Play is a magnificent activity that sustains life and promotes joy and hopefulness. Loose Parts for Children with Diverse Abilities addresses the importance of play while providing appropriate accommodation to support young children with diverse abilities. Award-winning author and educator Miriam Beloglovsky advocates for play for play sake and invites early childhood educators and families to see children with diverse abilities' strengths, recognize them as capable, competent and creative, and listen to their powerful voices. With hundreds of illustrative full-color photographs and infused with real stories of children with diverse abilities engaged in loose parts play, the book also includes narrative comments from families and educators.

This book introduces research and solutions tested in schools with students with intellectual disabilities, socio-emotional difficulties, and extreme illnesses. It also provides extremely talented students' opinions on best teaching practices. In addition to students, the authors aim to bring out voices of their parents, teachers, and other people supporting them. The book serves people working with questions of special education: practitioners, researchers, and teachers and students in the field of special education worldwide. The authors present successful study processes which are secured by caring interaction, flexible, and student-centered teaching and multi-professional collaboration. The elements of caring education are the guiding principles of new special education.

"Makes a distinct contribution to the field, addressing a critical area of responsibility for schools under IDEA 2004." -Gary Clark, Professor of Special Education University of Kansas "Will become a valuable resource to many stakeholders." -Jeanne Repetto, Professor of Special Education University of Florida Help students with disabilities transition successfully into adult life! Assisting students with disabilities in planning for their future as adults offers both challenges and unique opportunities for educators. An authoritative guidebook for Individualized Education Program (IEP) and Individualized Transition Planning teams, Assess for Success, Second Edition, helps students, special educators, and families define appropriate goals-including postsecondary education and employment choices-for the transition to adult life. New resources in the revised edition emphasize practical transition assessment techniques with sample forms for community assessment, job analysis, and vocational training analysis. Written by a team of highly respected authors, and aligned with the reauthorization of IDEA 2004, the text discusses self-determination and career development, and demonstrates how to: Utilize methods for transition assessment Use assessment outcomes in IEP development Collaborate effectively with team members and other participants Match students to appropriate transition environments Students with disabilities can successfully transition into adult life when they are supported by solid planning, realistic goals, and a team of caring individuals who want to ensure the best possible outcome.

This new edition revisits the important role that school counsellors play in the personal, social, academic, and career development of students with disabilities. While school counsellors play a critical role in the planning and distribution of services to students with special needs, they may have very little training in this area. Baumberger and Harper's essential handbook has been updated throughout to help counsellors work confidently and competently with students who may require special services. The specific model they originally developed is even more useful today as counsellors document the ways in which they connect student data with appropriate interventions. The book chapters provide: * Clear explanations of recent changes shaping the legal context for working with students with disabilities * Tips to help counsellors identify students eligible for special services * Suggestions for designing realistic, measurable IEP goals * A number of case studies that walk readers through effective counselling responses * Insight into gaining parents' trust, involving families positively in schools, and counselling siblings of students with disabilities * Strategies for integrating the individual needs of students with disabilities into comprehensive school counselling programs Every school counsellor feeling the weight of accountability will welcome this guide to measurable, improved service delivery for students with special needs.

- Explores hard to see practices that support inclusion in early childhood education. - Provides insight into the nature of inclusive learning interactions for a range of marginalised groups. - Explains ways in which children feel themselves to be included. - Offers guidance on effective inclusive practices in early childhood education. - Outlines developments in inclusion and early childhood education with a focus on the Welsh context.

This book explores what learning intervention means in inclusive classroom settings. It provides educational professionals with the knowledge and skills they require to reflect on, and respond to students' individual learning needs, and enables them to choose, implement and evaluate evidence-based strategies for learning intervention. Taking an ecological perspective, and placing a capability framework at its core, the book considers how responsive teaching and educational casework combine to create intricate layers of learning intervention, and recommends tailored teaching and support strategies that can be used to address a wide variety of student learning needs. Learning intervention is thus understood in its broadest sense, and educational professionals are equipped with a range of interactive and adaptive strategies to support student learning. Chapters introduce and unpack numerous frameworks for practice, provide an extension to Response to Intervention models, and bring together key evidence-based ideas in an accessible format. Effective teaching in response to clearly defined learning needs is central to the achievement of all students. Learning Intervention will provide future and current educational professionals with the structures, knowledge, insight and skills they need to respond effectively to each and every student.

