Inclusive education complexly defined for teacher preparation: the significance and uses of error

Research in the implementation of inclusive education in international contexts shows that progress in the Global South appears to lag behind nations in the North. In this paper, I investigate this phenomenon not by associating it with regional cultural and socioeconomic resource limitations, but by reconsidering the assumptions within inclusive education scholarship itself. Drawing on the theory of disability as complex embodiment [Siebers, T.(2008). Disability Theory. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press], I examine the sufficiency of the social model of disability as a foundational basis for teacher preparation for inclusive education in any sociocultural context. I argue for a post-positivist realist theorising of teacher preparation for inclusive education that, through an understanding of error, can imbricate the diversity of historically specific material contexts around the world. To illustrate the affordances of this theory, I examine two dilemmas in a Southern and Northern context, respectively, and generate implications that have transnational significance for inclusive education.