Search

Public education authorities throughout the Australian States and Territories have moved towards the development of policies and programmes to integrate students considered disabled into regular classrooms. The implementation of policy frequently is reduced to disputation over resources which, it is argued, will facilitate integration. This paper contends that such debates sustain the flawed notion that integration is simply a technical issue to be achieved through deployment of special equipment and personnel to regular schools, recommending a further consideration of the contribution of pedagogy, curriculum and school organisation to disabling or enabling educational programmes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the state of Victoria, Australia, the right of all children to be educated in a regular school has been Ministerial policy since 1984. However, the issue of integration of students with disabilities into mainstream schools is problematical because of the ways that practitioners interpret this policy. This paper summarises research on the attitudes of 194 primary and secondary school teachers to integration and discusses how these are impacting on the implementation process. It is argued that it is difficult to develop policies which define 'what will be' without careful consideration of 'what is' in terms of history, beliefs and attitudes. The researchers found that ideas arising from the practices of 'special' education are being imposed on the integration process, limiting teachers' visions of educational opportunity for all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among those who study education systems there has been a general concern with schooling outcomes, which has encouraged a focus on the main classroom and general education. This deflects attention from another important issue, the ways that schools understand differences in pupil performance and identify pupils in terms of that understanding. Concern with this issue encourages a focus on educational psychology and special education, where such understandings are developed overtly and such identifications are made explicitly. The purpose of this paper is to present some of the work in the sociology of special education that bears on this neglected issue. It does so by describing three main themes within the field. These are: cultural understandings of ability and disability, the soda! processes by which children are identified as disabled, and extra-school influences affecting the development and operation of special education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to provide an international overview of some of the main developments now taking place in educational provision for children with disabilities. Difficulties experienced fry disabled children in many countries in gaining access to any form of education are contrasted with home-based and centre-based projects, such as Portage. Particular attention is given to she nature of collaboration between families and teachers, in the context both of schooling and of community-based rehabilitation. Obstacles to parent-professional collaboration are identified and suggestions made for how these might be overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Because of the legal and organizational structures which are built into the special education system, its institutions provide interesting sites for the study of interactions between Third World peoples, such as Hispanics, and U.S. society. In the interests of developing an understanding of these interactions, an intensive two-year ethnographic field study of the formal intake process (assessment, programming, placement and evaluation) involving pre- schools. age Hispanic deaf children in a school in New York City was conducted. This paper discusses practices of `noninvolvement' of Hispanic parents in educational decision making, as well as the construction of particular ideological and social relations between participants in the intake process. The progress of one family through the intake is analyzed in detail to demonstrate the social and cultural complexities of these relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]