the greatest number of people and make it a central component of their professional identity (Edyburn 2015). This new professionalism is based on experiential knowledge that is intended to enrich practice beyond academic knowledge on teaching content or scholarly knowledge. Combined with theoretical knowledge, this experiential knowledge forms a repertoire of practices inviting, on the one hand, to consider the general teaching conditions conducive to adjustments to the diversity of students and, on the other hand, to build upon specific professional gestures required by some students to develop generic actions that benefit the greatest numbers. This contributes upstream to the identification of the obstacles to learning that some students may encounter owing to their particular learning characteristics and to the integration of these obstacles into teaching practices to avoid the mobilization of specific facilities.
This new professionalism is upsetting the foundations of the identity of the teaching profession. It makes it more wide-ranging and multidimensional, and creates a degree of uncertainty that is a source of deep discomfort for teachers. For the ways of acting and being of learners that deviate from school standards and the requirements of student’s profession interrogate the mirror effect that runs through all social relations. They question the members of the school community in their certainties, question the image they forged of their function, their role and themselves, and give rise to pedagogical hesitations and compassionate attitudes based on individual subjectivities (Ebersold 2017a). This discomfort is a source of resistance, as evidenced by the relatively small proportion of teachers who report adapting the tasks required of students to their own pace and profile (OECD 2014). This may be related to the emergency conditions in which they are instructed to personalize and asked to put all forms of routine behind them, without the dedicated tools and procedures that would allow them to do so: For example, individual education plans developed to enable the enrolment of children with disabilities in mainstream schools do not always contain the information required by teachers to be able to differentiate their teaching practices; the majority of teachers feel that they are ill-equipped to teach in classes with diverse profiles as a large number of them have difficulty managing student behavior in a classroom (OECD 2019). This discomfort is also rooted in an isolation that reinforces their sense of destitution in individualizing their teaching practices: they feel relatively unsupported by their colleagues or management staff, and engage relatively little in collaborative practices with their colleagues (OECD 2014). This discomfort is part of the malaise among teachers noted in some studies (Barrère 2017) and, correlatively, of their reluctance, or even resistance, to the principles claimed by inclusive policies. In particular, it encourages them to favor compensatory measures involving the stigmatization of pupils, as shown by the increase in the number of pupils with SEN observable in many countries (European Agency for Special Needs and Inclusive Education 2018). It recalls the role played by the symbolic and practical framework created by the normative activity of schools in overcoming the quandaries faced by any pre-defined meaning of good or poor accessibility.
I.4. An imperative promoting new normative standards
The third part of this book focuses therefore on the social meanings given to accessibility by the translation work carried out by the actors. Beyond a “good” or “bad” accessibility, the contours of which are explained in normative references, the modalities of accessibilization of school environments depend on the translation work carried out by the actors to transform the main principles specifying the facilities created into operational modalities taking into account the organizational and functional contexts as well as identity-related issues.
This translation work is, of course, organized around the representations of pupils conveyed by the methods of needs assessment: the promotion of an essentialist approach to learning difficulties encountered by pupils encourages a corrective understanding of accessibility, giving priority to the mobilization of additional resources and facilities that complement the actions of school stakeholders. These facilities become the main vehicle for the accessibilization of school environments by ensuring that pupils comply with school standards or by endeavoring to bring them closer to them (Ebersold and Dupont 2019). They also provide teachers with poles of certainty likely to reassure them about the feasibility of schooling (Ebersold 2017b). In many countries, these arrangements take the form of human resources to assist the teacher and special classes where learners are more or less temporarily enrolled. The forms of delegation they allow have an insuring, or re-insuring effect on the ways and manners teachers can conduct classes; the advice given may provide the reference points required to distance oneself from the usual ways of being and acting and to adopt new ones (Ebersold 2017b).
However, this translation work also proceeds from the strategies of territorial, organizational and functional legitimization of the facilities created to support the school in its openness to the diversity of learning profiles. The accessibilization of school environments can be organized around a delegated approach to accessibility, which is subcontracted to professionals from specialist provision for its implementation. As shown by Dupont in his analysis of the procedures governing the transition to mainstream education of learners enrolled in special settings (Chapter 9), this subcontracting logic stems from forms of cooperation between the actors in the school and those in the special setting with the aim of reducing, as far as possible, the concerns of teachers and the risk of discomfort represented by learners questioning routines. These forms of cooperation may require professionals from specialist provision to select students with disabilities who are closest to school standards, to be able to allay teachers’ fears, to assist them when situations are deemed difficult and to take on certain educational responsibilities that teachers do not feel able to assume.
This translation work is also organized around the systems of justification used by teachers to judge the educational legitimacy of pupils. As Armagnague-Roucher shows with regard to newly arrived allophone learners (Chapter 10), the rationales governing the accessibilization of school environments differ according to the proximity of pupils to legitimate view of what is the allophone learner. A differentialist approach to accessibility tends to prevail among teachers when these learners are identified by a linguistic distance that takes the form of a poor command of the language, which can be overcome both didactically and technically thanks to their social and academic proximity to school standards. This differentialist approach to accessibility leads them, for example, to show empathy towards learners, to seek to take account of some of their particularities, to support them through temporary arrangements and/or to punish their educational discrepancies less harshly. Conversely, a delegated approach to accessibility prevails among teachers when these students are linguistically close, but academically and socially distant from the school’s expectations. This delegated approach is organized around a conformist reading of the school experience where a recurring presumption of maladjustment prevails, as evidenced by the learning difficulties of these students. It supports forms of schooling in dedicated classes or arrangements by special teachers.
Combined with the ways in which the accessibility of school policies is orchestrated, the translation work carried out by the school’s actors to operationalize the principles claimed by the accessibility imperative determines the concepts of individualism presiding over the accessibilization of school environments. The strategies used by school actors to legitimize the measures deployed can, as seen in some European countries, promote positive individualism that supports the development of school as learning organization and, correlatively, is conducive to the development of an inclusive school that is closer to the principles on which it was founded. Conversely, as can be observed in many European countries, the strategies can encourage negative individualism (Castel 1995), which substitutes the figure of the “guilty” person for that of the “capable” person claimed by the accessibility imperative (Ehrenberg 2013). This negative individualism is particularly supported, as suggested by Mons (Chapter 3), by evaluation policies that reduce accessibility to effectiveness and performance. Such policies lead school stakeholders to develop avoidance strategies that lead them to pay less attention to vulnerable learners when taking tests or to base their teaching