Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

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Teaching and Teacher Education

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tate

General, special and . inclusive: Reguring professional identities

in a collaboratively taught classroom
Srikala Naraian*
Dept. of Curriculum and Teaching, Teachers College, Columbia University, 525 W. 120th St., New York, NY 10027, USA

a r t i c l e i n f o

a b s t r a c t

Article history:
Received 23 October 2009
Received in revised form
8 June 2010
Accepted 24 June 2010

In implementing inclusive education, special educators frequently collaborate with general educators in
various settings. How does such collaborative practice complicate the conguration of their professional
identities? This paper uses the framework of gured world (Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998) to
scrutinize the practice of one special educator, Stephanie. Alternatively assuming both subordinate and
lead positions within a collaborative teaching team, Stephanie regured her professional identity and
practice contingently, initiating a trajectory of change that extended to out-of-classroom spaces
(Clandinin & Connolly, 1996). Stephanies improvisations in this process index the signicance of
teachers authorial spaces in the implementation of inclusive education.
! 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Inclusive education
Disability studies
Qualitative research
Collaborative teaching
Special education
Teacher education

In some ways, I do feel like my role, aside from teaching writing,

has been the special ed teacher. I will do the adjustments on the
rug as they are listening to a lesson or Ill walk up and Ill start
charting the instructions for what the kids are supposed to do so
that they get a visual about what Jeanine [the general educator]
is saying. But many times, I dont have a voice within the actual
curriculum itself. (Stephanie1, special educator).

1. Introduction: collaborative teaching in the context

of inclusive education
It has been rightly pointed out that the discourse around
inclusive education has emanated largely within special education
(Artiles, Kozleski, Dorn, & Christensen, 2006). The Salamanca
Statement adopted by the United Nations in 1994 at the World
Conference on Special Needs Education placed inclusive education
squarely on the map of international efforts to address the historical marginalization of students with disabilities. Within the
economic, political and social constraints unique to their contexts,
countries of both the North and South have been engaged in
creating and developing the structures that can facilitate the

* Tel.: 1 212 678 8355; fax: 1 212 678 3237.

E-mail address: naraian@tc.edu.
1
Names of the school and all individuals described in this paper are pseudonyms.
0742-051X/$ e see front matter ! 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.tate.2010.06.020

greater inclusion of students with disabilities within mainstream

settings (Peters, 2007). One mechanism that has emerged as pivotal
in achieving inclusive education outcomes within the United States
and the UK centers on collaboration among multiple stakeholders
(Ainscow, 2007; Thousand, Villa, & Nevin, 2007). In the United
States, the growing numbers of students with disabilities with
primary placements in general education classrooms that are
increasingly recognized as culturally and ethnically diverse coupled
with recent legal mandates for increased participation of students
with disabilities in general education curriculum and assessment,
have stimulated a strong interest in collaborative planning and
teaching, generating many models of such practice (Nevin,
Thousand, & Villa, 2009).
While some have argued for collaboration as a necessary means
to make the profession better as a whole (Pugach & Johnson,
2002, p. 7) the pragmatic goal of collaborative teaching is to
increase access to a wide range of instructional options for students
with disabilities in general education classrooms, thereby
enhancing their school performance (Cook & Friend, 1995). So,
despite the reservations of some about the scientic evidence
supporting the efcacy of such practices (Magiera & Zigmond,
2005; Weiss, 2004) collaborative teaching remains an important
objective in efforts to achieve inclusive education (Villa, Thousand,
& Nevin, 2004). The implicit rationale that underlies the scholarship in this area is that when special and general educators
collaborate effectively, students with disabilities will reap the

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S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

benets. Such studies delineate the conditions that are most

conducive to effective collaboration including adequate planning
time, unambiguous delineation of roles and responsibilities,
administrative support and personal compatibility (Cook & Friend,
1995; Mastropieri et al, 2005; Murawski, 2009; Scruggs,
Mastropieri, & McDufe, 2007; Trent et al., 2003).
The countries that endorsed the Salamanca Statement, however,
committed themselves to not only improving the education of
students with disabilities but also to the development of schooling
systems where all children should learn together, whenever
possible, regardless of any difculties or differences they may have
(UNESCO, 1994, p. 11). The concept of inclusive schooling, therefore,
has been broadened to connote schools and classrooms that are
hospitable to the unique needs and characteristics of all learners
(Ainscow & Miles, 2008; Kluth, Straut, & Biklen, 2003). Such
inclusive classrooms deect attention from apparent decits of
learners to the affordances of the context in promoting their
achievement. As inclusive education comes to be viewed increasingly as a means to actualize the United Nations commitment to
Education for All (Peters, 2007), preparing teachers to become
inclusive educators has now acquired greater urgency within
university teacher preparation programs in the United States and in
the UK (Florian, 2008; Oyler, 2006; Pugach & Blanton, 2009).
Historically, teachers working with students with disabilities have
been socialized into particular identities as special educators
belonging to a profession distinct from the parameters of general
education (Osgood, 1999, 2002). Now, teachers are presented, as it
were, with an additional identity trajectory to the traditional
dichotomy of general/special educatordthe inclusive educator.
These inclusive educators, in practice, however, continue to navigate distinctively separate systems of general and special education, both of which, it has been argued, spawn the same decit
discourses that challenge inclusive goals (Graham & Slee, 2008). As
a site of inclusive education, collaborative teaching offers a transitional space that has the potential to blur the boundaries between
these professions, unearth ideological threads and generate
opportunities for hybridized practice. It can, therefore, offer
important insights into the complexities of implementing inclusive
education.
Co-teaching between general and special educators means two
or more professionals delivering substantive instruction to
a diverse, or blended, group of students in a single physical space
(Cook & Friend, 1998, p. 454 cited in Weiss, 2004). However, the
discrepancy between the ideal of true collaboration between two
equal partners (Scruggs et al., 2007, p. 412) and the complex,
dissatisfying, and contradictory illustrations of lived practice
suggest that this may be a deceptively simple denition. Stephanies opening comment unambiguously attests to the perceived
inequity in relations between partner teachers that has surfaced in
the literature (Bessette, 2008). As teachers negotiate roles and
responsibilities within various forms of collaborative teaching, they
seem to continue to remain entrenched in the habits of mind that
distinguish their particular professions generating problems of
unequal status, incompatibility, and turf battles (Magiera &
Zigmond, 2005; Scruggs et al., 2007).
Such incompatibility has implications for inclusive practice.
Teachers subject positions are important narrative resources for
their identity construction (Soreide, 2006). Investing in the identicatory possibility (Hodges, 1998) offered by inclusive spaces
such as collaborative teaching may be premised on a willingness to
negotiate, even transgress boundaries (Huber & Whelan, 1999;
Oyler, 2006). In the study by Huber and Whelan, a constricted
vision of inclusive practice positioned the general education
teacher as unknowing and incompetent. Restoring the teachers
story to live by entailed her confrontation of such public

