6 February: final session.

First, I must apologise for not having put this post up on the blog--not sure how I forgot. Still, here it is...

The William Blake quotation:

He who would do good to another, must do it in Minute Particular
General Good is the plea of the scoundrel hypocrite & flatterer:
For Art & Science cannot exist but in minutely organized Particulars

Jerusalem, ch. 3 plate 55.

Lesley and Emma on the child care front raised some interesting issues about when "inclusion" (as a "General Good" turns into its opposite by the law of unintended consequences.

Similarly Jackie, Laura and Louise did a good job on the practice of inclusivity among themselves, by managing to explore adjusting to meet individual needs in quite disparate settings, and finding common themes across them, including the utilitarian question of when such adjustments disadvantage other members of the class.

The discussion turned at one point to the medical and social models of disability, and the different approaches which follow from them. This link is to a short piece from Leicester University, on this, and this one from the OU with some more links. We also discussed the use of language in the session--I think the OU piece may be stepping over into Political Correctness--comes back to Blake again.

And of course, the real test for inclusivity policies is how they engage with issues of assessment, as you discussed.

Sam Shepherd blogs on ESOL teaching--he has just vented his spleen at the funding regime which is imposing unrealistic targets on his learners, here. He's is certainly on the same page as those of you working in similar areas.

And for the outcome on discussing the "rhetoric of inclusivity" you may be interested in this.

Incidentally, Wordle is here. But there are other variations, too--see here.

I'll continue to post items of potential interest, but all the best with units 7 and 8, and do get in touch over the assessment.

Update

From the TES on the more serious end of inclusion and post-16 SEN students. And here is a summary of the Green Paper on it.

30 January; presentations and (my) misleading information.

My apologies for some misleading information in discussion. I stated that it was illegal to devote federal funds to prison education in the USA. As I thought about that, I thought it sounded extreme even for as reactionary a penal system as the US, so I tried to check my sources (as of course one does). And I couldn't find my note, so I had to look again.

Funding for prison education has long been controversial. Private citizens often oppose prison education, because they assume that the government, and thus tax money, is solely responsible for finding prisoners' educations. Private charities and even inmates can fund prison education, however. Educational establishments also can help with funding...

"Governmental support of education for inmates and ex-inmates can be limited by law. In the United States, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 prohibited those convicted of felonies from receiving Pell grant assistance. The Federal Pell Grant Program offers less than 1 percent of its budget to the education of inmates. Other laws can, in fact, support the education of inmates. For example, the Higher Education Act’s Grants for Youthful Offenders program allows the U.S. government to spend $17 million US Dollars on inmate education, provided that inmates seeking to participate in educational programs are younger than 25 and have sentences that are less than five years in length.

From here--not a particularly good site itself, but compact enough to quote. If you are interested enough, here is the horse's mouth, as it were.

Many thanks to Rebecca, Becky and Lucy for the presentation--if you'll send me the link I'll post the Prezi. We did, as ever, get rather caught up in the practice of offender education itself, but it did raise some more general issues about inclusion which you might want to note for your submissions;

• The trade-off between the needs of the individual and those of the rest of the group. At what point does inclusion of one or two disturbed/disturbing individuals effectively exclude others?

• And the issue of targeting scarce resources--which is important but we did not actually get round to discussing in this context, although we have touched on it lightly, previously. There are two main strategies in this situation--and for managing all kinds of scarce resources, in health or aid or of course education in general;
• Direct resources to the place of greatest need. Which is many people's intuitive position, but can result in losing them down a bottomless pit.
• Direct resources to where they can do the most good, a strategy known as triage, which of course admits the possibility of "writing people off", but which ensures the greatest utilitarian return.