Srikala Naraian

This New Field of Inclusive Education: Beginning a Dialogue on Conceptual Foundations

Numerous scholars have suggested that the standard knowledge base of the field of special education is not a suitable intellectual foundation for the development of research, policy, and practice in the field of inclusive education. Still, we have yet to have a dialogue on what conceptual foundations may be most generative for the growth and development of the field of inclusive education. This article imagines and initiates such a new dialogue among educational researchers and teacher educators about the intellectual resources that can best support inclusive educators everywhere. As inclusive education gets increasingly taken up within international policy discourses, it may be imperative to explore and identify theories and ideas that can be responsive to diverse and hugely unequal contexts of schooling. This article forwards an initial collection of intellectual resources for an inclusive education that can accommodate such complex schooling conditions and invites rich scholarly exchange on this issue.

Institutional Stories and Self-Stories: Investigating Peer Interpretations of Significant Disability.

This paper describes the data collected from a study that examined the participation of two students with significant disabilities in separate settings — a first‐grade classroom and a high school. Interweaving several theoretical strands — disability studies, narrative theory and socio‐cultural perspectives on learning — it incorporates an understanding of relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers that centralizes the context within which they occur. It appropriates the argument of Ferguson in 2003 that the narratives of others are critical to the development of individuals with significant disabilities and explores its meaning within the classroom. In doing thus, it implicates the institutional arrangements in each educational setting, documenting the nature of student relations that are engendered by them. Simultaneously, it draws attention to the inseparable connection between the shaping of individual student identities and the participation of classmates with severe disabilities. The author suggests that while an institutional narrative that fosters community values can offer students greater opportunities to engage in mutually empowering relations with a peer who has significant disabilities, students also require effective mediation in the classroom to remain in meaningful engagement with him/her.

Seeking transparency: the production of an inclusive classroom community

The successful participation of students with disabilities in a general education classroom is generally presumed to be contingent on the creation of classroom communities that can nurture the qualities of equity and care and where different forms of diversity are valued. However, there has been less scholarship that documents the production of such communities. This paper reports on an ethnographic study that was conducted in an urban first-grade classroom which included several students with disabilities, including one student with significant multiple disabilities. Situated within the disability studies in education tradition, the study adopts a sociocultural perspective to understand the expressed commitment of the teachers within this classroom to transparency. The paper describes the sites of tensions and possibilities that emanated from the confluence of such commitment with other teacher priorities for students. Data from this study showed that overall transparency in the classroom was weakened by proceduralised notions of caring that left teacher practice highly susceptible to the influence of norms. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this for the project of developing inclusive classrooms.

Professional Development for Special Education Reform Rearticulating the Experiences of Urban Educators

As urban districts undertake special education reform initiatives to move toward inclusive schooling arrangements, educators are challenged to reflect critically on their practices to support greater participation of all students, including those with disabilities. The authors describe the narratives of three educators who participated in a professional development opportunity offered in the context of special education reform within a large urban school district. By exploring the parameters of their practice, their professional priorities and their struggles in adopting the offerings of this professional development, the authors derive important clues to the process of change that can inform professional development for inclusive practice.

Dis/ability, Agency, and Context: A Differential Consciousness for Doing Inclusive Education

Abstract In any sociocultural context, efforts to promote inclusive education may evoke trajectories of change that are as unpredictable as they are inexhaustible, stimulating the production of a range of disability subjectivities, performances, and constructions. This article unearths such local constructions by focusing on the experiences of nongovernmental organization educators and families of students with disabilities in Chennai, India, as they collectively engaged in inclusive education activity. Using the framework of differential consciousness (Sandoval, 2000) I explore the oppositional agency of participants in securing equitable opportunities for students with disabilities in mainstream settings. My aim in doing thus is to animate the links between local practices and global concepts of inclusive education. Even though the narratives of participants index “place” as the predominant signifier of inclusion, their decision making within hugely inaccessible contexts discloses their compulsory movement through multiple, sometimes contradictory, positions to achieve equitable schooling. I subsequently draw on these narratives and more broadly on U.S. third world feminist scholarship to suggest a few lines of inquiry that can serve a transnational theory of inclusive education.