understandings, even if that implied accepting a marginalized

location within the school space. As that study suggested, teachers
can and do alter their positionings, working both within and
against the dominant discourses that frame their practice. The
centrality of such identity work within teachers professional
practice has acquired increasing prominence within teacher
education research (Geijsel & Meijers, 2005; Gomez, Black, & Allen,
2007; Kooy & de Freitas, 2007; Reio, 2005). The signicance of
teachers becoming (Marsh, 2002) has been shown to be particularly relevant as teachers negotiate and occupy varied professional
spaces within diverse socio-cultural contexts (Gomez et al., 2007;
Kooy & de Freitas, 2007). So, as the role of a special education
teacher within inclusive settings undergoes transformation from
traditional singular meanings to encompass greater variety and
leadership in responsibilities and locations (French & Chopra, 2006;
York-Barr, Sommerness, Duke, & Ghere, 2005), the documentation
of identity projects to understand the micropolitics of school
change in the context of inclusive reforms becomes increasingly
relevant (Artiles et al., 2006). This paper is an attempt to address
that issue by considering teacher positionality in relation to the
enactment of inclusive practice.
2. Theoretical framework
2.1. Figured worlds
Socicocultural perspectives on learning situate the development
of individual identities within social and cultural practices (Holland
& Lave, 2001; Holland, Lachiotte, Skinner, & Cain, 1998; Lave &
Wenger, 1991; Vygotsky, 1978). Individual selves are necessarily
plural and inextricably embedded in everyday practices. To
describe the identity work in which Stephanie engaged, I have
drawn on the research by Holland et al. (1998). Drawing extensively
on Bakhtin and Vygotsky, Holland et al. emphasize that though the
development and production of identities are always mediated by
cultural discourses they cannot be determined entirely by them.
They seek explanations of human agency that are not circumscribed by determinist understandings of individuals in relation to
culture. So, rather than envisioning individuals as only compliant
with or resistant to cultural discourses, they propose a more
expansive framework that considers subject positionality in relation to cultural discourses but also recognizes the multiple unpredictable improvisations enacted by individuals from within those
positions. In the meeting of persons, discourses and practice,
Holland et al. are interested in how these improvisations can serve
as heuristics in the subsequent production of behavior thereby
leading to altered identities.
They offer, therefore, the construct of gured world which is
a socially and culturally created realm of interpretation in which
particular characters and actors are recognized, signicance is
attached to certain acts, and particular outcomes are valued over
others (p. 52). Such as-if realms are not detached from real
happenings, but are continually produced and re-produced within
the everyday activities of such worlds. These everyday activities are
abstracted by individuals to generate certain expectations of how
particular events unfold within these worlds, while simultaneously
affording the framework by which such events are interpreted.
Figured worlds may be evoked by artifacts which are themselves
constituted by discourses with peculiar histories (for e.g. the label
of special needs, at-risk, classroom rules of behavior, etc.). It is
through such artifacts that gured worlds are collectively developed and made personally meaningful. For example, the term
learning disabled can evoke a gured world for a teacher in which
(s)he comes to hold certain expectations of herself and her
students. The same artifact of learning disabled might evoke

S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

a gured world for a student labeled as such that mediates his/her

relations with other students, with teachers and with his family.
Relations marked by forms of privilege and power characterize
the experiences for the teachers, students and families whose
gured worlds invoked by the term learning disabled might have
signicant overlaps but also remain distinct precisely because of
these relational elements. Consequently, Holland et al. note that
identities are as much gurative as they are positional. Figured
identities are all about rulesdhow individuals engage with each
other in the context of the activities that inform that world. These
rules are presumed, so they originate in the imagination. Positional
or relational identities develop in the context of social experiences
that are marked by the relations of power that characterize the
everyday workings of culturally situated persons. Through the
enactment of such identities, gured worlds supply the contexts of
meaning in which individuals come to understand themselves and
develop the capacity to direct their own behavior. In this sense, the
framework explicitly pursues the everyday construction of actors
(p. 59).
The framework of gured worlds has been increasingly
adopted as an effective mechanism to describe the social context of
identication, especially among socially devalued groups (Bartlett,
2007; Blackburn, 2002/2003; Dagenais, Day, & Toohey, 2006;
Rubin, 2007). This framework has even been utilized to investigate efcacy of instructional practices (Jurow, 2005), and to document the multiple worlds that students simultaneously navigate as
they engage with varying curricular contexts (Luttrell & Parker,
2001). The construct of gured world then, is an important
heuristic for understanding identity production in education
(Urrieta, 2007) and therefore well suited to describing the identity
work of Stephanie. Given the concern of some scholars about the
atheoretical nature of current scholarship in collaborative teaching
in Ke12 contexts (Nevin et al., 2009), the concept of gured world
presented a particularly constructive and generative tool in
enhancing our understanding of the teachingelearning processes
within collaborative classrooms.

