Developing and Maintaining Inclusive Identities: Understanding Student Teaching through de Certeau’s Framework of Tactics and Strategies

The article describes how a group of student teachers understood and enacted inclusion in noninclusive school placements during a year-long teaching residency. It examines, within de Certeau’s framework of tactics and strategies, how students made meaning of their placements, their understanding of university practice in relation to inclusion, and their developing teaching identities as inclusive educators. The fissure between university and school praxis, and the student’s relationship to that disconnect, is at the heart of this research. Moreover, the tension between the participants’ pedagogical underpinnings of what constitutes effective teaching practice’ and the ways they experienced their school sites through the adoption of an inclusive ideological framework, informed how participants resisted and negotiated daily interactions within established systems and structures.