Educational Inequality and Inclusion from Intersectionality. Special Education in Belgium's French-Speaking Region
(2024) European Sociological Association. 16th Conference. Tension, Trust and Transformation — Location: Porto (27.August.2024)
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- Abstract
- Specialized education in Belgium's French-speaking region, historically characterized by segregation and the predominance of boys from working-class and immigrant backgrounds, is undergoing a significant transformation towards inclusive schooling. This transition is being driven by a substantial reform plan for the educational system, known as the Pacte pour un Enseignement d’Excellence (2015). Our research explores whether the inequalities that have characterized specialized education since its inception persist in the context of new inclusive logics. Our paper proposes to focus on intersectionality, which we mobilize to study the evolution of inequalities in special education in the context of new inclusive logics. The state of the art indicates that although intersectionality offers a unique theoretical perspective that renew the study of educational inequalities, there are debates and unknows on how it works at the methodological levels (Choo and Ferree 2010, Davis 2008). Our paper aims to fill in this methodological gap of intersectionality in two steps. First, it engages in a review of the existing literature and the academic debates around the conceptualization, analysis method, and uses of intersectionality (Choo and Ferree 2010, Davis 2008). Second, we will present our own methodological approach that is inspired notably by intra- and inter-category approaches of McCall (2005). This second part of our paper will discuss our use of intersectional methodology in our current qualitative research. We conducted interviews and observations with key actors involved in school guidance in the French-speaking region of Belgium mobilizing the prism of intersectionality in order to explore in depth the construction of the category of 'special educational needs' and its interaction with other categorisation processes, such as those related to race, gender and socio-economic status. We will analyze in which ways our methodological proposal contribute to the understanding of educational inequalities through the lens of intersectionality.
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Ozden, M., André, G., & Souto Lopez, M. (2024). Educational Inequality and Inclusion from Intersectionality. Special Education in Belgium’s French-Speaking Region . European Sociological Association. 16th Conference. Tension, Trust and Transformation, Porto. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/273722