of conditions and situations. The way in which school policies make sense of accessibility is essential in this respect: it makes explicit the higher common good pursued by all stakeholders and constructs the symbolic and practical framework that gives anthropological, organizational and functional legitimacy to what constitutes accessibility. It forges the space of possibilities within which the configurations are crystallized that allow ways of being and acting, supporting the accessibilization of learning and social environments to be established and stabilized (Ebersold 2008).
The ways in which school policies orchestrate accessibility condition the conceptions of excellence and teaching promoted by organizational contexts. They support stakeholders’ distancing with the traditional components of the school form and the reconfiguration of the constituent components of the pedagogical nucleus of school environments. According to Mainardi (Chapter 4), such a reconfiguration invites teachers to prevent the emergence of difficulties among learners by means of didactic strategies that distance them from a normative conception of pedagogy that gives priority to top-down transmission in favor of a transformational perspective centered on real universal access to planned learning. These strategies, as suggested in particular by Feuilladieu, Gombert and Benoit (Chapter 5), require the combination of routines and innovations made possible by the generic and specific activation of study aids. This reconfiguration redefines the teacher-learner relationship: it requires teachers to recognize the expertise of students and to solicit their adherence to the pedagogical objectives pursued by paying close attention to their school experience, ensuring that the forms of pedagogical mediation are adapted to individual characteristics, that each student is involved in regular pedagogical activities and that friendly relations are established between all the learners in the class. The reconfiguration of the pedagogical nucleus is also the result of collaborative practices mobilizing diversified professional figures around the construction of paths to academic success, the improvement of teaching practices and the increase in the sense of self-efficacy among staff. It is based, in particular, on formative steering instruments or strategies, such as individualized teaching plans, allowing for planning learning and its sharing over time (especially during transition periods) in a personalized manner and to support cooperation among the relevant stakeholders.
The ways in which accessibility is orchestrated also govern the forms of agreement required to embed accessibility as a principle ruling the social games among schools’ stakeholders. Weber (Chapter 6) shows that the mobilization of digital technologies cannot be summed up in their technical or pedagogical dimensions. These technologies do not support the accessibilization of school environments per se: their use by school actors, even if it is progressing, remains very fragmented (OECD 2019) and recourse to them does not necessarily increase school performance (Amadieu and Tricot 2014). The creation of software accessible to certain groups of students with special educational needs sometimes struggles to go beyond the experimental stage or to establish itself as a teaching resource used by the majority of teachers (Muratet et al. 2013); the fact that the tools comply with standards specifying universal accessibility does not mean that they are appropriate for the uses that certain categories of learners with special educational needs may have of them (Edyburn 2015). As a result, the use of digital technologies presupposes school policies that seek to legitimize it among members of the education community. This legitimization undertaking presupposes a comprehensive strategy targeting all school staff and mobilizing all the actors likely to be concerned within a territory. It also calls for the use of digital technologies to be part of an inclusive ethos that invites the school’s staff to see accessibility as a resource beneficial to all the players concerned. It is also based on the various measures to provide teachers with the skills and knowledge required to use digital tools in a classroom context.
Modes of orchestrating accessibility also establish the formalized space for possibilities that collectively qualify what makes for accessibility and translates its principles into a collective competence. This space of possibilities derives, in particular, from the forms of cooperation legitimized in organizational contexts. According to Mainardi (Chapter 4), cooperation between teachers and administrators contributes to the organizational legitimization of the principles that specify the inclusive school: it encourages school actors to see the diversity of cognitive profiles as a resource that benefits everyone and to strive to reduce the obstacles to learning for all pupils in order to prevent academic failure; the joint mobilization of special and mainstream teachers in the context of co-teaching encourages teachers to focus on a universal pedagogical stance oriented towards the classroom without neglecting the requirements imposed by certain pupils. Synergies between teachers and professionals from specialist provision condition the legitimacy of the mechanisms created to facilitate the transition of pupils enrolled in special settings to the mainstream environment. All these elements suggest that collaborative practices are part of the symbolic and practical environment required to enable stakeholders to pay attention to the collective and individual components involved in the accessibilization of learning environnements and to mobilize, in an appropriate way, the continuum of generic and specific supports that need to be adapted to the diversity of contexts and profiles.
The creation of a symbolic and practical framework making accessibility a resource that benefits all those involved in the school is all the more important since the accessibility imperative, as shown by Plaisance (Chapter 7), has established a new professionalism for teachers. This new professionalism rejects the figure of the teacher-instructor in favor of that of the resource teacher who is a source of change and innovation. It requires teachers to take the unknown and unpredictable inherent in the uncertainty that underpins the need to take into consideration the individual needs and the specificity of the contexts to allow access to planned learning and social inclusion for the greatest number of people and make it a central component of their professional identity (Edyburn 2015). This new professionalism is based on experiential knowledge that is intended to enrich practice beyond academic knowledge on teaching content or scholarly knowledge. Combined with theoretical knowledge, this experiential knowledge forms a repertoire of practices inviting, on the one hand, to consider the general teaching conditions conducive to adjustments to the diversity of students and, on the other hand, to build upon specific professional gestures required by some students to develop generic actions that benefit the greatest numbers. This contributes upstream to the identification of the obstacles to learning that some students may encounter owing to their particular learning characteristics and to the integration of these obstacles into teaching practices to avoid the mobilization of specific facilities.
This new professionalism is upsetting the foundations of the identity of the teaching profession. It makes it more wide-ranging and multidimensional, and creates a degree of uncertainty that is a source of deep discomfort for teachers. For the ways of acting and being of learners that deviate from school standards and the requirements of student’s profession interrogate the mirror effect that runs through all social relations. They question the members of the school community in their certainties, question the image they forged of their function, their role and themselves, and give rise to pedagogical hesitations and compassionate attitudes based on individual subjectivities (Ebersold 2017a). This discomfort is a source of resistance, as evidenced by the relatively small proportion of teachers who report adapting the tasks required of students to their own pace and profile (OECD 2014). This may be related to the emergency conditions in which they are instructed to personalize and asked to put all forms of routine behind them, without the dedicated tools and procedures that would allow them to do so: For example, individual education plans developed to enable the enrolment of children with disabilities in mainstream schools do not always contain the information required by teachers to be able to differentiate their teaching practices; the majority of teachers feel that they are ill-equipped to teach in classes with diverse profiles as a large number of them have difficulty