2.2. Disability studies in education

My concern for teacher identity in inclusive classrooms is situated within the tradition of disability studies in education (DSE)
that has emerged within the last decade from the nascent eld of
disability studies. While many leading scholars have explained the
core values and philosophy of DSE (Biklen, 2007; Gabel, 2005; Reid,
2004, among many others), what they share in common is
a recognition that meanings of disability emerge in the context of
interaction between persons and institutions in society. Critiquing
the essentialism of neurobiology and body (Biklen, 2007), the DSE
tradition challenges the exclusionary practices in schools where the
intersection of ability with other social categories have created
systems that locate differences within persons, conceptualizing
such differences as decits (for example, Ferri & Connor, 2006).
Rejecting the dominant narrative of professional expertise, it
affords primacy to the voices of students with disabilities and their
families in dening the meanings of the experience of disability.
The DSE tradition remains committed to inclusive education
seeking both the transformation of institutional structures but also
acknowledging the contribution of critical special education
scholarship (Danforth & Gabel, 2006; Gabel, 2005; Ware, 2005).
DSE scholars frequently grapple with the immediate task of
preparing preservice and inservice critical special educators.
Locating the multiple identicatory paths towards inclusive practice recognizes inclusive education as a process while simultaneously affording teacher educators additional resources to help

1679

teachers develop an inclusive stance in the context of current

general and special education systems.
3. Method
Data for this paper was drawn from an ethnographic study that
was conducted within a rst-grade elementary classroom in a large
urban setting in the Northeastern United States. As part of a larger
inquiry into the production of inclusive classroom communities,
the selection of the classroom as the research site reected
purposeful sampling (Maxwell, 1996; Merriam, 2009). The criteria
used to determine the site were: 1) there would be at least one
student with signicant disabilities in the classroom and, 2) this
student would be identied in school records as being a member of
a general education classroom. The emphasis on students with
signicant disabilities emerged naturally from my ongoing research
preoccupation with their inclusion in general education classrooms
(Naraian, 2008). Furthermore, I hypothesized that such inclusion
provokes a deeper inquiry into the enactment of community.
After institutional approval to carry out the research was
obtained from the university in which I was located and from the
school district, permission to conduct the study in the selected
classroom was granted by the school principal who had blazed
a trail in the city in her commitment to include students with
signicant disabilities in general education classrooms. Signed
consent forms with clearly stated procedures to maintain condentiality were obtained from the families of students in the
classroom and from all participants who were interviewed during
the study. Ethnographic techniques of participant-observation and
interviews with members of the setting (teachers, therapists and
families) were used to collect data during the school year from
March 2008 to June 2009. I located myself along various points on
the participanteobserver continuum (Glesne & Peshkin, 1992),
sometimes as an observer in spaces such as the playground but
mostly as participant within the classroom. For the rst three
months I visited the school twice weekly, each visit lasting about
2 h. These gradually tapered down to once a week and eventually
once in two weeks. By the middle of May, I was paying occasional
visits to the classroom. All visits, informal meetings and conversations were documented and described in detailed eld notes that
contained thick descriptions of events as well as a research
commentary on emerging issues and trends (Bogdan & Biklen,
2007; Geertz, 1973).
Congruent with the model adopted by the district, the classroom comprised students with documented labels of disability and
non-labeled peers in a pre-determined ratio of approximately
40:60, and was lead by one general and one special educator. The
general educator, Jeanine, left on maternity leave for about three
months, during which period another special educator, Angie, took
her place. Over the course of 7 months, I conducted four interviews
with the special educator, Stephanie (two separate, one with the
substitute special educator, Angie, and one with the general
education teacher, Jeanine). Each interview was 30 min to 2 h long.
Merriam (2009) describes data collection and analysis as recursive
and dynamic, (169) noting that the decisions about which
participants will be interviewed and what questions will be asked
are always emergent during the course of the study. I did not set out
to investigate positionality of teachers within this classroom. But
initial interviews established this as an important dimension to the
work of Stephanie and to her implementation of inclusive practice. I
pursued this issue in subsequent interviews, examining it in relation to my observations in the classroom. At the end of the period of
the study, I conducted member-checking by meeting separately with
each teacher to discuss some of the key themes that had emerged
from the data.

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S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

The framework of gured worlds used in this paper is premised

on identity development as inseparable from the social and cultural
practices in which individuals are engaged. Stephanies stories of
herself that emerged from her interviews and my observations of
her practice within the classroom, therefore, constituted the
primary text for this research project. Interview transcripts and
eld notes were analyzed using a constant-comparative method
(Merriam, 2009). Codes were identied inductively, using open and
axial coding and subsequently rened through an iterative process
(Bogdan & Biklen, 2007; Merriam, 2009). As various categories of
Stephanies practice emerged in the analysis, I looked for the
evidence that could situate her perspectives within the context of
this building and also categorized the changes within those
perspectives that occurred over the course of the school year. This is
congruent with the concern for teachers identity development and
is mindful of the commonplaces of narrative inquiry, namely,
temporality, sociality and space (Clandinin, Pushor, & Orr, 2007).
Such categorizing therefore served to be responsive to the purpose of
the research (Merriam, 2009, p. 185). Simultaneously, care was
taken to ensure that categories were exhaustive, mutually exclusive
to the best extent possible, sensitizing (exacting in capturing the
meaning) and conceptually congruent, when categories at one level
are characterized by the same level of abstraction (Merriam, 2009).
Categories were linked through various visual models to illustrate
inter-relationships between them, thereby rening the relationship
between teacher practice, teacher identity and socio-cultural
context. The theme of relations between general and special
education teachers that thus emerged from the data analysis
coincided with the concern for positional identities within the
gured world framework, marking teacher positionality as a significant element within teacher identication in this study.
This inquiry was stimulated by the following research questions: As the designated special educator within the co-teaching
team, how did Stephanie construct herself professionally within
this collaboratively taught classroom? What were the social relations among members within this setting in which such selfconstruction took place? How did her self-construction in the
context of these social arrangements relate to her efforts to
implement an inclusive practice?
4. The collaboratively taught classroom context
The collaborative team teaching model as utilized in this school
setting involved one full-time special educator and one full-time
general educator in a classroom where students with disabilities
may constitute up to forty percent of its strength, with the
remaining sixty percent of students comprised of students
without IEPs.2 Teachers accommodated for differences in student
learning proles in their instruction, both in the design of classroom activity, as well as through intense support usually provided
by the special educator in the room. There were many such
collaborative team teaching classrooms within this building, with
at least one at each grade level. Students with varying levels and
kinds of disabilities were enrolled in these classrooms. Among
students with signicant disabilities, the group targeted to enter
this building was clearly students with signicant physical and
communication disabilities, rather than students with intellectual/
developmental disabilities. Assistive technology and augmentative

