.

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Cermes3 participants: Sophia Rosman, Emmanuelle Fillion, Olivier Thiery (postdoctoral fellow)