Gemenskapens gränser: Stigmahantering och pluralistisk fostran i gymnasieskolan

This thesis problematizes values education and governed inclusion from the standpoint of experiences made by upper secondary students with severe physical disabilities. The aim is to contribute to the understanding of value education empirically, by examining how students with physical disabilities experience the process of integration into different communities of regular education.
The students framing of the everyday life in school reveal regular education as a setting structured by strong social and symbolic borders. Integration thus requires the integrated student to perform the boundary work spurred from passing these borders. This process of handling the everyday life of regular education shows patterns of stigma management, social exclusion, and problematic normalization of student minorities. However, some of the students’ framing of exclusive education indicates strategies of resistance. These strategies depend on three ways of framing disability status as: i) a basis for collective identity formation, ii) a part of the radical difference existing between all human beings and iii) a demand for recognition. These ways of framing disability not only appear to be crucial for many of the students to feel recognized in their everyday school life, but also for their ability to claim positions as full worthy members of the communities of regular education.
Against this backdrop I propose that a circular conceptualization of inclusive education, in contrast to the binary definition commonly used within educational science, can account for and explain the experiences of the students. Furthermore, I suggest that values education can benefit from the closeup pictures of everyday school life that can be captured by combining microsociology and normative ethics.