2
The term with/without IEPs has emerged as a convenient way for practitioners in the United States to distinguish students who receive special education
services from those who dont. (IEP refers to a students Individualized Education
Program required by federal law which is drawn up by a multidisciplinary team.)
Not surprisingly, this even appears on the district website.

communication technology, therefore, received considerable

interest and attention within this building as teachers sought to
make the curriculum accessible to their students. Stephanie and
Jeanine had been co-teaching in this classroom for about four years
now and according to the former, were considered one of the
better teams in the building.
In the next two sub-sections, I describe in detail the world of
teaching elementary students as gured by Stephanie, illustrating
both her gurative and her positional identities. Within this world,
she ascribed particular responsibilities for herself as she sought to
implement her vision of a community of learners. However, as the
second sub-section illustrates, the enactment of this gurative
identity occurred in the context of social relations that she experienced as hugely disempowering.
4.1. Figuring identity as an educator: attending to the
social context of learning
Holland et al. note that gured worlds in their conceptual
dimensions supply the contexts of meaning for actions, cultural
productions, performances, disputes, for the understandings that
people come to make for themselves, and for the capabilities
people develop to direct their own behavior in these worlds
(p. 60). Stephanie was a dually certied teacher who had been
assigned the status of a special educator within this collaborative
partnership. Even as she remained cognizant of her role as a special
educator, it was always located within a gured world of teachingelearning where achieving a community presided over immediate concerns of academic growth. Her identication of students
and families as well as her rationales for both curricular and extracurricular decision-making were inevitably informed by a vision of
learning that was premised on the creation and maintenance of
a community of learners who respected each other and felt
empowered to express themselves. Consequently, she assigned
herself the task of achieving transparency in this classroom while
simultaneously instating the particular norms of behavior that
would promote a communitarian ethic.
An important artifact that was clearly intended to evoke
a certain vision of this community, was the set of classroom rules
prominently displayed on the walldtake care of yourself, take
care of others, take care of the environment, and do your best
work. Describing these rules, especially the rst two, as her
mantra she (like Jeanine and even Angie) used them repeatedly to
draw attention to various forms of behavior, so that they served
both as a means of classroom management as well as a tool to
illuminate desirable community behavior. So, for instance, it was
not uncommon for Stephanie to note, as she waited for students to
get into line for recess, that some students were taking care of
themselves and of the group, by demonstrating readiness to leave
(which largely implied not talking with ones neighbor and
standing in place). Yet, she might also note that the art teacher had
taken care of them by allowing them extra time to nish their
projects and so, they needed to take care of him by arriving to his
class on time. The rules, therefore, were variously invoked in the
public arena by adults, including Stephanie, who freely used them
to interpret behavior as well as to require normative forms of
behavior from students.
Still, in sustaining this community, Stephanie did not rely solely
on these rules. Her expressed commitment to the objective of
achieving transparency in her classroom was enacted in multiple
ways, most prominent of which, was the extraordinary emphasis
she placed on representing students to each other in respectful and
empowering ways, and her attention to demystifying the work of
adults in the room. She congured children as requiring careful and
intentional scaffolding for their social-emotional development and

S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

was particularly attentive to the use of language as a tool to achieve

the ends of community.
I think the language of adults is so important. Like even asking
them to go off the rug, they are so sensitive to the tone. So I
always have to calm myself and just say (whispers) why dont
you go off the rug and come back when you are ready? (laughs).
Stephanies concern to create an emotionally safe space for her
students through her own speech was reinforced by her partiality
for engaging students in critical conversations around social
conict with their peers in order to help them develop empathy.
She frequently incorporated role playing into such moments,
believing that such methods could also let them see that nobody is
perfect in the way they think about a situation, and that we can take
time to be thoughtful about what we are doing. It was not
uncommon for her to abandon a lesson in math or reading to take
up a conversation on peer relations.
Embedding emotional growth within collective literacy practices such as role play or book-talk extended naturally to other
conscious acts of representation such as assuring students that
a peer was not in trouble when asked to step aside from the
group, or actively interpreting student reticence during Morning
meeting with a normalizing explanation. Nowhere, however, was
the concern for representation more clearly suggested than the way
in which Stephanie sought to include Trevor, a student with
signicant multiple disabilities in the classroom. Trevors speech
was slow and labored and not readily intelligible. Besides a switch
that produced recordings, he did not consistently use any form of
augmentative communication. He was instead encouraged to speak
on his own in the classroom. Not only did Stephanie purposefully
encourage his participation in group experiences, she would
unhesitatingly interpret seemingly unusual behaviors to his peers.
For example, when Trevor was engaged with his aide Felipe who
was softly coaching him about his share for the day, Stephanie
normalized this activity by reminding the group you know when
you really want to share something and then you forget it?
While Stephanie was committed to ensuring that students with
disabilities had access to equal forms of participation in the classroom, she chafed under expectations that their needs should be
addressed separately. Not surprisingly, when Jeanine left and she
assumed the position of lead teacher (willingly granted by Angie,
the substitute teacher) she sought to spread students around the
room so that students with disabilities were not grouped together.
She evoked their participation in the context of group activities
rather than in isolated moments and spaces and held them
accountable to higher levels of academic work. Still, reluctant to
label children in terms of their intellectual capacity, she protested
the expectation that students labeled as having physical disabilities
are necessarily assumed to be intellectually average. Her argument rested on the unfairness of this requirement of intellectual
competence for any child. She believed instead that documenting
their learning and growth was more important. Clearly addressing
the educational lives of students with signicant disabilities, she
explained further: If we nd that their academic life in our school is
more important than a school that works on activities of daily living,
then this is the appropriate setting. This endorsement of inclusive
programs over segregated/self-contained settings for students with
signicant disabilities was congruent with her preference to leave
open and undetermined a students learning capacity.
Stephanies attempts to achieve a transparent practice within
this classroom community stemmed from a recognition of the
important opportunities it afforded students. She mused:
I think letting them into my head gives them a framework for
thinking about the world. And I think thats whats missing from

