The 2019 Camphill Research Symposium was unforgettable. The conversations throughout, whether within formal or informal spaces, made clear the common commitments to greater love and wholeness. And how special to get to stay on the Camphill campus! I met several new friends that I imagine will be colleagues and friends for a very long time.
Leveraging a perspective of community as a site of mutual giving, I work to reframe the decades-long debate of inclusion in the field of special education. Instead of culturally derived and socially constructed norms of independence, achievement, and success as emancipatory, I propose that true community counters oppression, segregation, and control. In a true community, efforts toward inclusion become obsolete, as inclusion presumes a center where assimilative characteristics are required for access to the dominant norm. Informed by data from an ethnographic study in which I challenge idealized independence as necessary for access to the community for adults with developmental disabilities, I propose that a philosophy of community can reframe discourses of inclusion and diversity, especially with respect to the dualism of general and special education. Rather than conceptualizing inclusion as simply an issue of physical space, the distribution of resources, or even an instructional context, a discussion of community would render the long-time points of contention in the field as ancillary. Instead, consideration is given not only to the ways individuals contribute to the collective, but also to the process of each person’s edification toward their own belovedness, which occurs in community.