Since the mid-1980s, most developing countries launched decentralization reforms. At least sixty claim to be devolving some natural resource management functions. These reforms are lauded for their potential to increase efficiency, equity, democracy and resource sustainability in the local arena. But what is taking place in the name of decentralization? Is the discourse on decentralization being codified in law? Are the laws being translated into practice? What are the effects of the reforms that are taking place? Natural resource decentralizations provide powerful insights into these questions-for natural resource decentralizations and for decentralizations writ large.
Natural resources are a major point of conflict and cooperation between local people and national governments and elites. They are an important source of both national wealth and local livelihoods and, hence, a historical a point of struggle between rural people and elites. As such, they are a lens into the contentious relations and negotiations that constitute decentralization reforms. More significantly, because of their significance to local people, natural resources are also key to the success of decentralization reforms. They provide powers to local authorities that can help to make these authorities relevant and legitimate. But, their devolution meets resistance because it threatens central authorities and elites who fear losing income or patronage resources.
This volume queries the state and effect of the global decentralization movement through the study of natural resource decentralizations in Africa, Asia and Latin America. The case studies presented here use a comparative framework to characterize thedegree to which natural resource decentralizations can be said to be taking place and, where possible, to measure their social and environmental consequences. In general, the cases show that threats to national-level interests are producing resistance that is fettering the struggle for reform. They also, however, show that even these fettered reforms can be pulled along by local demand.
Where do we go from here? Though the particular circumstances and needs vary from country to country, the authors conclude that an important first step forward would be to implement the decentralization experiment; open public dialogues with governments, development institutions, NGOs and local communities about the appropriate division of powers; build representative locally accountable institutions; and create multiple channels that grass roots movements and individuals can use to influence the authorities who wield power over them.
This volume was previously published as a special issue of the "European Journal of Development Research."

This book argues that contemporary neuroscience compliments, extends, and challenges recent and influential posthuman and new materialist accounts of the relations between rhetoric, affect, and writing pedagogy. Drawing on cutting-edge neuro-philosophy, Comstock re-thinks both historical and current relations between writing and power around questions of affect, attention, and plasticity. In considering the uses and limits of exciting new findings from the neurobiology, this volume both theorizes and offers pedagogical strategies for teaching writing in a digital age characterized by the erosion of wonder and pervasive disaffection. Ultimately, in response to recent critiques transcendental reason and subjectivity, and related calls for the increased inclusion of multi-modal and digital writing and rhetoric, Comstock argues for an embodied pedagogy that values the substantial relations between writing and pedagogical care.

Testing and Inclusive Schooling provides a comparative perspective on seemingly incompatible global agendas and efforts to include all children in the general school system, thus reducing exclusion. With an examination of the international testing culture and the politics of inclusion currently permeating national school reforms, this book raises a critical and constructive discussion of these movements, which appear to support one another, yet simultaneously offer profound contradictions. With contributions from around the world, the book analyses the dilemma arising between reforms that urge schools to move towards a constantly higher academic level, and those who practice a politics of inclusion leading to a greater degree of student diversity. The book considers the types of problems that arise when reforms implemented at the international level are transformed into policies and practices, firmly placing global educational efforts into perspective by highlighting a range of different cases at both national and local levels. Testing and Inclusive Schooling sheds light on new possibilities for educational improvements in global and local contexts and is essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students interested in international and comparative education, assessment technologies and practices, inclusion, educational psychology and educational policy.