1681

the world a lot. Like things happen and we dont know why, and
because of the misunderstanding and the confusion, people get
angry and things happen.
Stephanies commitment to a communitarian ethic and to
individual empowerment within community extended to her
relations with the families of her students. She was watchful of how
students were being represented within the family community and
did not hesitate to remind families that conicts amongst them
adversely affected the community of children, even if such intervention meant risking the alienation of some parents. (None of the
parents to whom I spoke either informally or during formal interviews, expressed any reservations about their relations with her.)
Stephanie gured herself as an educator entrusted with the
responsibility of creating a just world which required its citizens to
adopt multiple perspectives to foster the ideals of tolerance and
respect. In practice, this meant that she was concerned with
building the notion of difference into a working concept of
community. This might be evidenced in provoking students to
address how they might adjust their responses when working with
different partners, enlisting support from students to modify an
activity to allow participation of peers with physical disabilities,
even choosing deliberately to avoid the use of assistive technology
when it interfered with the development of authentic social relations among students, or openly resisting attempts of some parents
to marginalize other families within this classroom community.
4.2. Stephanies positional identity in relation to
general education colleagues
The positioning of participants is pivotal within gured worlds.
Stephanies gurative identity of an educator striving to create
a caring community was simultaneous with her understanding of
her social positioning in this classroom and buildingdher positional identity. Her lived experiences of implementing this classroom community within the context of a collaborative teaching
model that prescribed particular relations between general and
special education, forced her into subject positions that were disempowering. Though such positions were often evoked within
out-of-classroom spaces (Clandinin & Connolly, 1996) such as
grade level meetings, the in-classroom space remained a prominent contested ground where Stephanie struggled to craft the
professional identity she sought.
As Stephanie reminisced about the new freedoms she experienced as temporary lead teacher, she reected on the relations
between her and Jeanine where the latters general education
background seemed to have automatically afforded her a permanent superior status.
As a special ed part of the team, Jeanine teaches all the curriculum except for one curriculum area that Ive told her I loved
and I would love to teach myself, which is writing. So Ive been
teaching writing all these years. But thats really the one area
that I actually [plan] and feel like I can, in some ways say we
should do it this way.
She added with some resentment that Jeanine had wanted to
own it back again and informed her at the beginning of the year
that she wanted to take over all the general ed pieces. Jeanine was
delineating roles clearly in a way that positioned her as a secondclass citizen, someone who could offer support like a paraprofessional but who could never take charge. Stephanie expressed
awareness that such devaluing of her perceived professional afliation was a systemic phenomenon that pervaded not just this
building but the culture of educational practice in general. Stephanie yearned to have a sense of ownership over all students and

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S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

felt eminently capable and professionally qualied to do so, given

that she was dually certied in both general and special education.
However, the general assumption that accompanied taking on the
role of the special educator was that you are here for the IEP kids
and so you should be there focusing exclusively in some ways on
the IEP kids. Stephanie commented somewhat bitterly, but mostly
matter-of-factly, on the unexpected and unshakeable weight that
special education appeared to deposit on the career prospects of
dually certied teachers. It seemed inconceivable to othersd
administrators and general educators alikedthat even as a dually
certied teacher, one could seek anything other than a special
education position. In Stephanies view, the purpose and role of the
special educators presence in the collaborative team taught
classroom was unclear both to families and within the profession
itself. This implied that the signicance of dually certied professionals was even less visible or apparent to administrators, rendering
inconsequential the collective worth of their preparation as teachers.
Insofar as the subordinate position of special education teachers
was a distinctive aspect of Stephanies gured world, it was available for reection. When positional identities are no longer available for such reection they become dispositions, everyday aspects
of lived identities. For some teachers, early experiences of such
struggles in subordinate positions may have eventually fossilized
into routine practices, perhaps even integrating with their dispositions, and consequently making them less available for introspection. Stephanies illustration of a phenomenon that has been
documented in the literature on co-teachingdthe apparent reluctance of special educators to accept lead roles in the co-taught
classroomdsubstantiates this point. The administration had
assumed that a dually certied teacher would adopt the role of
a special educator and the special educator had been living in that
assumption and that expectation for an extended period. Later,
when it came time to hire someone to replace the general educator,
this special educator acknowledged that there was no way I
could take the general ed curriculum conrming for the administrators that dually certied teachers could not replace general
educators. These teachers might have come to believe that they
were too unskilled or unqualied to implement the general
education curriculum. Stephanies story implicated the self-fullling prophecy contained in the specic demarcation of roles
within co-teaching models. Citing her own forceful stance with the
administration that she was fully qualied to manage the general
education curriculum when Jeanine left on maternity leave, she
warned that novice special educators should be prepared to
become strong self-advocates.
5. Changes
Thus far, the paper has described Stephanies enactment of her
gurative identity in the context of her professional positioning.
Her efforts to create a transparent inclusive practice emerged
within disempowering relations with her general education
partner and colleagues in the building. In some part, such relations
were premised on a (mis)perception of special educators as insufciently prepared in curricular areas, and therefore performing less
valuable work. In this section, I attend to the disruption of her
positional identity upon the entry of another special educator
within the room and Stephanies consequent re-guration of the
world of teachingelearning in the elementary classroom. This new
partnership would renew her afliation to the profession of special
education and simultaneously render it as possessing equal, if not
greater utility, in meeting the needs of all students. In the rst subsection I describe the immediate changes that she instated in her
practice in the classroom, followed in the second by a glimpse into
how she reformulated her role when her general education partner

returned as well as her subsequent activism in out-of-classroom

spaces.

