CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article
Front. Educ.
Sec. Special Educational Needs
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/feduc.2025.1544512
This article is part of the Research TopicEducation To Enhance The Inclusion Of All LearnersView all 4 articles
Defining and Exploring Relational Inclusivity: Attending to Inclusion Across Four Dimensions of Schooling
Provisionally accepted
- University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States
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The goal of this paper is to present, conceptually and empirically, a framing for inclusion grounded in the social network perspective: Relational Inclusivity (RI). This approach emphasizes the importance of interdependent student relationships that educators must attend to in order to create socially responsive learning communities. We center relational ties and dynamics across four social dimensions experienced by students: friendships, recess, academic support, and emotional connection networks. Using data from a Grade 7 class collected through the Social Network Analysis (SNA) Toolkit, we illustrate how student experiences vary across these four dimensions and how educators may attend to them. We argue that an RI approach necessarily shifts attention away from traditional individualized paradigms of achievement and towards the social dynamics of learning environments.
Keywords: Relational Inclusivity, social network analysis, Social Network Analysis Toolkit, Social network perspective, Students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities, inclusion
Received: 13 Dec 2024; Accepted: 15 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mamas and Trautman. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Christoforos Mamas, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, United States
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