(OECD 2019). This discomfort is also rooted in an isolation that reinforces their sense of destitution in individualizing their teaching practices: they feel relatively unsupported by their colleagues or management staff, and engage relatively little in collaborative practices with their colleagues (OECD 2014). This discomfort is part of the malaise among teachers noted in some studies (Barrère 2017) and, correlatively, of their reluctance, or even resistance, to the principles claimed by inclusive policies. In particular, it encourages them to favor compensatory measures involving the stigmatization of pupils, as shown by the increase in the number of pupils with SEN observable in many countries (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education 2018). It recalls the role played by the symbolic and practical framework created by the normative activity of schools in overcoming the quandaries faced by any pre-defined meaning of good or poor accessibility.
I.4. An imperative promoting new normative standards
The third part of this book focuses therefore on the social meanings given to accessibility by the translation work carried out by the actors. Beyond a “good” or “bad” accessibility, the contours of which are explained in normative references, the modalities of accessibilization of school environments depend on the translation work carried out by the actors to transform the main principles specifying the facilities created into operational modalities taking into account the organizational and functional contexts as well as identity-related issues.
This translation work is, of course, organized around the representations of pupils conveyed by the methods of needs assessment: the promotion of an essentialist approach to learning difficulties encountered by pupils encourages a corrective understanding of accessibility, giving priority to the mobilization of additional resources and facilities that complement the actions of school stakeholders. These facilities become the main vehicle for the accessibilization of school environments by ensuring that pupils comply with school standards or by endeavoring to bring them closer to them (Ebersold and Dupont 2019). They also provide teachers with poles of certainty likely to reassure them about the feasibility of schooling (Ebersold 2017b). In many countries, these arrangements take the form of human resources to assist the teacher and special classes where learners are more or less temporarily enrolled. The forms of delegation they allow have an insuring, or re-insuring effect on the ways and manners teachers can conduct classes; the advice given may provide the reference points required to distance oneself from the usual ways of being and acting and to adopt new ones (Ebersold 2017b).
However, this translation work also proceeds from the strategies of territorial, organizational and functional legitimization of the facilities created to support the school in its openness to the diversity of learning profiles. The accessibilization of school environments can be organized around a delegated approach to accessibility, which is subcontracted to professionals from specialist provision for its implementation. As shown by Dupont in his analysis of the procedures governing the transition to mainstream education of learners enrolled in special settings (Chapter 9), this subcontracting logic stems from forms of cooperation between the actors in the school and those in the special setting with the aim of reducing, as far as possible, the concerns of teachers and the risk of discomfort represented by learners questioning routines. These forms of cooperation may require professionals from specialist provision to select students with disabilities who are closest to school standards, to be able to allay teachers’ fears, to assist them when situations are deemed difficult and to take on certain educational responsibilities that teachers do not feel able to assume.
This translation work is also organized around the systems of justification used by teachers to judge the educational legitimacy of pupils. As Armagnague-Roucher shows with regard to newly arrived allophone learners (Chapter 10), the rationales governing the accessibilization of school environments differ according to the proximity of pupils to legitimate view of what is the allophone learner. A differentialist approach to accessibility tends to prevail among teachers when these learners are identified by a linguistic distance that takes the form of a poor command of the language, which can be overcome both didactically and technically thanks to their social and academic proximity to school standards. This differentialist approach to accessibility leads them, for example, to show empathy towards learners, to seek to take account of some of their particularities, to support them through temporary arrangements and/or to punish their educational discrepancies less harshly. Conversely, a delegated approach to accessibility prevails among teachers when these students are linguistically close, but academically and socially distant from the school’s expectations. This delegated approach is organized around a conformist reading of the school experience where a recurring presumption of maladjustment prevails, as evidenced by the learning difficulties of these students. It supports forms of schooling in dedicated classes or arrangements by special teachers.
Combined with the ways in which the accessibility of school policies is orchestrated, the translation work carried out by the school’s actors to operationalize the principles claimed by the accessibility imperative determines the concepts of individualism presiding over the accessibilization of school environments. The strategies used by school actors to legitimize the measures deployed can, as seen in some European countries, promote positive individualism that supports the development of school as learning organization and, correlatively, is conducive to the development of an inclusive school that is closer to the principles on which it was founded. Conversely, as can be observed in many European countries, the strategies can encourage negative individualism (Castel 1995), which substitutes the figure of the “guilty” person for that of the “capable” person claimed by the accessibility imperative (Ehrenberg 2013). This negative individualism is particularly supported, as suggested by Mons (Chapter 3), by evaluation policies that reduce accessibility to effectiveness and performance. Such policies lead school stakeholders to develop avoidance strategies that lead them to pay less attention to vulnerable learners when taking tests or to base their teaching on the requirements of the latter. Far from reducing educational inequalities, this negative individualism legitimizes and reproduces them: it reserves the most successful forms of differentiation for pupils with the strongest guarantees of “schoolability”; it demotes those who find themselves in the opposite camp to resorting to interstitial arrangements with uncertain effects on capacity-building or to the substitute forms of provision provided by special schools.
This book invites us, as proposed in Chapter 11, to relate the imperative of accessibility and, correlatively, the promotion of an inclusive school to the system of signs and symbols that make up its grammar. Respecting this grammar establishes the social possibilities that define “accessibility” or, conversely, “inaccessibility” and conditions the performative effect of the semantics of accessibility. This performative effect resides in the articulation of three notions generally used to qualify the accessibility imperative (access, accessible and accessibilization) to distinguish between what comes under the redefinition of the economy of obligations, what is part of the reorganization of the social contract linking societies to their members, and the rationalities presiding over the advent of new forms of normativity. This distinction associates the notion of access to to forms of social visibility made possible by access to a place, to learning, that is the patterns of belonging that individuals derive from it. It consequently relates the accessible to the social legibility of practices and to the resulting forms of commitment to the common good that individuals impose on themselves because of the accessibility of school and social environments. Such accessibility is inseparable from the accessibilization strategies developed by stakeholders to institutionally, organizationally, functionally and socially legitimize the principles claimed by the accessibility imperative. In other words, if access to requires accessible school environments, the latter derives from the accessibilization of school environments through the creation of a symbolic and practical framework that allows the legitimization and, thereby, the operationalization of the principles claimed by the accessibility imperative.
