Epistemology of Inclusive Education or the Question of Its Definition Dilemmas

Abstract

This article analyzes some of the most relevant definition dilemmas of inclusive education. Its current cognitive developments are nothing more than a peculiar system of sanctioned ignorance that operates powerfully through the deceiver-deceived metaphor, an argumentative spatiality that is born deceived and produces multiple forms of deception. What we know as inclusive education is nothing more than a rationality that works without objective references about itself. The truth is that inclusion is a dynamic, variable phenomenon whose signifiers change, mutate, and transform systematically according to the context. This is what allows us to argue that inclusion is a suitcase concept with different uses and applications. This metaphor informs us how something can serve multiple things. It is a phenomenon and a non-fixed body of knowledge that, through it, allows us to read a variety
of theoretical categories and social practices. It follows that we are not dealing with a fixed body of knowledge. Neither the authentic  understanding of inclusive education nor its methodological repertoire can escape power relations. Both are deeply rooted in what they set out to understand. Their knowledge is never politically neutral. The paper concludes by observing that one of the most relevant tensions facing the epistemological construction of inclusive education consists in learning to use its cognitive foundations in empirical work to prevent its practice from avoiding defending the social inequalities -structural and relational- that it seeks to understand. Taking inclusive education as any theoretical approach that analyzes social  problems may incur a lax praxis that produces more errors than answers.