Thinking through the concept of care in inclusive education: a poetic inquiry

TY - CONF

T1 - Thinking through the concept of care in inclusive education

T2 - London International Conference on Inclusive Education (LCIE)

AU - Mercieca, Duncan

AU - Mercieca, Daniela

N1 - Conference code: 1st

PY - 2025/7/28

Y1 - 2025/7/28

N2 - Background: The presentation is an art-based research and explores how educators (Head Teachers, teachers, classroom assistants/pupil support assistants) experience care when working and engaging with children and young people with disability and special educational needs. While the term ‘care’ is regularly used in the vocabulary of educators, there has been minimal exploration and deconstruction of this term in research and of the implication of this concept for inclusive education. The research project is grounded in the philosophical work of Nel Noddings, who argues for an approach to doing research that acknowledges ways of being (including bodies of oneself and others) that are often seen as minor and othered, that embrace feelings, are nurturing, recognise others and include being in the moment. These qualities led the researchers to opt for an art-based research to collect voices of educators’ lived experiences of care with children and young people with disability and special educational needs. Poetry inquiry was used to collect data, through poems written by educators, as poems are fluid, rhizomatic and lack forms of predetermined prescriptions, and could thus lend itself to better attend to issues of care than other traditional research methods. Through this arts-based method, the “emotional edges” of lived experienced in special schools are explored, so that authors of poems can “explore the things that irk us” and “open…up our unsaid personal struggles” (Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick 2016, p.60). Methods: Educators were invited to write poems to voice their experience of care in their work with children with disability and special educational needs. The term poem is understood as ‘poem-like prose’ or ‘free verse’ or ‘poem-like compositions’ - emphasising that participants are not poets, in a traditional sense. The researchers meet the educators individually over three short sessions to support them in the process of writing poems. The poems written were shared with the researchers and the educators could opt to make them public through sharing them on a Padlet. This research provided a novel way of conducting poetic inquiry that moves away from poems written by the researchers based on interviews and / or observations of individuals. The presentation explores the challenge of analysis, moving from traditional ways to more art-based research approaches, that still would identify as research. Poetry offers a listening which is other, a listening to what is othered. “Poetry speaks in a unique way from the interior of human experience in a way that science can never, indeed does not wish to, do” (Shapiro, 2004, p.172-3). Our challenge is to support this listening without giving it an affirmed position, to continue to let it be other. We draw upon Law’s (2004) and Ingold’s (2006) “methodological meshwork” – where entanglements (Barad, 2007) are not ironed out but presented as such. Thus this research analysis aims to retain the integrity of the poems while allowing simultaneous theoretical and contextual engagement. Results and Conclusion: This research is original, in listening to how educators live ‘care’ in daily inclusive settings with children and young people with disability and special educational needs, and also through its method of conducting and analysing the research. References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, London: Duke University Press. Fitzpatrick, K. and Fitzpatrick, E. (2016) Since Feeling Is First’ Poetry and Research Supervision, in (Eds) Elke Emerald, Robert E. Rinehart, and Antonio Garcia, Global South Ethnographies Minding the Senses. Netherlands: Brill. Ingold, T. (2006) “'Up, across and along'”, Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics, 5, 21-36. Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Taylor & Francis e-Library. ISBN 0-203- 68010-3 Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. California: University of California Press. Shapiro, J. (2004) Can Poetry Be Data? Potential Relationships Between Poetry and Research. Families, Systems, & Health, 22(2), 171–177.

AB - Background: The presentation is an art-based research and explores how educators (Head Teachers, teachers, classroom assistants/pupil support assistants) experience care when working and engaging with children and young people with disability and special educational needs. While the term ‘care’ is regularly used in the vocabulary of educators, there has been minimal exploration and deconstruction of this term in research and of the implication of this concept for inclusive education. The research project is grounded in the philosophical work of Nel Noddings, who argues for an approach to doing research that acknowledges ways of being (including bodies of oneself and others) that are often seen as minor and othered, that embrace feelings, are nurturing, recognise others and include being in the moment. These qualities led the researchers to opt for an art-based research to collect voices of educators’ lived experiences of care with children and young people with disability and special educational needs. Poetry inquiry was used to collect data, through poems written by educators, as poems are fluid, rhizomatic and lack forms of predetermined prescriptions, and could thus lend itself to better attend to issues of care than other traditional research methods. Through this arts-based method, the “emotional edges” of lived experienced in special schools are explored, so that authors of poems can “explore the things that irk us” and “open…up our unsaid personal struggles” (Fitzpatrick and Fitzpatrick 2016, p.60). Methods: Educators were invited to write poems to voice their experience of care in their work with children with disability and special educational needs. The term poem is understood as ‘poem-like prose’ or ‘free verse’ or ‘poem-like compositions’ - emphasising that participants are not poets, in a traditional sense. The researchers meet the educators individually over three short sessions to support them in the process of writing poems. The poems written were shared with the researchers and the educators could opt to make them public through sharing them on a Padlet. This research provided a novel way of conducting poetic inquiry that moves away from poems written by the researchers based on interviews and / or observations of individuals. The presentation explores the challenge of analysis, moving from traditional ways to more art-based research approaches, that still would identify as research. Poetry offers a listening which is other, a listening to what is othered. “Poetry speaks in a unique way from the interior of human experience in a way that science can never, indeed does not wish to, do” (Shapiro, 2004, p.172-3). Our challenge is to support this listening without giving it an affirmed position, to continue to let it be other. We draw upon Law’s (2004) and Ingold’s (2006) “methodological meshwork” – where entanglements (Barad, 2007) are not ironed out but presented as such. Thus this research analysis aims to retain the integrity of the poems while allowing simultaneous theoretical and contextual engagement. Results and Conclusion: This research is original, in listening to how educators live ‘care’ in daily inclusive settings with children and young people with disability and special educational needs, and also through its method of conducting and analysing the research. References Barad, K. (2007) Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning, London: Duke University Press. Fitzpatrick, K. and Fitzpatrick, E. (2016) Since Feeling Is First’ Poetry and Research Supervision, in (Eds) Elke Emerald, Robert E. Rinehart, and Antonio Garcia, Global South Ethnographies Minding the Senses. Netherlands: Brill. Ingold, T. (2006) “'Up, across and along'”, Place and Location: Studies in Environmental Aesthetics and Semiotics, 5, 21-36. Law, J. (2004) After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, Taylor & Francis e-Library. ISBN 0-203- 68010-3 Noddings, N. (1984) Caring: A feminine approach to ethics and moral education. California: University of California Press. Shapiro, J. (2004) Can Poetry Be Data? Potential Relationships Between Poetry and Research. Families, Systems, & Health, 22(2), 171–177.

UR - https://www.licie.co.uk/programme

M3 - Paper

Y2 - 28 July 2025 through 30 July 2025

ER -