5.1. Improvising to regure the classroom community of learners

The notion of gured world disrupts the idea of an unproblematic and direct relation between cultural discourses and self. It
is premised on the assumption that cultural discourses both position people as well as afford them the resources to address the
problems they encounter, i.e. the tools to alter those positionings.
Within their gured worlds, individual actors use the resources
available to them to improvise in unpredictable ways. In this
section, we see how Stephanies renewed afliation with her
profession allowed her to re-assert herself in several unpredictable
ways within the classroom.
When Angie entered the classroom, Stephanies vision of
a genuine co-teaching partnership that could stimulate individual
growth seemed to be realized. Deriving genuine pleasure from the
relationship, she noted the encouragement she had received from
Angie to experiment with new ideas and techniques, a practice that
she reported had been squelched by Jeanine. She also felt less
compelled to project an exterior that satised others visions of
learning, seeking instead to make every experience meaningful to
herself and the children.
Jeanine would never let these [walls] go bare! (laughs) We
would have things up there, but I would hate them! (laughs) I
would look at them and just be like, What is that up there?!
(laughs) And I would want no part of making those bulletin
boards .
Accompanying the welcome personal support that she received
from Angie was the discovery of a shared interpretive framework
that informed their approach to student learning. Describing
themselves as universal thinkers who did not see themselves as
information disseminators, she explained the common language
that she shared with Angie.
Sometimes it can get technical in the way that were kind of
corresponding about a child. But I think the more important
piece is that we both understand that the little progression that
kids need to make in order to get to a bigger concept. And we are
not afraid to go and spend some time on the little details . to
make sure that they can get to that big point.
Stephanie may have been referring to the difference that has
been reported to characterize special and general education
approaches (Scruggs et al., 2007). General educators have been
found to adopt an approach that is driven by curriculum coverage
for the whole group contrasting with the special education hallmark of individualized instruction. As the lead teacher and
temporary general educator, Stephanie utilized the benets of her
special education background to restructure her practice. This
implied not only reecting on individual student needs, but
creating opportunities within the classroom for those needs to be
met through practices such as small groups or guided discussion.
Such exibility differed from her perception of the general educators approach where its the lessons that are going to get done,
and were going to move on, and the kids who dont get it, dont get
it. Supported by Angies similar concern for individual student
growth and with strong paraprofessional support for her methods,
Stephanie reported laughingly that they had drawn the ire of the
grade level team by their refusal to move along at the pace set by
the general educators. Still, her new determined stance did elicit
a reluctant admission from them that Stephanie was now

S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

inuencing the curriculum more and that her voice had probably
been unacknowledged in previous semesters.
The changes in curricular and instructional emphases that Stephanie instated during this period produced inevitable repercussions on her approach to classroom management and her views on
student learning. Even as she remained committed to creating
a transparent practice and an inclusive community, she appeared to
be re-considering her passionate attention to the social-emotional
development of her students. She wondered if practices such as
role playing or even her extensive scaffolding on interpersonal
relations might actually have done her students a disservice. She
commented that despite these efforts, students did not appear to
have internalized the kindness. She speculated that excessive
adult mediation of student conict may have produced the unintended consequence of both student inability to solve problems
independently as well as student indifference to academic learning
as a primary goal of classroom life. In later conversations, she even
commented on the child-rearing practices within the community
represented in this building that diminished childrens resilience to
disruptions in expectations and routines. As her beliefs on students
social-emotional growth continued to evolve, she started
responding differently to student issues in the classroom. While
she remained empathetic to students, she de-emphasized the
magnitude of the events, requiring them to adapt to changing
circumstances. She also increasingly turned over responsibility for
resolving conict to the students themselves.
In early conversations, Stephanie acknowledged the shift in
perception that characterized student responses when she moved
from her subordinate role as special educator in the room to lead
teacher.
I think before Jeanine left, a lot of it was, you know Stephanie, I
love you, you help me, youre so kind and youre so gentle. And
now there are moments where I have to call kids out and do a lot
of management or saying, That wasnt kind. And I think for
them its a different way of seeing this particular adult interact
with them.
Stephanies reguring of herself in her new role that she saw
reected in student responses to her, remained connected to her
rediscovery of her special education roots that surfaced in the
context of Angies entry into the classroom. Recalling selfconsciously her earlier approach that prioritized student socialemotional development over evidence of academic learning, she
acknowledged her gratitude to Angies presence, which, she noted,
let me step out of that make-everybody-feel-good type of
concept into what does every also need academically. Why is
there a child who still cannot read words like cat and should
there be any children at that point in rst grade?
Stephanies representation of her earlier approach in somewhat
disparaging terms accompanied by a concern for documentation
that needs to happen was no doubt fueled in some part by
administrative pressure regarding an upcoming quality review
within the school. Yet, it seems reasonable to assume that her
particular response on this occasion to this yearly process was
qualied by her new professional partnership with another special
educator. The underlying doubts that such partnership might have
triggered about her emphasis on students social-emotional
development also surfaced markedly in her assessment of the
constraints of the collaborative team teaching model that she
expressed around the same time. She complained that in putting
a blanket over everybody as being equally smart and allowing this
to take precedence over empowering children to know who they
are as learners, the collaborative team teaching model failed to
meet standards of accountability.

