Over the past two hundred years in the United States and Germany, special educational systems have been institutionalized to facilitate access to learning opportunities for children with disabilities, difficulties, and disadvantages. Originally heralded as innovative, the positive views of these mainly segregating and separating educational…

Early childhood and elementary music teachers face particular challenges when including children with special needs in the music classroom. Children with autism act out and misbehave not because they are autistic, but because their fears and anxieties are so great. Knowing that children with autism and other neurological disorders have distinct…

This study evaluates and compares special educational services for children with dyslexia in three different settings: special schools, reading units and mainstream resource provision. The emphasis in this paper is on the parental perspectives. Participants were the parents of dyslexic children, aged eight to thirteen, who had been accessing…

This paper presents and discusses the key findings from a study funded by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) that explored the relationship between achievement and inclusion in mainstream schools in England. Overall the results indicate that, although there is a small statistical relationship between inclusion and academic achievement,…

More than ever, students with disabilities are being included in general physical education classes, recess, and extracurricular sports. To ensure successful experiences in these settings, it is important for the teacher to provide an environment of acceptance and for the students without disabilities to have a positive attitude towards students…

Providing children with special educational needs with individual education plans (IEPs) was advocated in the 1994 code of practice for SEN, and retained in the 2000 code. Specifically as it relates to mainstream secondary schools, this has proved highly controversial: many SENCos report that the writing and implementing of IEPs is a bureaucratic…

This study explored Mikhail Bakhtin's conceptualization of carnival as it applies to 2 second language (L2) learners in an American kindergarten classroom. Unwilling to engage in two story retelling tasks, the children nevertheless invoked the imaginative, playful, and dialogic world of carnival, creating meaningful, contingent contexts for…

We conducted an online statewide survey of teachers of students with moderate and severe intellectual disabilities to determine the extent to which their students were included in school extracurricular and community recreation activities. For the 252 teacher respondents who indicated that their primary caseload consisted of students with…

Montgomery County Public Schools (MCPS) "Special Education at a Glance," which includes a copy of the "Guide to Planning and Assessing School-Based Special Education Programs," provides in a single document, information about the special education population at each Montgomery County (Maryland) public school, including…

Currently there is an international shift towards inclusive education, a means of education according to which the learner is schooled in the least restrictive environment possible, to overcome his or her challenges to learning and development. Bearing this in mind we considered the experiences of a learner with learning difficulties who transited…

The disproportionate representation of culturally and linguistically diverse students in special education has been a persistent problem in education for more than four decades. The core issue concerns the possibility that some students may be misidentified, thereby receiving inappropriate educational services and being unnecessarily placed…

This research used qualitative methods to gather the perceptions of regular classroom teachers and students with and without mild disabilities (MD) about an inclusive program implemented in three separate classrooms and designed to enhance both the academic and social engagement of a small number of students with MD. Teachers acknowledged that…

The issue of where to teach children with special educational needs (SEN) and disabilities has been a great concern as countries respond to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Salamanca Statement on inclusion of 1994. In this study, the responses of 500 trained and untrained mainstream primary school…

Some universities and colleges across the country are creating opportunities for young adults with significant disabilities to meaningfully participate in postsecondary education. Students with significant disabilities are now attending college classes with peers without disabilities either during or after high school. In this qualitative study we…

Inclusion is a way of thinking--a deeply held belief that all children, regardless of ability or disability, are valued members of the school and classroom community. Inclusive classrooms are places where all students "are integral members of classrooms, feel a connection to their peers, have access to rigorous and meaningful general education…