Inclusion Practices With Special Needs Students ─ Theory, Research, and Application

Explore the challenges, opportunities, and pitfalls of the inclusion of students with disabilities in your classroom!

Exciting, complex, and challenging shifts in American education are occurring today. First, schools are moving to embrace student diversity and accommodate the classroom experience to support diverse ways of organizing students for learning. Second, teachers are moving away from a traditional didactic instructional mode and embracing a facilitator role that encourages creating innovative classroom learning opportunities. Third, there is a shift from the view of the school as providing educational and psychoeducational services for students to providing educational supports for learning.

Coinciding with these changes is the growing movement in special education that enourages full inclusion of students with special needs. This is a far cry from the exclusionary and separatist movements of special education less than twenty years ago. Now American education is facing the challenging situation of working with students with disabilities in the regular classroom. Inclusion Practices with Special Needs Students provides a much needed overview of the issues faced by educators committed to understanding how to best serve children with disabilities in schools.

Inclusion Practices with Special Needs Students: Theory, Research, and Application provides an overview of the origins, evolution, and recent developments regarding the inclusion of students with disabilities into general education classrooms. The book critically challenges the overriding assumptions that support the philosophy of inclusion with a balanced presentation or research and theory that both supports and raises questions about the viability of this practice. The contributors are authorities in their respective areas of inclusionary practices.

Some of the issues you will explore in Inclusion Practices with Special Needs Students are:

• political, fiscal, and legal events that have shaped inclusion practices
• implications for school psychologists
• handling students with serious emotional, behavioral, or developmental problems remaining in regular education
• agenda for future research
• priorities for research, training, and policy reform
  
  Inclusion Practices with Special Needs Students addresses practical, psychoeducational, philosophical, legal, ethical, and financial issues surrounding the inclusionary initiative in special education.