1683

Stephanies dismissive posture to her own prior stance on

learning meant that she would regure herself as a teacher in other
ways in the classroom as well. Staunchly committed to accountability, she sought to include all students within this frame. She felt
comfortable in retaining Kevin, a student with physical and
learning disabilities, after school to complete his work even if that
meant disrupting bus schedules. She was also not chary of holding
Trevor accountable to both the classroom rules as well as the
completion of his schoolwork. During group instruction, such
accountability might be enacted in requiring students to explain
and make visible the strategies they employed in solving problems,
but also in soliciting greater participation from all students, and
affording fewer opportunities to pass such requests. Stephanie
believed that her changed practices actually served to make her
teaching more transparent. By slowing down the curriculum,
breaking it down more and affording learners devices such as
rubrics to monitor themselves, she felt that students had come to
derive greater ownership over their learning. Simultaneously, by
not micro-managing their interpersonal growth, they could still
be encouraged and trusted to become reective learners. So her
original commitment to create great citizens still prevailed, but
now she had discovered a better way to make that happen, by
instilling hope while encouraging self-reection.
5.2. Activism inside and outside the classroom
According to Holland et al. the improvisations undertaken by
actors within their gured worlds serve as heuristics for the next
moment of activity; they become the tools of agency or change.
Stephanies initiatives triggered by Angies temporary displacement
of Jeanine morphed into other forms of action upon the latters
return from her maternity leave.
For instance, Stephanies realization that she too was knowledgeable in teaching curricular areas such as math subtly altered
the nature of support that she offered Jeanine so that even if it still
did not permit her to assume an equal status, it at least allowed her
to experience greater empowerment. She also became more
intensely aware of, and dismissive of, Jeanines imperfect knowledge of students social-emotional development. Jeanines bafement at Stephanies apparent transformation during her absence in
addressing this was not missed by Stephanie who came to document this reaction as another instance of the conceptual gulf that
stretched between them. She could now, in fact, clearly articulate
the conditions for her learning.
She found Jeanines method of developing her instructional
repertoire through random trial-and-error events incompatible
with her own practice of situating her attempts in extensive prior
study to establish rationale and purpose. As Stephanie immersed
herself in the pedagogical literature, she continually tweaked her
own methods, but also found that Jeanine could not keep pace with
her growth, forcing her to explain these transformations to Jeanine.
She observed to me:
And as Ive grown in my repertoire of understanding language,
understanding curriculum, understanding how to talk to
parents, the relation of children as a community to children as
a community of people in the world, . I think as Ive evolved in
those aspects, (pause and then very slowly) Ive-wanted-tochange-my-partner.
Stephanie pushed for recognition of her re-fashioned identity in
out-of-classroom spaces. She placed a request with the principal
to be instated as the general educator within another co-teaching
team for the following academic year. Stephanie, it would seem,
was embracing her dual identity as both special and general
educator, but clearly staking her claim on contested territory in

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S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

requesting to be paired with a special educator. Undoubtedly, she

valued her own professional background in special education. Still,
condent in her understanding of general education curriculum
and not a little resentful of the power differentials that prevailed
between these two professions, she sought to re-assert an identity
that the structures of schooling had rendered inconsequential. In
doing thus, she permitted herself an identicatory possibility that
could not be predicted by afliation to either of these professions,
yet still emerging within the context of both.
During our nal conversation in the summer after the school
ofcially closed for vacation, Stephanie informed me that her
request had been denied. She would serve in the capacity of
a special educator in the same classroom with a different general
educator during the following academic year. However, as the more
experienced member of the team (her general education partner
was being relocated from sixth grade) she seemed to be condent
that she could actively create a different model of collaborative
teaching in the classroom, one that differed from the one teach,
one assist approach (Cook & Friend, 1995). Furthermore, building
on the stimulating partnership she had briey enjoyed with Angie,
she now participated in a mini inquiry group that included herself,
Angie, and Angies own collaborative partner for the new academic
year. They engaged in reading and reecting on books that challenged traditional ways of thinking about children and learning.
While Jeanines perception of the relational space between her and
Jeanine as being conducive to her learning and growth remains
unavailable, she did indicate to me a growing discomfort within the
relationship on her return. It was not surprising that at the end of
the year, she informed me that she was going back to her roots
and that she would be teaching the following year in a rst-grade
classroom as a general education teacher.
6. Discussion and implications
6.1. Teaching inclusively as general and special educators
Stephanie may not have perceived the availability of a distinctive identity as an inclusive educator, but she was clearly committed
to an inclusive practice that was simultaneously grounded in her
afliation to the profession of special education. Stephanies
professional becoming (Marsh, 2002) in all its socio-cultural situatedness illuminates dilemmas that may be inevitable in efforts to
implement inclusive education. Recent theorizing of inclusive
education has cautioned well-intentioned efforts of policy-makers,
practitioners and researchers alike against an uncritical leap into
practices ostensibly to support the inclusion of students with
disabilities into mainstream settings. Reminding us that the question inclusion into what? should be a vital rst step, scholars have
questioned the illusory interiority that remains largely unexplored in the midst of increasing international rhetoric around
inclusion (Graham & Slee, 2008; Slee, 2008). The normative basis
that undergirds schooling practices in general produce the mechanisms for categorizing and compartmentalizing student proles
that afrm or negate particular ways of being. So, spaces such as
collaboratively taught classrooms may purport to support the
inclusion of students with disabilities into mainstream educational
experiences, but in the prescribed roles assigned to special and
general educators premised on the delineation of different abilities, such spaces continue to spawn decit discourses. Oyler and
Hamre (2006) note:
Categorizing students into regular and special does not
disappear with the implementation of inclusive classrooms. In
fact, by having a special education teacher designated to provide
special education services mandated through an Individualized

