Inclusion began in the United States and Europe as a special education initiative on behalf of students with disabilities as early as the 1980s. Now, more than two decades later, schools in these countries are changing as educators, parents, politicians and communities try to prepare for the new challenges and promises of the twenty-first century.…

Inclusion's new challenge is to create schools that no longer rely on a particular text, activity, or teaching mode to support a given student's learning. The learning enterprise of reinvented inclusive schools will be a constant conversation involving students, educators, families, and others working to construct learning, document…

Analyzes the tensions underlying the debate regarding inclusive schools, focusing on (1) a social relationship and civil rights orientation versus an academic skills and individual development orientation; and (2) the dilemma in which advocacy emphasizes the difference between students with and without disabilities. Maintains that tensions around…

This paper uses qualitative research data and examples from a high school drama class to examine how achieving full learning membership for students with severe disabilities requires teachers, in collaborative and consultative relationships, to provide all students with crucial supports by flexibly working within three inclusion parameters…

Inclusion is an effort to make sure that all students benefit by becoming important and contributing members of their school communities. It is the attempt to make sure that students with disabilities go to school along with their friends and neighbors while also receiving the "specially designed instruction and support" they need to succeed as…

This article reanalyzes the principle of partial participation in integrated educational programing for students with severe or profound disabilities. The article presents four "error patterns" in how the concept has been used, some reasons why such error patterns have occurred, and strategies for avoiding these errors. (Author/JDD)

This report presents a systemic change framework for creating inclusive urban schools. It explains that if a key feature of reform focuses on multicultural education as a fundamental social and educational transformation, then opportunities for all students to achieve educational equity will be realized in U.S. schools. The first section of the…

As schools attempt to accommodate an increasing range of students with disabilities, linguistic differences, or other unique requirements, teachers worry about their preparation to deal with these differences. General education teachers do not always have the necessary background. Special education teachers may have only limited knowledge about…

The Regular Class Participation System (RCPS) project attempted to develop, implement, and validate a system for placing and maintaining students with severe disabilities in general education classrooms, with a particular emphasis on achieving both social and learning outcomes for students. A teacher-based planning strategy was developed and…

This final report describes the activities of the Reinventing Schools Research Project, a project that investigated how the inclusion of students with severe and other disabilities merges with larger efforts of educators, administrators, and parents to restructure and reform schools and how to influence the direction of that merger. The project…

This analysis of the changing role of the special educator to that of the inclusion specialist reviews the logic of these changes, presents results of research on the role of the inclusion specialist, analyzes the limitations of these changing roles, and presents an alternative view of professional roles in which teachers share the teaching of a…

This final report describes the activities and outcomes of a federally-funded project that investigated how the inclusion of students with severe and other disabilities merges with larger efforts of educators, administrators, and parents to restructure and reform schools, and how to influence the directions of that merger. The project explored how…