* Classic best-seller from one of the UK's leading SEND authors * Comprehensive but very concise and accessible coverage of the area. * The new updates make this book more relevant than ever the ever-changing landscape of special educational/additional learning/additional support needs. * Provides a unique critique of current legislation

This practical book offers a multifaceted view of cultural inclusion from the perspective of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). It provides a road map for teachers to ensure increased participation in arts and culture for children and young people with SEND, defining a series of characteristics for good practice. Chapters explore spaces as diverse as galleries, museums, theatres and performance venues and include a variety of case studies, highlighting the experiences of young people and the organisations who partner with schools. Cultural Inclusion for Young People with SEND offers a compelling call to action and is an essential resource for those who have the power to improve and support the development of future provision for children with SEND.

This book explores what learning intervention means in inclusive classroom settings. It provides educational professionals with the knowledge and skills they require to reflect on, and respond to students' individual learning needs, and enables them to choose, implement and evaluate evidence-based strategies for learning intervention. Taking an ecological perspective, and placing a capability framework at its core, the book considers how responsive teaching and educational casework combine to create intricate layers of learning intervention, and recommends tailored teaching and support strategies that can be used to address a wide variety of student learning needs. Learning intervention is thus understood in its broadest sense, and educational professionals are equipped with a range of interactive and adaptive strategies to support student learning. Chapters introduce and unpack numerous frameworks for practice, provide an extension to Response to Intervention models, and bring together key evidence-based ideas in an accessible format. Effective teaching in response to clearly defined learning needs is central to the achievement of all students. Learning Intervention will provide future and current educational professionals with the structures, knowledge, insight and skills they need to respond effectively to each and every student.

How special education used disability labels to marginalize Black students in public schools The Unteachables examines the overrepresentation of Black students in special education over the course of the twentieth century. As African American children integrated predominantly white schools, many were disproportionately labeled educable mentally retarded (EMR), learning disabled (LD), and emotionally behavioral disordered (EBD). Keith A. Mayes charts the evolution of disability categories and how these labels kept Black learners segregated in American classrooms. The civil rights and the educational disability rights movements, Mayes shows, have both collaborated and worked at cross-purposes since the beginning of school desegregation. Disability rights advocates built upon the opportunity provided by the civil rights movement to make claims about student invisibility at the level of intellectual and cognitive disabilities. Although special education ostensibly included children from all racial groups, educational disability rights advocates focused on the needs of white disabled students, while school systems used disability discourses to malign and marginalize Black students. From the 1940s to the present, social science researchers, policymakers, school administrators, and teachers have each contributed to the overrepresentation of Black students in special education. Excavating the deep-seated racism embedded in both the public school system and public policy, The Unteachables explores the discriminatory labeling of Black students, and how it indelibly contributed to special education disproportionality, to student discipline and push-out practices, and to the school-to-prison pipeline effect.

No matter what variety of educational program is used to motivate students the bottom line is knowing the people within the circle of influence are behind every effort the student faces. Our students are the future leaders, parents, workers and citizens of our society. While tests and accountability are very important; the outcome is far greater than basing achievement on individual performance on tests. Information included in More Than a Test Score, derives from educators who empower students to take ownership in their educational journey by using a variety of strategies and programs to meet the needs of the students. The strategies target academic, behavioral and social components in education. Each successful program has one common element that rises above anything else and that is the element called empowerment! Building relationships is one of the main keys to success in school and every endeavor faced by the youth of our society. Success stories are included to show how caring has made a difference with all those involved.

Bringing together international authors to examine how diversity and inclusion impact assessment in higher education, this book provides educators with the knowledge and understanding required to transform practices so that they are more equitable and inclusive of diverse learners. Assessment drives learning and determines who succeeds. Assessment for Inclusion in Higher Education is written to ensure that no student is unfairly or unnecessarily disadvantaged by the design or delivery of assessment. The chapters are structured according to three themes: 1) macro contexts of assessment for inclusion: societal and cultural perspectives; 2) meso contexts of assessment for inclusion: institutional and community perspectives; and 3) micro contexts of assessment for inclusion: educators, students and interpersonal perspectives. These three levels are used to identify new ways of mobilising the sector towards assessment for inclusion in a systematic and scholarly way. This book is essential reading for those in higher education who design and deliver assessment, as well as researchers and postgraduate students exploring assessment, equity and inclusive pedagogy. Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license

