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Presentation of ongoing research projects (interim status)

This contribution addresses the question of subject positionings of researchers within the field of inclusion drawing on a discourse analysis from an internationally comparative perspective. It presents preliminary findings of an ongoing study on achievement and achievement differences (APrA; DFG-JOINT 2025–2027). Based on the sociology-of-knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD; Keller 2004), in a sub-study education policy documents from Italy (Province of Bolzano) and Germany (NRW) are analyzed.
Our aim is to reconstruct how achievement is being produced in education policy documents (2002–2020). This approach is guided by a critical concept of inclusion informed by perspectives on inequity. Achievement is conceptualized as a historically evolved, cultural and institutional phenomenon produced in “discourse-practice formations” (Reh & Ricken 2018).
Despite an increasing overlap between international and national discourses, preliminary results from the analyses suggest significant differences between the discourses in the two countries. In Germany, educational policy tends to construct an order of achievement tied to ability norms. Discourses frame the ‘capable child’ as one who fulfils normative expectations while ‘enjoying’ learning. Achievement becomes more than outcomes: a way of life, a personal and societal resource. High achievement seems to link to traits such as curiosity, openness, self-discipline, and flexibility, contrasting with the “underachieving child”. In the Italy-related discourse, achievement appears to be mainly linked to assessment intended as a fundamental process of measurement of students’ learning processes. In this regard much focus is put on acquisition of individual competences which is brought together with the educational aim to welcome and to value individual differences and to promote the personality development of every child.
Building on these first reconstructions, we reflect how inclusion researchers position themselves as “responsible speaking and acting persons” (Arendt 1981: 192), inscribing research into discourses and confronting disciplining powers (Foucault 1981). Producing “discourse about discourses” (Keller 2004) highlights the situated role of researchers in shaping and challenging policies of inclusion.