Translating inclusion for students with visual impairment and special educational needs in French-speaking Belgian school organizations

Abstract

The policy implementation of “reasonable adjustments”, a recent education inclusion policy that requires regular school and school governance to accommodate students with special needs, places the responsibility on several key actors, who become important gatekeepers in the process of enabling educational access (Charlier et al., 2019) to regular schooling and opportunities to students with special educational needs (Verhoeven & Dubois-Shaik, 2021). This paper tries to reveal in the Belgian french-speaking context, through discursive policy and narrative analysis (Czarniawska, 2004), how the inclusion policy is translated (Callon, 1987; Dubois & Vranken, 2012) for including a student with visual impairment in a regular secondary school. These sensitive negotiations take place in what we identify in this paper as a soft policy (Lawn, 2009).