Thinking and Research Inclusive Education without a Banister

This paper presents some initial findings of a double sided study on research in inclusive education. The first part of the study concerns the development of a framework for establishing communities of collective thinking and inquiry with a specific emphasis on bringing researchers and practitioners of inclusive education closer together. The second part concerned the findings and new ideas that where brought to light in the collective framework. The idea then was to develop dialogical research in order to help researchers and practitioners to mediate between conceptions of inclusion on the one hand and inclusion in practice on the other hand. In order to discuss the relationship between concepts of inclusion and inclusion in practice we focused on ‘thinking’ and ‘judgment’ as theoretical as well as practical activities. In this sense the resulting paper offers a theoretical and methodological approach to dialogical research and cooperation between researchers and practitioners with respect to development of the concept and practice of inclusive education.