Book Review: "Parenting and Inclusive Education" by Chrissie Rogers. Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, pp. 189

Abstract

“Parenting and Inclusive Education” written by Chrissie Rogers is an exceptional sociological work. It was constructed on the basis of narrative interviews (intimate stories) conducted with 24 parents of children with special educational needs (SEN). The text treats about parental experiences, especially the experiences emerging in parents’ and children’s interaction with British educational system. Roger’s interviewees – white British citizens from working and middle class were bringing up 30 children (4-19 years old), some of the informants had two or more disabled children. The level of disability was differentiated from dyslexia, dypraxia, AD/HD through epilepsy, hearing and visual impairment to Down’s syndrome and autistic spectrum. Chrissie Roger’s work gives the opportunity to follow her sociological reflections on British educational system based on the assumption of social inclusion. We consider the issues of social policy and at the same time we look at the social world with the eyes of the person who has experienced the mothering of a disabled child – the author’s daughter was also diagnosed a “SEN” child. The assumption of Roger’s was to give contribution to the debate about parenting/mothering, impairment and education, “to create a sociological space to discuss in depth issues about dealing with difficulty and, specifically, learning disability (both at a theoretical and experiential level) (p. 3). The author treats the private world depicted in the narrations (“intimate windows to the lives lived”) “as emotional response to the social world in relating to the self and well being” (p.4). She mentions C.W. Mills and feminist researchers and states that experiencing disability is the result of social construction within a social model of disability, which means that the parents not only experience the everyday difficulties resulting from the child’s impairment but also experience the impairment as a social construct.