In its unwavering adherence to a pathology-based model of disability, special education has foreclosed other ways of constructing meaning about disability. To challenge special education's reductionist understandings of disability, scholars in disability studies in education are drawing on a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches,…

This article reviews the need for the arts to be integrated into scientific ways by which educators pursue an understanding of exceptionality. This need emerges from an awareness of the essential function the arts and humanities hold in the scientific enterprise and from increasing disenchantment with the dominant scientific paradigm. (Author/JDD)

This paper describes early efforts underway at City College, New York, to introduce a disability studies content into an otherwise traditional special education programme. The paper draws on previously funded research projects that merged humanities-based disability studies in education, prior teaching experiences and excerpts from the writing of…