Transforming for inclusive practice: professional development to support the inclusion of students labelled as emotionally disturbed

Few models of professional development (PD) are designed to bring about the fundamental shifts in thinking about student behaviour that can support the inclusion of students labelled as having emotional/behavioural disabilities within general education classrooms. In this paper, we seek to accomplish two goals: (1) we briefly delineate the features of a model of PD to build the capacity of teachers to create hospitable classrooms for students with labels of emotional disabilities, and (2) we use the context of this PD model to describe the transformative process that occurred within the specialists who implemented it within an urban school district. In narrating their process of change, we illuminate the conditions for learning supported by this model and its potential for promoting inclusive practices within urban schools.

Teacher discourse, peer relations, significant disability: unraveling one friendship story

Mainstream research in the education of students with significant disabilities, which seeks to improve the ways these students can participate successfully in general education settings, has established the importance of teachers and classroom contexts in mediating relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers in the classroom. However, there is still a gap in the literature regarding the ways in which teacher practice, particularly teacher discourse, shapes the identities of these students. Drawing on the data from a study that examined the participation of students with significant disabilities in inclusive settings, this paper presents a case study of the relations between Harry, a first‐grade student with significant disabilities, and a peer student, Andrea. The paper weaves several theoretical frameworks – disability studies, narrative theory, and sociocultural theory – to offer an interpretation that directs attention to the forms of teacher mediation available to peer students in engaging with their classmates with significant disabilities.

Negotiating Normalcy with Peers in Contexts of Inclusion: Perceptions of youth with disabilities in India

The qualitative study reported in this article investigated how youth with disabilities in India described their peer relationships within their educational settings. We situate the aims of this study within the larger context of inclusive education in India and discourses on self-determination for individuals with disabilities. Findings from the study suggest that students with disabilities actively sought membership in their peer communities but had few opportunities within inhospitable schooling contexts to represent themselves in ways other than as needing help. For families of students with disabilities, the onerous demands of making physical environments and curricular materials accessible to their children left them isolated within schools and their communities. The study sheds light on families’ reluctance to abandon legal guardianship models in order to support increased self-determination for their children, and also raises important questions for activist educators working within complex conditions such as the Indian context.

New Literacy Studies An Alternative Frame for Preparing Teachers to Use Assistive Technology

Even as research continues to suggest the potential of assistive technology for improving student outcomes, it remains under-utilized in schools. Among numerous challenges to the effective utilization of assistive technology, research has suggested that educators are inadequately prepared to consider and implement the use of such technologies. In this article, we complement the effort to delineate the competencies needed by teachers for this purpose by suggesting that New Literacy Studies can serve as a generative frame to stimulate the dispositions necessary for a strong commitment to the use of assistive technology (AT) and to increase accessibility in the classroom. Specifically, we examine constructs within sociocultural approaches to literacy, multimodality, and critical literacy, thereby strengthening the interconnections between curriculum, pedagogy, and technology-based support for students with disabilities. We offer several implications of this approach for educators and teacher educators.

Disentangling the social threads within a communicative environment: a cacophonous tale of alternative and augmentative communication (AAC)

Alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) technology is being increasingly recognised as an important means of fostering the literacy of students with significant disabilities. However, the coordinated use of AAC technology continues to challenge professionals, families and users leading to dissonant meanings and fragmented use. This paper is an attempt to inquire into, and disentangle some of, the social threads that made up the communicative environment of one first‐grade student with significant disabilities – Trevor – for whom augmentative communication technology was procured. The ethnographic study reported in this paper documents the conflicting meanings of access and participation that surfaced among the multiple participants under whose guidance Trevor was required to use AAC. The paper discloses the assumptions implicit in these practices and in the conceptions of literacy enacted by different professionals. The paper notes the significance of these issues for Trevors narrative construction of himself and concludes with implications for practitioners.