Something old, something new: Educational inclusion and head teachers as policy actors and subjects in the City of Buenos Aires

Abstract

In Argentina, "inclusion" has become a central target of national and provincial educational policy since the mid-2000s. Unlike in other countries, inclusion has been associated with the transformation of upper secondary schooling into a compulsory level of education, together with the effective integration of pupils from socio-economically deprived families. This article examines how policy on inclusion is "done by" and "done to" head teachers in two Escuelas de Reingreso (Returning Schools) in the City of Buenos Aires. It scrutinises the usefulness of Ball and colleagues´ approach to policy in a very different context from their own. It argues that the head teachers are both policy actors and subjects. As policy actors, they creatively interpret and translate their schools´ policy mandates within specific contexts. In so doing, they produce antagonistic versions of "inclusion": the "educational" and "socio-educational" approaches. As policy subjects, they are spoken by competing policy discourses (in a Foucaultian sense) on schooling: the "selection and homogenisation" and the "inclusion and personalisation" discourses. They demarcate the limits to which head teachers are able to imagine, think and do. In different ways, they contribute to the misrecognition of the centrality of teachers` views and practices in pupils´ learning.