Resolving dilemmas: Swedish special educators and subject teachers’ perspectives on their enactment of inclusive education

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article presents the findings from an interview study with 12 subject teachers and special educators in three Swedish lower secondary schools. The purpose of the study was to explore how school professionals perceive and respond to dilemmas related to inclusive education that require prioritizations between conflicting values, principles or goals. Through the use of conceptual tools and theoretical notions of policy enactment, the article sheds light on how such dilemmas can be played out in practice. Four different dilemmas were discerned in the analysis: special vs. general education settings, external control vs. professional freedom, curricular demands vs. students’ needs and individual vs. group. The analysis illustrates how actors’ perceptions and responses to dilemmas can be framed by policy demands in different ways, but also by contextual factors and the actors’ roles and positions in their schools. In this way, the article provides a partly new understanding of such processes in relation to previous research. Moreover, it is argued in the article that the notion of dilemmas provides an educational dimension that can be an important addition in analyses of policy enactment.