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A Case Study of Transductive Resolution: Analyzing the Practice of Inclusive Education for a Girl with down’s Syndrome at an Elementary School in Japan

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Abstract

Inclusive education is a process in which schools devise curricula and plan resource allocation to include the diverse group of children in society. Although not many schools promote inclusive education at a school-wide level, there are some schools making efforts toward inclusion in Japan. This study aimed to understand the process of inclusion in a Japanese elementary school by using Trajectory Equifinality Modeling. We conducted a participant observation and focused on Naomi, who was 7 years old and had Down’s syndrome. Naomi spent more than 80% of her time in the general education classroom, where she began to refuse to do tasks different from other children. In regard to this, the opinions of the homeroom teacher and the coordinator of these classes were completely different, but their opposing opinions were transformed into complementary ones using time differentiation, and they were able to continue to collaborate toward inclusive education. We found “transductive resolution” as a key to understanding the processes of striving for inclusive education.

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Data Availability

The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to privacy protection, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Notes

  1. From the perspective of developmental psychology, transduction has been treated as an immature mode of reasoning (Stern, 1893; Stern & Stern, 1914; Piaget, 1924). For instance, children relate the cause of what is happening to unconfirmed factors. However, Simondon’s explanation of transduction showed it was not retrospective reasoning but instead a concept that shows what is becoming, and it suggested a new dimension of creation. We have adopted Simondon’s view of transduction to develop our argument.

  2. Hiragana is a Japanese syllabary and Kanji is Chinese characters adapted for Japanese. Currently, there are approximately 3000 kanji characters in common use in Japan, and it takes time to learn them. Children learn hiragana first. Therefore, we label difficult or novel kanji with hiragana to provide information about pronunciation for students. This is a commonly used method, not just in special education programs.

  3. Naomi’s mother felt that Naomi would not be able to be involved in the same way when she gets older. This may indicate the difficulties of inclusion in Japanese society.

  4. Hviid (2017) said, “as resistance fundamentally operates to reconfigure the relation between the person and her sociocultural living conditions, willpower (and emotions) comes to the fore of our attention.” Naomi’s refusal to do tasks that were different from others is evidence that she became able to hold an opinion about what she wanted to do in daily life. This served as a turning point, where she was able to hold her own beliefs, and her teachers were forced to reevaluate their interactions with her.

  5. Incorporating TEM and hierarchical sign regulation in the same figure has helped to deepen our understanding. In TEM, an equifinality point is set in the upper right corner of the diagram, and a polarized equifinality point is set in the lower right corner. The distance between the equifinality point and polarized equifinality point represents future perspectives for the system. Furthermore, we introduce the idea of hierarchical sign regulation, which expresses the degree of generalization, into the TEM. Then, the steepness of the arrow is considered to express the degree of generalization. The more that the arrows toward EFP and toward P-EFP move toward generalization, the more the conflict between them intensifies, but transduction will open the way for them to function in a complementary manner as a new dimension rises.

  6. Simondon said that “we should note that there is a difference between a domain of transductivity obtained at the end of an essentially deductive process and a domain of transductivity obtained at the end of an essentially inductive process: the first is open on both ends; it is composed of a continuous spectrum of various classified and organized values; the second on the contrary is self-enclosed, and its scope has a periodic structure.” (p125) This means transduction is not separate from induction and deduction, but this research doesn’t review this complex process.

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Correspondence to Mami Kanzaki.

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Kanzaki, M., Kato, H. & Sato, T. A Case Study of Transductive Resolution: Analyzing the Practice of Inclusive Education for a Girl with down’s Syndrome at an Elementary School in Japan. Integr. psych. behav. 57, 1256–1272 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12124-022-09735-y

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