Thomas M. Skrtic

Equity and Advocacy Expectations of Culturally Diverse Families’ Participation in Special Education

The authors contend that the equity and advocacy expectations imbedded in the legal mandate for parent participation in the special education decision-making process directly contradict the hierarchy of professional status and knowledge on which the positivist paradigm of professionalism is based, and are also in conflict with the values held by many families from culturally diverse backgrounds, contributing to low levels of participation and advocacy. They argue the need for professional education to incorporate opportunities for professionals to identify the cultural assumptions imbedded in the field of special education towards more balanced and effective collaboration.

Voice, Collaboration, and Inclusion Democratic Themes in Educational and Social Reform Initiatives

Although the rise of constructivism calls conventional remedial and special education practices into question, it also represents a positive opportunity for progress and renewal in the professions and in society. emphasizing the constructivist principles of voice, collaboration, and inclusion, the authors identify the influence of constructivism across three interrelated levels of reform: structural reforms in school organization, pedagogical reforms in classrooms, and institutional reforms in human service systems generally relative to the “school-linked services integration” movement. by doing so, the authors argue that, far more than a new special education service delivery model, inclusion is the emerging cultural logic of the 21st century. they conclude the article with a political-economic argument for inclusive education and a discussion of the implications of constructivist reform efforts for the broader possibility of democratic renewal in society.

A Political Economy of Learning Disabilities.

The invitation to participate in this issue of LDQ asked me to review my earlier contributions to learning disabilities research, reflect on trends since then, and offer suggestions or predictions for the future of the field. I begin by reviewing my work on the social construction and representation of school failure as student disability and on the reconstruction of special education and public education to avoid the need for such representations. In the remaining sections, I identify several trends in education and society and, by linking them, recommend that the field of learning disabilities join the struggle to create a strong democratic future for students and communities, a project that involves transforming education and American democracy itself, and begins with a transformation of professionalism in education and special education.

The mediating role of exclusionary school organizations in pre-service teachers’ constructions of inclusion

ABSTRACT In this article, we build on the extant literature documenting efforts to reform teacher education for inclusive education in the United States to demonstrate the complexity of preparing teachers to enact inclusive education given their own educational trajectories. We draw on qualitative data from a larger study on the nature and impact of an undergraduate course in inclusive education, providing an empirical analysis of the mediating role of general education pre-service teachers’ educational experiences in their constructions of inclusive education and its feasibility. Our data reveal how pre-service teachers’ educational experiences within school organisations configured by professionalisation and specialisation, worked to perpetuate and legitimate the separation of general and special education. We conclude by suggesting possible efforts to prepare educators for inclusive education.

Comparing Special Education: Origins to Contemporary ParadoxesComparing Special Education: Origins to Contemporary Paradoxes, by RichardsonJohn G.PowellJustin J. W.Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011. 346pp.

The Spectacular State explores the production of national identity in post-Soviet Uzbekistan. The main protagonists are the cultural elites involved in the elaboration of new state-sponsored mass-spectacle national holidays: Navro’z (Zoroastrian New Year) and Independence Day. The overall argument is that despite their aspirations to reinvigorate national identity, mass spectacle creators in Uzbekistan have reproduced much of the Soviet cultural production. National identity has been one of the most fraught questions in Central Asia, where nationality was a contradictory and complicated product of the Soviet rule. Although the category of nationality was initiated, produced, and imposed by the Soviet state in the 1920s, it eventually became a source of power and authority for local elites, including cultural producers. The collapse of the Soviet Union opened up possibilities for revising and reversing many understandings manufactured by the socialist regime. Yet, upon her arrival in Tashkent to conduct her research on the renegotiation of national identity in 1995, Laura Adams discovered that instead of embracing newly-found freedom to recover a more authentic history, most Uzbek intellectuals, especially cultural producers working with the state, avoided probing too far in this direction. Rather than entirely discarding the Soviet colonial legacies, they revised their history selectively. Whereas the ideological content of their cultural production shifted from socialism to nationalism, many of the previous cultural ‘‘forms’’ have remained. Similarly, the Uzbek government continued to employ cultural elites to implement the task of reinforcing its nation-building program, thus following the Soviet model of cultural production. The book consists of four chapters. The first chapter delineates the broad themes of national identity building, and the remaining chapters explore mass spectacle creation by distinguishing between three elements: form (Chapter Two), content (Chapter Three), and the mode of production (Chapter Four). The study is based on content analysis of two Olympic Games-style national holidays, interviews with cultural producers, and participation observation of festivals and behind-the-scenes preparation meetings. Although Adams provides a few references to viewers and their attitude toward the public holiday performances, her book does not offer an extended engagement with reception and consumption of these holidays. The comprehensive and multi-layered overview of the process of revising national identity in Uzbekistan is one of the book’s major accomplishments. For Adams, the production of national identity is not a selfevident and seamless production forced by the state but instead a dynamic, complex, and dialogical process of negotiation between various parties (intellectual factions, state officials, mass spectacle producers, etc.). Her account reveals the messy and often contradictory nature of national identity production and thus moves away from the tendency to reify the state and its policies. The book makes a significant contribution to studies of nationalism by suggesting that the production of national identity in Uzbekistan was centrally constituted by the consideration of the ‘‘international audience.’’ Although public holidays, studied by Adams, aimed at fostering national identification, the forms in which these celebrations are performed (including national dances and music) indicate the aspiration of cultural producers to be part of the international community. This kind of national production self-consciously oriented toward the international viewer has been the legacy of the Soviet nationalities policy where all cultural producers had to produce art ‘‘socialist in content, national in form.’’ Notwithstanding the difference in generations or genres,