'Makes a strong contribution to the field, illuminating many issues and significant concerns.' - Mary Carlson, Special Education Teacher, Park Hill K-8 School, Denver, CO 'A unique, timeless collection that raises interesting questions about disability classification internationally.' - Wendy Dallman, Special Education Teacher, New London High School, WI Promote equal educational opportunity through improved classification practices! The identification of children for special educational services has long been a topic of debate. Are students classified accurately? Are adequate services available? Have systems designed to ensure equity instead resulted in discrimination? Disability Classification in Education offers a comprehensive analysis of current classification systems and categorical labels in the United States, the United Kingdom, and other countries. Covering specific national policies from historical, sociological, and legal perspectives, this collection of articles from a group of esteemed educational researchers identifies the disparities between different classification systems and suggests changes based on recent requirements, challenges, and trends. Aligned with NCLB and the reauthorization of IDEA 2004, this edited volume examines: The evolution of special education classification policies The relevance of existing disability classification systems Dilemmas educators face in using current classification procedures Alternatives for serving learners with special needs Approaches to developing a standardized or universal classification policy Intended to stimulate discussion and spark change, this guide helps school or district administrators and university faculty improve the professional practice of those entrusted with the development and well-being of children with disabilities.

Kids in the Middle: The Micro-Politics of Special Education takes the reader on a fascinating journey through special education in the past, present, and future. On this journey, the micro-politics of special education are seen through the eyes and experiences of children with disabilities, their parents and advocates, adult educators, and school administrators. Supplementing these perspectives to develop an understanding of special education that goes beyond its administrative and political aspects, such as the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), are scholars with expertise in special education law, administration, severe and profound disabilities, ethics, finance, teaching, and disability rights. Together, these voices explain the micro-political issues that affect how children with disabilities are educated. Kids in the Middle promotes a new model of special education to help transform special education. Instead of perpetuating a system grounded in the concepts of promises, privilege, and power, this book considers how to build a system based on caring, compassion, and the common good, a system that will elevate the status of special education children who are lost in the middle.

Disability is a widespread phenomenon, indeed a potentially universal one as life expectancies rise. Within the academic world, it has relevance for all disciplines yet is often dismissed as a niche market or someone else's domain. This collection explores how academic avoidance of disability studies and disability theory is indicative of social prejudice and highlights, conversely, how the academy can and does engage with disability studies. This innovative book brings together work in the humanities and the social sciences, and draws on the riches of cultural diversity to challenge institutional and disciplinary avoidance. Divided into three parts, the first looks at how educational institutions and systems implicitly uphold double standards, which can result in negative experiences for staff and students who are disabled. The second part explores how disability studies informs and improves a number of academic disciplines, from social work to performance arts. The final part shows how more diverse cultural engagement offers a way forward for the academy, demonstrating ways in which we can make more explicit the interdisciplinary significance of disability studies - and, by extension, disability theory, activism, experience, and culture. Disability, Avoidance and the Academy: Challenging Resistance will interest students and scholars of disability studies, education studies and cultural studies.

Imagination for Inclusion offers a reconsideration of the ways in which imagination engages and empowers learners across the education spectrum, from primary to adult levels and in all subject areas. Imagination as a natural, expedient, and exciting learning tool should be central to any approach to developing and implementing curriculum, but is increasingly undervalued as learners progress through the education system; this disregards not only imagination's potential, but its paramount place in informing truly inclusive approaches to teaching and learning. This book presents a new theory of imagination and includes discussion about its application to teaching and learning to increase the engagement of disaffected students and reinvigorate their relationships with curriculum content. Chapters include key ideas and discussion surrounding the benefits of introducing imaginative practices into the classroom for learners from a range of marginalised backgrounds, such as young people with disabilities and adult learners from socio-economically disadvantaged environments. In exploring imagination in the practice of inclusive education, the book includes chapters from researchers and practitioners in education who have fresh ideas about how learners and teachers have benefited from introducing imaginative pedagogies. The diverse collection, featuring writers with backgrounds from early childhood to adult education, will be essential reading for academics and researchers in the fields of education, inclusive education, social policy, professional development, teacher education and creativity. It will be of particular interest to current and pre-service teachers who want to develop inclusive practice and increase the engagement of all students with formal education.

