Beyond Fauxclusion: Generative listening for an inclusive world
Biography: Dr Zinnia Mevawalla is a Lecturer in Early Years Education at the University of Strathclyde. She has had the privilege of learning, teaching, and researching with children, families, practitioners, and diverse communities across the world, including Australia, Cambodia, India, Timor-Leste, and the United Kingdom. Zinnia’s research focuses on disability studies and inclusive education in early childhood. This work spans participatory, play-based and arts-informed methodologies, emphasising the importance of critical consciousness and the rights of children in early childhood.
Background: Inclusive education is a recognised human right with well-established benefits for children, families, and societies the world over. Yet, from early childhood onwards, ableism has remained a common lived experience. This is sustained by the enduring myth of the “normal” child, which reproduces exclusion. Dominant, unquestionable, and “comfortable assumptions” (Barone & Eisner, 2012) about disability give rise to Fauxclusion – that is, practices that appear to be inclusive, but which are exclusionary. As a result, those committed to inclusion can feel isolated in spaces that claim to value belonging. In this context, generative listening emerges as a necessary construct, recognising that there is a need to listen and feel understood to belong.
Aim: Moving beyond “bell curve thinking” (Florian, 2026) and the bureaucratisation of inclusion, this presentation draws on the concept of generative listening as a relational praxis for creating a more inclusive world for children (Cologon et al., 2019). In doing so, it challenges tokenistic, co-opted, and systematised versions of inclusion, instead foregrounding what we can do within everyday work.
Method: Informed by research data from the Changing Hearts and Minds Programme (CHAMP) – a joint research and knowledge exchange project running with 60 leaders from early years settings across Glasgow – this paper forwards a framework for generative listening focused on: (a) disrupting taken-for-granted norms, (b) centring marginalised voices, (c) supporting critical consciousness, (d) sharing meaning-making, and (e) mobilising transformative action.
Results/findings: CHAMP findings highlight that meaningful change is driven by people, not bureaucratic systems (which often position Fauxclusion as inclusion). The research emphasises the potential of using generative listening as an everyday praxis for making the world more inclusive.
Conclusion: Listening and belonging are co-dependent experiences because inclusion is a daily, unfinished encounter lived out in the context of relationships. Generative listening offers a relational pathway for challenging ableism, resisting Fauxclusion, and sustaining praxis.
Implications for children and families: When generative listening is practised, you are welcomed as you are, your experiences are taken seriously, and you do not have to explain or change yourself in order to belong.
Implications for practitioners: Practising generative listening asks you to work alongside children and families, question ideas of who or what is “normal”, to resist Fauxclusion, and to engage in ongoing reflection and action to transform processes of exclusion.
Funding: Glasgow City Council, Scotland, UK
Keywords: generative listening, children’s voices, belonging, inclusion, ableism
This presentation relates to the following United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: