The title of a collection on 'ethics and methodology of research with children' implies that research with children necessarily raises unique questions about ethics and methods. Our paper questions whether this is so, what the unique questions might be and how they arise. We consider that any extra complications in research with children are common to research with other 'minority' groups. The main complications do not arise from children's inabilities or misperceptions, but from the positions ascribed to children in late twentieth-century Western societies. Clarity about the social origins of any complications in research with children is crucial if these complications are to be addressed. Ethics, methods, theories, data and policy conclusions are inextricably interwoven, and it is important to acknowledge how initial theories inevitably shape policies. Reasons are given for preferring rights-based to child-centred ethics.
The title of a collection on 'ethics and methodology of research with children' implies that research with children necessarily raises unique questions about ethics and methods. Our paper questions whether this is so, what the unique questions might be and how they arise. We consider that any extra complications in research with children are common to research with other 'minority' groups. The main complications do not arise from children's inabilities or misperceptions, but from the positions ascribed to children in late twentieth‐century Western societies. Clarity about the social origins of any complications in research with children is crucial if these complications are to be addressed. Ethics, methods, theories, data and policy conclusions are inextricably interwoven, and it is important to acknowledge how initial theories inevitably shape policies. Reasons are given for preferring rights‐based to child‐centred ethics.
This paper proposes inclusion phobia as a sharper and more operative definition of the ‘fear of the unknown’ often cited as an explanation for resistance to inclusive education. Using ‘severe and profound learning disability’ as the paradigm case, we situate the phobia surrounding this label in its social and historical context. Our hypothesis is that resistance to inclusion for this group is not rational but amounts to a thought disorder in a psychiatric sense. Using qualitative case studies of pre-service teachers on practicum and head teachers engaged in decisions about admissions, we demonstrate the workings and impact of inclusion phobia. We illustrate its trajectory from a general social dysfunction, to the systems that channel it to the individuals caught up in it. Our aim is to expose inclusion phobia so that, teacher educators, teachers and pre-service teachers might, in knowing it, find new ways to remedy it. In doing so, long standing resistance to inclusive education is made more tractable. We conclude with our own proposals for an anti-phobic curriculum for teacher education
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.