Elise A. Frattura and Colleen A. Capper present a unique, step-by-step guide for schools that incorporates a continuous accountability process to help schools avoid backsliding into poor practice. Leading Beyond Equity and Accountability addresses how to reach ELL and special needs students sometimes overlooked by NCLB practices. Each concise chapter describes typical school practices that traditionally fail to serve all students and illustrates research-based practice to help address this inequity. The authors offer ways to address the discrepancies between current practice and research and include scores of vignettes from the field.This book is ideal for school principals, directors of special education, and other district administrators involved locally in the implementation of integrated services for special education, at-risk, bilingual, and other Title I students.

This book is about the inner voice of the self. It addresses the ways students, teachers, and others speak to themselves about who they are and how they fit in the world.

Even as kindness toward individuals with intellectual disabilities has increased, encountering an individual and his or her family whose lives revolve around the daily challenges that come with them is atypical, or is experienced and narrated as such, particularly by the media. Even when there is progress, making such a leap provides rhetorical cover, or at least a distraction, while intolerance regroups. And for some, it becomes less about showing love and compassion than about being able to pat oneself on the back when an interaction with a person like our son Neil is over. But it's why they don't know, or are curious but reluctant to engage, or just flat out lack empathy, that compelled us to write this book. Contributing to their misimpressions and misanthropy are portrayals of individuals with intellectual disabilities in the mass media, scant though they are. We should always be skeptical of those in my line of work who argue that the onslaught of information we take in from a widened array of sources can magically change our behavior - the so-called "hypodermic needle" theory of media effects. But these messages do help us craft our realities and develop and share our own narratives about folks with intellectual disabilities. Holding Up the Sky Together is admittedly a hybrid: part memoir, part academic analysis-a professor with more than 30 published articles and four books, all of which revolve around media analysis, looks inward. But our fervent hope is to inject a bit more realism into the national dialogue about intellectual disabilities. We are grateful for increased awareness and tolerance, for Special Olympics, and for shows like Born This Way. But there is so much more to be done.

An audio CD specially recorded for those who may not have access to a piano, this tape features 20 of the songs from the Song Book. Each song has a few introductory melodies to reacquaint the group with the tune, with accompanied male voices providing the background music to familiar, well loved songs including: 'I'm Henry the Eighth I am', 'Let's all go down the strand', 'I love a lassie', 'Roll out the barrel', 'Lilli Marlene', We'll meet again', 'Auld Lang Syne', 'Cockels & Mussels', 'My Bonnie is over the ocean'.

This key text provides essential tools for understanding legislation, policy, provision and practice for children in the early years, particularly young children with special educational needs and disability (SEND). Based on extensive research and the four areas of need as defined in the Special Educational Needs and Disability Code of Practice: 0 to 25 Years (DfE, 2015), the book charts the development of young children and their growing constructions of learning, communication, language, motor movement and emotion. Providing material that translates into practice in a straightforward and practical way, this text is packed full of personal accounts and case studies, enabling readers to appreciate what the experience of SEND in the early years means for families and professionals, and also to learn more about how they might understand and respond appropriately to a child's needs. Understanding Special Educational Needs and Disability in the Early Years will be of interest to students studying Early Years courses, families, SENDCOs, teachers and other staff supporting young children with a range of special educational needs and disabilities.

This volume explores serious challenging behavior in schools, with an emphasis on promising and research-based approaches to dealing with such behavior. Topics include what we know about (a) the nature and extent of the problem (e.g., rates of aggression, violence, and noncompliance in schools); (b) addressing extreme forms of noncompliance; (c) dealing with serious disruptive behavior; (d) violence prevention programs; (e) schoolwide response to aggression and violence; (f) issues of covert antisocial behavior (e.g., vandalism, truancy, theft); (g) functional behavioral assessment and function-based interventions; (h) legal and policy considerations in disciplining students with disabilities; and (i) promising and needed avenues for further research.