Paradoxes in inclusive education: a necessary condition of relationality?

Life’s paradoxes present across the varied landscapes we traverse in education and serve as formidable barriers in attempts to secure ethical consistency in practice. The presence of paradox invites educational researchers and practitioners to diligently examine our available choices, particularly when fixed by dominant ways of knowing/being. This too is especially consequential as these resources work for or against what we hold to be fundamental to our practice. This quandary is responded to here in three parts. The first section steps through a paradoxical psychosocial assemblage created in Australian educational practice through the National Assessment Program–Literacy And Numeracy (NAPLAN). The second section then suggests possibilities for challenging paradoxes around the status quo by reflecting on ways professionals from a range of countries in the Asia/Pacific region can reexamine their own practice as part of theoretically informed postgraduate research. The third section discusses how paradoxes have persisted in Australian policy responses to disability, which evade substantiated ways of being and knowing inclusion. The relationships paradox invites us to are entangled and complex but in opening ourselves to prospects inherent in contradiction we challenge ourselves to explicating preferred ideals.