From Inclusion to Community

I explore how the organizing principle of community can expand the dichotomous inclusion-exclusion framework in special education. Just as wholeness requires the integration of an individual’s opposites, community is the collective integration of opposites. Whether collectively or individually, the process toward wholeness requires integrating realities into one’s awareness, realities that have been repressed, erased, rejected, or excluded, like the practices of institutionalization or segregation. However, integration cannot occur with a mere charitable recognition that intends to change, improve, fix, deny, reject, or erase that which exists. Community as a representation of wholeness contains great possibility toward justice in education because community provides the foundation for human becoming. I draw from prominent voices of various freedom movements to note that transformation of the collective is mutually constituted by transformation of the self. Contrary to common uses of community that connote either the public sphere, shared affiliation, purpose, or identity, I conceptualize community as the reciprocity, awareness, and agency that results from wholeness.