1.
Exploring the modelling of “inclusion” in a
preservice teacher education programme in
Aotearoa New Zealand
Leechin Heng
PhD Candidate, School of Educational Studies and Leadership, University of
Canterbury, New Zealand
Asia-Pacific Educational Research Association – Taiwan Education Research Association,
November 10 – 12, 2016
National Sun Yat-sen University, Kaohsiung, Taiwan
Supervisors:
Professor Missy Morton, Distinguished Professor Niki Davis & Associate Professor Rosemary Du Plessis
What is ‘diversity’ and who
defines ‘diversity’?

2.
Introduction
• Born in Malaysia
• Doctoral candidate – University of
Canterbury, New Zealand
• Thesis focus – How do teacher educators
construct and enact inclusion in a new, one
year Master’s level pre-service teacher
education programme.

3.
• Qualitative research:
- 13 months classroom observations
- 1 focus group interview with teacher educators
- 6 individual interviews with teacher educators
Research process

4.
New Zealand Ministry of Education
request for proposals:
- Intervention – develop a Master’s level
programme in response to the increasingly
diverse population in New Zealand
- Goal – raise the academic achievement of
‘diverse’ learners in schools
Background

5.
Fieldnote, teacher educator:
“The Ministry identified it’s the teachers who
are the responsible holders to do this
[inclusion], and this whole idea is why the
Ministry is funding this project.”
Addressing diversity – who
is responsible?

6.
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included:
racism and diversity in institutional life
 Organisational ideals
 Tokenistic
 Feel-good rhetoric
• A critique of ‘inclusion’

7.
Interview, teacher educator:
“If you look back at the long history of schooling, there is
something schools are really effective at doing: A tinkering
with things. Tinkering around the edges which is the easy
stuff to do but actually what happens if you just tinker around
the edges is that it doesn't really engage with the complexities
of difference and the way that it [normalcy and social
inequality] is reproduced in schooling.”
Tinkering with things?

8.
Interview, teacher educator:
“I prefer to use the term ‘difference’ rather than
‘diversity,’ because often in inclusive education,
diversity and inclusion means including and
assimilating the ‘diverse other’ into the ‘norm.’”
‘Difference’ not ‘diversity’

9.
Interview, teacher educator:
“Inclusion means that you're included into something
right? In my mind, you're included into the norm. So
what that does is just reproduces the norm. Because
inclusion involves moving [the diverse other] beyond
inclusion to mean assimilation, right?”
Inclusion as assimilation?

10.
- A ‘bringing in’; in that it presupposes a whole into which
something (or someone) can be incorporated.
- …there is an implicit centred-ness to the term inclusion.
- …privileges notions of the pre-existing by seeking to
include the Other into a prefabricated, naturalised space.
(p. 20, emphasis in original)
Graham, L. J. (2006). Caught in the net: A
Foucaultian interrogation of the incidental
effects of limited notions of inclusion

11.
Interview, teacher educator:
“I think that's a really big issue because people don't
live their lives in hierarchies and instalments. It’s not
about: Let’s include the gay kids into the
heterosexual norm. If the problem is the norm so
why would you want to belong to the norm if you're
not the norm?”
The big issue(s)…

12.
“When we talk of including, into what do we seek to
include?” (Graham & Slee, 2006, p. 3)
“We are still citing inclusion as our goal; still waiting
to include, yet speaking as if we are already
inclusive.” (Slee & Allan, 2001, p. 181)
“To include is not necessarily to be inclusive.”
(Graham & Slee, 2006, p. 3, emphasis in original).
Included into what?

13.
My reflections…
• Inclusion – one-way street
• The more I know, the more
I don’t know

14.
Emergent questions
- How do teacher educators conceptualise and
understand the current inclusive education system in
which they and the preservice teachers are situated?
- How teacher educators reconceptualise what
inclusive education might mean (beyond tinkering
around the edges)?

15.
- How do teacher educators conceptualise their
roles and enact inclusive practices with the
preservice teachers to make that happen?
- What are the relationship between the aspiration
to include and the realisation of inclusion that is
not normative assimilation?
Continuing emergent questions

16.
A positioned critique?
My positioning:
- Third generation, Chinese Malaysian, female,
international student, middle class, wheelchair-
user, yet-to-be identified identities
- I don’t live (or want to live) in hierarchies and
instalments or insert myself into the ‘norm’

17.
Interview, teacher educator:
“There's something different about doing
something for the first time and having to try
out these ideas and essentially doing it on
the hoof which is really, really stressful.”
Sitting on a plane as it is
being built

18.
• Ethnographic case study
- Make the familiar, strange
- Make the strange, familiar
- Empathy and critique
- Sitting on the plane while building it…
Research “on the hoof”?

19.
Thank you 
Acknowledgements
Asia-Pacific Educational Research Association &
Taiwan Education Research Association
We also acknowledge the Ngāi Tahu Educational Advisory Group for the MTchgLn programme and colleagues in the UC College of
Education, Health and Human Development who are part of the MTchgLn development team and related research. The programme
development has been a collaborative effort, and the structures developed for the operationalisation of the broad goal to prepare
adaptive and action competent pre-service teachers reflects the knowledge and wisdom of the group.
Leechin Heng, PhD Candidate
School of Educational Studies and Leadership
College of Education, Health and Human Development
University of Canterbury, Private Bag 4800, Christchurch
leechin.heng@pg.canterbury.ac.nz

20.
References
Ahmed, S. (2012). On being included: racism and diversity in institutional
life. London Duke University Press.
Graham, L., & Slee, R. (2006). Inclusion? Paper presented at the
American Educational Research Association (AERA) 2006 Annual
Conference, San Francisco.
Graham, L. J. (2006). Caught in the net: a Foucaultian interrogation of the
incidental effects of limited notions of inclusion. International Journal
of Inclusive Education, 10(1), 3-25.
Goodley, D., Lawthom, R., Clough, P., & Moore, M. (2004). Researching
life stories: Method, theory and analyses in a biographical age.
London: RoutledgeFalmer.