Conference Program

Inclusive education is widely recognised as a democratic imperative, requiring schools to support participation, recognition of difference, and equitable learning opportunities for all students. Yet inclusive practice increasingly takes place within educational environments marked by epistemic fragmentation, including contested knowledge claims, polarisation, performative accountability pressures, and growing uncertainty linked to digital technologies and social change (Biesta, 2021; Gamote and Hyman, 2025). In such contexts, teachers are not only pedagogical practitioners but key epistemic actors, required to exercise judgement about evidence, values, emotions, and competing interpretations of need. This paper argues that teachers’ capacity to enact inclusive education as a democratic practice depends critically on the alignment between professional agency, emotional labour, and the epistemic conditions shaped by leadership and organisational design.

Drawing on the framework of democratic intelligence, the paper conceptualises inclusion as a system-level achievement rather than an individual disposition. Democratic intelligence refers to the capacity of educational systems to reason, learn, and act wisely under conditions of complexity and difference, and emerges from the interaction between individual epistemic capacity and organisational epistemic infrastructure (Brown, 2018). From this perspective, teachers’ emotional experiences - such as uncertainty, moral tension, care, frustration, or professional vulnerability - are not peripheral to inclusion but central to how judgement is exercised in practice. Emotional labour becomes particularly salient in inclusive contexts involving neurodiversity, disability, and cultural difference, where procedural guidance is insufficient and teachers must interpret ambiguous situations while sustaining relationships and trust.

The paper introduces epistemic stewardship as a leadership and organisational responsibility: the deliberate shaping of cultures, routines, and governance arrangements that enable teachers to engage productively with evidence, disagreement, and uncertainty without emotional overload or erosion of professional agency (Edmondson, 2019; Smith, 2020). It is argued that when accountability and evaluation frameworks prioritise compliance over collective sense-making, teachers’ emotional strain intensifies and their capacity for inclusive judgement diminishes. Conversely, when schools operate as epistemic infrastructures - supporting psychological safety, structured professional dialogue, and participatory decision-making - teachers are better positioned to integrate emotional awareness with inclusive practice (Brown and Poortman, 2023).

The paper further considers the implications of emerging technologies for inclusive education, suggesting that their democratic potential depends less on technical capability than on whether teachers are supported to interpret, contest, and use them confidently within shared epistemic norms (Biesta, 2021). The analysis concludes by outlining implications for teacher education, professional learning, and evaluation, arguing for a reorientation toward emotional competence, dialogic capacity, and epistemic judgement as foundational to inclusive schooling within democratic societies.