Time for Inclusion?

In this presentation we explore temporality in education, noting how time mediates systemic practices that impact upon the capacity of educators to respond adequately to the needs of diverse learners. Taking up time as a conceptual construct, we demonstrate that temporality shapes the possibilities of inclusive practice within which a dominant agenda of compliance frames classroom complexities into fragmented responses. Education systems wherein learner difference is diagnosed but not acknowledged position educators in risk discourses concentrated on compliance, compartmentalisation and performance. Our analysis grapples with the promise of educational inclusivity amidst a political malaise that purports to champion it. The complexities are problematized in contradistinction to the immediacy of school demands by foregrounding how inclusion is subjugated to time. A diffraction in time is proffered as a diffusion of the temporal wherein practitioners are afforded the latitude to eschew diagnostics in favour of a considered relationality.