Education Plan, the categories of typical and special are, in

fact, reied (p. 141).
Graham and Slee (2008), therefore, argue that authentically
inclusive education invites the denaturalization of normalcy so
that the language of special and regular education is rendered
redundant (p. 280). Inclusion may be less about location and more
about uncovering normative expectations at the systemic and local
levels that assign students the status of unequal difference. The
transformation of traditional schooling structures and concomitant
disruption of discourses of normalcy has emerged as a fundamental prerequisite to achieving the kind of authentic inclusive
education that can accommodate all students (Graham & Slee,
2008; Slee, 2008).
Still, the lived path for many teachers like Stephanie into
inclusive practice inevitably entails engaging creatively with the
discourses that inform traditional structures of schooling. As
Holland et al. remind us, cultural discourses are the living tools of
the self (p. 28). Even as they constrain actors, they are also the
means by which actors can alter their positionings. Stephanie used
available discourses on learning, ability, and community to achieve
important pragmatic ends. Her inclusive approach and recognition
of different kinds of learners among her students afforded her the
conceptual tools to distinguish herself as a learner from her general
education partner, Jeanine, and thereby position herself as
requiring a professional development space that was more
conducive to her learning prole. Such a space would acknowledge
her capacity to be an effective general educator, a possibility
currently denied within her relations with Jeanine. Stephanies
approach to students as learners shunned normative notions of
ability, but she was also not averse to using normative expectations
of behavior to more effectively achieve her vision of a caring
community. This could stabilize her position in relation to families
as she admonished them for disrupting the collective sense of
community when they marginalized some members. She used her
expressed concern for student social development not only to
undertake elaborate scaffolding of peer discussions of interpersonal
conict but to also rationalize her later dismissal of such intervention. The latter posture served to cement her renewed identication with the profession of special education and her concern to
meet standards of accountability, without placing a blanket over
all students.
Stephanies identity work embodies the messiness that
inheres in the practical commitment to inclusive education. The
apparent contradictions in her practice reect the tensions that
may well be concomitant to making special education inclusive
(Farrell & Ainscow, 2002), as she worked with available tools to
realize her vision for this classroom community. The peculiar social
arrangements of the collaborative classroom model dened in
signicant part Stephanies own course of professional identitymaking as she navigated the complex relations between general
and special education. Stephanies beliefs in students as learners,
her commitment to tolerance and her desire to create a just
community of great citizens coalesced to congure a unique form
of inclusive practice. Such practice was not premised on the politics
of group identities, but, nevertheless, it confounded to some extent
the possibility that some differences are unequal. Minow (1990)
describes the tension in the activity of identifying and responding
to labeled differences that may simultaneously serve to endanger
the commitment to equality and full inclusion as the dilemma of
difference. Stephanie may be understood as working through this
dilemma of difference in her practice, by widening the breadth of
normalcy within her classroom so that the stagnating effects of
perceived differences could be diminished to a signicant extent.
Simultaneously, she actively sought the mantle of a general

S. Naraian / Teaching and Teacher Education 26 (2010) 1677e1686

educator to enrich that position with her specialized expertise that

could then be made available to a greater number of students. In
authoring herself in these ways (Holland et al., 1998) Stephanie, it
could be argued, was performing special education inclusively.
For teacher educators who prepare teachers to become critical
educators, general or special, Stephanies story certainly reinforces
the commitment to troubling the core of normalcy that pervades
schooling systems in general (Florian, 2008) and to uncover the
myriad ways in which it surfaces in everyday teaching practice.
Remaining vigilant to the questions inclusion into what? and
different from whom? may serve as guideposts to the assessment
and planning that constitutes the daily work of teachers. Though
Stephanies notion of ability was uid rather than xed, such
questions may still have offered Stephanie other solutions in
addressing the situations she encountered in her enterprise to
create a transparent, inclusive community within this collaborative
teaching context. For instance, they might have provided the
impetus to struggle not so much for ownership of the general
education curriculum but for the opportunity to rene its capacity
to meet the needs of all learners. She might then have been able to
recognize the complicity of both special and general education
practices in constructing student failure and to conceptualize the
purpose of collaboration as the joint provision of needed supports
for all students rather than as an amalgam of two distinct professional knowledges.
6.2. Future inquiry
The limitations of the study reect the particular nature of the
methodology, i.e., the study of a single case, with attendant issues
of generalizability. Still, Stephanies partial story may offer us some
important lessons on conceptualizing the implementation of
inclusive education. Teachers will be in different places in terms of
their knowledge, beliefs and practices. In orchestrating these
multiple, often conicting voices, they come to create authorial
spaces whence they are able to make a voice by taking a stance
(Holland et al., 1998, p. 184) towards other discourses within their
worlds. The important question then, is how teachers can be
supported to develop the knowledge, beliefs and practices that
support inclusion (Florian, 2008, p. 205). This study has documented one teachers conguration of inclusive practice while
simultaneously suggesting that such practice was informed by
particular social arrangements in that setting. Just as there are no
prescriptions for doing inclusive education research (Allan & Slee,
2008), meanings of inclusive education too may be realized
differently in various settings. We need more descriptions about
how educators, both special and general, orchestrate multiple
discourses within their teachingelearning contexts and the
authorial spaces they create in their efforts to implement inclusive
classrooms. Such research would serve as a valuable resource for
teacher educators who acknowledge the signicance of individual
subjectivities in initiating and sustaining processes of change
within schools. Illustrating the signicance of literary performances
in altering gured worlds, Blackburn (2002/2003) proposed that
individual literary performances may or may not bring about social
change, but it was the cumulative trajectory that created powerful
opportunities. (p. 323). Such powerful opportunities anticipate the
potential for achieving the transformation sought by critical special
education scholarship, when decit-oriented, normatively based
categorical systems of thinking will eventually give place to a reconceptualization of special education where the recognition of the
need for transformation of schooling is accompanied by a commitment to disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions of normalcy in all
spaces of teachingelearning (Florian, 2007).

1685

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