Abstract
Inclusive education rests on the precipice of significant transformation in Australia. Recommendations resulting from the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (Sackville et al., 2023) have highlighted the need for significant change in the way in which people with disability are educated and this has triggered a wave of reforms in education policies in Australia (Department of Education, nd). However, the path forward remains tangled, divided and deeply complex. Utilising the metaphor of a Gordian Knot, this presentation attempts to unravel the needs, perspectives, challenges and opportunities to re-weave the education of pre-service teachers who seek to work with students with disability in Western Australian schools. This presentation offers vignettes from the different communities involved in inclusive education, where we invite participants to listen to the perspectives and reflect on the issues, standpoints and their interlacing themes. Our exploration of these will be influenced by qualitative methodological approaches of weaving an otherwise (as expressed by Tachine and Nicolazzo, 2022) to observe the interconnectedness and divergence of the vignettes. The questions we seek to explore relate to the concept of problematising the education of students with disability as well as identifying both the challenges and opportunities in the schools and teaching workforces related to inclusive education. We reflect on what has been, the process undertaken to re-design and re-imagine pre-service teacher education where students with disability and the communities that support them to re-weave a different knot. Rather than problematising the knot and seeking to ‘solve it’ – we imagine it as a thing of beauty, uniqueness and as an opportunity to begin in a place to disentangle and re-weave the Gordian knot. Our journey to create pathways for pre-service teachers in both primary and secondary school contexts has been complex, creative and continues to evolve as we re-imagine inclusive teaching and schools. This requires, on some level, active resistance to the dominance of policy and practice that limits the preparation of pre-service teachers to dominant and traditional frames of reference. These inadvertently submerge the perspectives and needs of children and young people and inhibit opportunities to enact contemporary pedagogies and person-centred and responsive provisions for these students required within all learning environments. Providing inclusive education to students of all abilities requires intentional mobilisation of resources, re-imagining of priorities and determination to persist, in order to effect meaningful change. These insights highlight to us the need for cultural shift, to overcome resistance, micro-aggressions and casual ableism that makes change difficult to achieve and progress towards it slow.