SLOGANS, MOTTOS, AND PROVERBS ABOUT INCLUSION…

In the process of writing, scholars often stop and search for a phrase or saying that cogently and concisely expresses the work done; the take-home message they want readers easily to remember. Proverbs, sayings, slogans, and citations support a point of view and increase the persuasiveness of what is being said. They reinforce the speaker’s argument by leveraging both the wisdom they feed in and the effect they produce in the flow of speech from which they emerge in meaning, rhythm, and tone (Gandara, 2004). Advertisers, for example, know that to launch a product it is crucial to have a powerful and memorable slogan that connects and represents a product or brand. Otherwise counselors and psychotherapists know that clients have built their lives around themes that can be synthesized in proverbs, sayings and slogans. Like headlamps, such words project life motives that allow for re-meaning the past and the present, and that can guide future choices and decisions. Career counsellors who know career construction theory (Savickas, 2013), view a motto or proverb as advice that one gives to oneself. A proverb or motto will usually succinctly state a person’s intuitive strategy toward something important, in this instance toward inclusion. In line with the aim of this volume, here we tried to comprehend the best advice about inclusion that scholars, professionals, students, parents and the many who accepted the challenge of this Manifesto have to advance professions of those, like us, are interested in others. Listening to the advice of the respondents to this survey reveals ways forward for us all. The results represent a self-organizing wisdom for our life and professions. They provide new ways of thinking, feeling, and understanding inclusion from multiple perspectives, and it is multiple perspectives that provide depth of meaning. Making the analogy that a client’s motto is advice to self, means that the mottos of these key actors about inclusion represent their best advice to our life and professions. Wishing to contribute to all of this, results of our analyses are reported below, after a brief presentation of the motto, proverb and slogan definitions.