Social development Essay Example for Free

Social development Essay Inclusion is viewed as a social development connected to a history of social policy reform in the United States beginning in the mid-1950s. Inclusion involves the processes of increasing the participation of students in, and reducing their exclusion from, mainstream curricula, cultures and communities. There has been a vigorous, ongoing academic debate between those who support and those who oppose the inclusion of special education students in general education classes. Much of this debate has taken the form of argument about the appropriateness of instructing special education students in classrooms with their general education peers or in separate, exclusionary spaces. When special education students are included in general education classrooms, they are expected to adhere to a modified version of the standard curriculum and are graded according to alternative standards. This work considers inclusion in the classrooms of Longview Public Schools. An overview of the national and local contexts for inclusion is presented, and then a high school theater arts class is portrayed from data collected over a fifteen-week period. The work concludes with a synthesis of the issues raised by the case-study and their implications for continued progress toward the goal of inclusion in American society and its impact on special needs students. Literature Review The idea of inclusive education was given impetus by two conferences set up under the auspices of the United Nations. The first of these, held in Jomtien, Thailand in 1990, promoted the idea of education for all; this was followed in 1994 by a UNESCO conference in Salamanca, Spain, which led to a Statement that is being used in many countries to review their education policies. The Salamanca Statement proposes that the development of schools with an inclusive orientation is the most effective means of improving the efficiency and ultimately the cost-effectiveness of the entire education system. The International Journal of Inclusive Education, established in 1997, encourages the same broad conception of inclusive education as ourselves, involving an examination of all the processes of inclusion and exclusion in education. Among those who anticipated the failure of mainstreaming during the 1980s, many challenged the institutional practice of special education, calling for widespread reform (see Reynolds, Wang, and Walberg 1987; Sarason and Doris 1982; Skrtic 1986; Will 1986). The radical restructuring of special education urged by Skrtic (1986) has yet to occur, although some states have attempted special education reform, often in concert with general education reform (Ferguson 1995; Thousand and Villa 1995). However, so-called â€Å"systemic reform† of special education is far from the norm in the United States (Roach 1995). Skrtics (1995) theoretical analysis of the field of special education aims for excellence, equity, and adhocracy through a deconstruction and reconstruction of both general and special education for a post-industrial economy in the twenty-first century. He maintains that an alternative paradigm, that of critical pragmatism, is necessary to reconstruct special education and disability. Without it, the current inclusion debate will not â€Å"resolve the special education problems of the twentieth century†¦ [but] will simply reproduce them in the twenty-first century† (p. 80). He argues that critical pragmatism enables individuals to continually evaluate and reappraise the â€Å"political consequences of a professions knowledge, practices, and discourses by critically assessing them and the assumptions, theories, and metatheories in which they are grounded† (p. 91). The authors of the book From Them to Us: An International Study of Inclusion in Education (Ainscow Booth 1998) used the terms special educational needs or just special needs to categorize pupils with learning difficulties, physical impairments and behaviour disorders. Such terminology implies that there is a division to be drawn between â€Å"normal† and â€Å"less than normal† learners. It implies exclusion, as pointed out by Booth (1995, p. 99). The term integration is still in use among teachers although officially, at least, it has been replaced. When referring to integration, teachers mean the presence in ordinary schools of those children who used to be transferred to special schools or special classes. One of the writers on normalization (Solum 1991) has tried to replace integration with the term anti-segregation. This has a more positive connotation in that it takes for granted that nobody is segregated at the beginning and, therefore, the challenge is to see that everybody remains within the regular school. For many involved in the current debate on inclusion, it is evident that the questions raised by Sarason and Doris over a decade ago remain unanswered, diluted by concerns that locate this endeavor within an educational rather than a societal discourse. The current literature on inclusion in the United States documents the way the practical realities related to inclusion continue to obscure the â€Å"charity† needed to frame the moral issue (Zigmond et al. 1995). This literature, in combination with the concerns of Sarason and Doris and the warnings issued by Skrtic, challenge the success of inclusion. And yet, at this particular moment schools continue to grapple with inclusion: an ill-defined, and yet, ever-increasingly accepted and widely practiced reform.