How Special Education Authorizes Teaching Practices in Inclusive Schools

Inclusion in school has experienced a significant rise and was once understood as a means to overcome special education’s exclusionary elements. However, it is now special education that is on the rise again, even in so called inclusive schools. Thus, it seems that special education fulfils a function which inclusive education does not. This raises the present papers question what the de facto functions are that special education fulfils in inclusive schools. My paper answers this question based on an ethnography of teaching in self-proclaimed inclusive schools in Germany. The focus is on teachers’ equal treatment, individualization and differentiation. The latter often leads to criticism about favouritism and thus to questioning the teachers’ authorization. As I will argue based on empirical analyses, it is in this context where special education takes on a legitimizing function. It provides necessary authorizations for pedagogical differentiations by providing legitimizing knowledge about differences. Inclusive education, with its focus on universalism and singularity seems to lack this special knowledge and with it the necessary authorizations.