The real challenge of inclusion: Confessions of a 'rabid inclusionist'

The new challenge of inclusion is to create schools in which our day-to-day efforts no longer assume that a particular text, activity, or teaching mode will “work” to support any particular student’s learning, Ms. Ferguson avers.

A year ago, a colleague told me that my work was constrained by the fact that “everyone” thought I was a “rabid inclusionist.” I was not exactly sure what he meant by “rabid inclusionist” or how he and others had arrived at the conclusion that I was one. I also found it somewhat ironic to be so labeled since I had been feeling uncomfortable with the arguments and rhetoric of both the anti-inclusionists and, increasingly, many of the inclusionists. My own efforts to figure out how to achieve “inclusion” – at least as I understood it – were causing me to question many of the assumptions and arguments of both groups.

In this article, I wish to trace the journey that led me to a different understanding of inclusion. I’ll also describe the challenges I now face – and that we all face – in trying to improve our schools.

The Limits of Our Reforms

Despite our best efforts, it was clear to my husband and me that even the possibility of “mainstreaming” was not open to our son Ian. Although mainstreaming had been a goal of the effort to change the delivery of special education services since the late 1960s, the debates never extended to a consideration of students with severe disabilities. Indeed, it was only the ”zero reject” provisions of the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (P.L. 94-142) in 1974 that afforded our son the opportunity to attend school at all – albeit a separate special education school some 20 miles and two towns away from our home. What that landmark legislation did not change, however, were underlying assumptions about schooling for students designated as “disabled.”

Since special education emerged as a separate part of public education in the decades spanning the turn of the century, the fundamental assumptions about students and learning shared by both “general” and “special” educators have not changed much. Despite periodic challenges, these assumptions have become so embedded in the culture and processes of schools that they are treated more as self-evident “truths” than as assumptions. School personnel, the families of schoolchildren, and even students themselves unquestionably believe:

that students are responsible for their own learning;
that, when students don’t learn, there is something wrong with them; and
that the job of the schools is to determine what’s wrong with as much precision as possible, so that students can be directed to the tracks, curricula, teachers, and classrooms that match their learning-ability profiles.

Even our efforts to “integrate” and later to “include” students with severe disabilities in general education failed to challenge these fundamental assumptions. Indeed, these special education reform initiatives have served more to reinforce them.

Unlike mainstreaming, which was grounded in debate about where best to provide the alternative curricular and instructional offerings that students with disabilities need, the reform initiatives of integration and later of inclusion drew much more heavily on social and political discourse. From a democratic perspective, every child has a right to a public education. For those moderately and severely disabled students who had previously been excluded from schooling on the ground that they were too disabled to benefit, the application of a civil rights framework gave them the same status as any minority group that was widely disenfranchised and discriminated against.’ The essential message of integration was to remediate social discrimination (not so much learning deficits) by ending stigmatizing and discriminatory exclusion.

We sought this more “normalized” schooling experience for Ian, advocating actively for placement in a typical public school rather than in a separate school. Unfortunately, the efforts of professional educators to balance the right of students to be educated with the still unchallenged and highly individualized deficit/remediation model of disability most often resulted in the delivery of educational services along some continuum of locations, each matched to the constellation of services believed to “fit” the identified type and amount of student deficit and disability.

For someone like our son, with multiple and severe disabilities, the result was self-contained classrooms that afforded only the briefest contact with nondisabled students. The integrationists’ promise that the mainstream would tolerate and perhaps even incorporate more differences in abilities remained largely unfulfilled. Even when some students found themselves integrated into general education classrooms, they often did not reap the promised rewards of full membership.

Yet we could see the promise of something else. Ian’s first experience in a public school was when he was about 10. He was assigned to a new self-contained classroom for “severely and profoundly handicapped” students. This new classroom was located in the “physically handicapped school,” where all students with physical disabilities were assigned because the building had long ago been made accessible, unlike most other school buildings in town.

Because we hoped he would have some involvement with nondisabled peers, we lobbied the school administration for a policy that permitted two kinds of “mainstreaming”: one kind for students who could learn alongside their peers with some extra teaching help and another kind for students like Ian, who could not learn the same things but might benefit by learning other things. It took months of discussion, but finally the grade 5 class down the hall from Ian’s self-contained room invited him to join it for the “free” times during the day when students got to pick their own games and activities. The teacher was skeptical but willing and sent students to collect him for some part of nearly every day.

One day a small group of students invited Ian to join them in a Parcheesi game. Of course, he had no experience with the game and probably didn’t grasp much of it. It could be argued, I suppose, that his lessons (at the separate school and class) on picking things up and putting them into cans offered him some ability to participate, but he would not be just another player like the other fifth-graders. The students, with no adult intervention, solved this participation problem by making him the official emptier of the cup of dice for all the players – something he could not only do, but relished. His role was critical to the game, and he got lots of opportunities to participate, since he was needed to begin every player’s turn.

Ian’s experience in Parcheesi expanded over the year to include some integration in music, lunch, and recess with these same students. More important were the lessons his participation began to teach us about the possibilities of integration that we and others had not yet fully explored, especially regarding the ways that learning, participation, and membership can mean different things for very different children in the same situation.

However it was being implemented, integration also contained a critical flaw in logic: in order to be “integrated” one must first be segregated. This simple point led to the first calls for inclusion. According to this new initiative, all students should simply be included, by right, in the opportunities and responsibilities of public schooling. Like integration, however, these early notions of inclusion focused primarily on students with moderate to severe disabilities who most often were placed along the continuum of service environments furthest from general education classrooms.

Unfortunately, neither integration nor inclusion offered much practical guidance to teachers who were engaged in the daily dynamics of teaching and learning in classrooms with these diverse students. The focus on the right to access did not provide clear direction for achieving learning outcomes in general education settings. Essentially, both of these reform efforts challenged the logic of attaching services to places in effect challenged the idea of a continuum of services. However, the absence of clear directions for how services would be delivered instead and the lack of information about what impact such a change might have on general education led some proponents to emphasize the importance of social rather than learning outcomes, especially for students with severe disabilities.² This emphasis on social outcomes certainly did nothing to end the debates.

Inclusion as ‘Pretty Good’ Integration

The inclusion initiative has generated a wide range of outcomes – some exciting and productive, others problematic and unsatisfying. As our son finished his official schooling and began his challenging journey to adult life, he enjoyed some quite successful experiences, one as a real member of a high school drama class, though he was still officially assigned to a self-contained classroom.³ Not only did he learn to “fly,” trusting others to lift him up and toss him in the air (not an easy thing for someone who has little control over his body), but he also memorized lines and delivered them during exams, learned to interact more comfortably and spontaneously with classmates and teachers, and began using more and different vocal inflections than had ever before characterized his admittedly limited verbal communications. Classmates, puzzled and perhaps put off by him at the beginning of the year, creatively incorporated him into enough of their improvisations and activities to be able to nominate him at the end of the year not only as one of the students who had shown progress, but also as one who showed promise as an actor. He didn’t garner enough votes to win the title, but that he was nominated at all showed the drama teacher “how much [the other students] came to see him as a member of the class.”

In trying to change everything, inclusion all too often seems to be leaving everything the same. But in a new place.

Ian’s experiences in drama class helped me begin to understand more fully that learning membership was the most important dimension of inclusion and that it was an extraordinarily complex phenomenon, especially within classrooms.⁴ It also prompted me to question other bits of the conventional wisdom about inclusion: Is inclusion all about place? Must it be full time? Is it okay for learning to take second priority to socialization and friendship? Does one always have to be traded for the other? Will students learn things that they can use and that will make a difference in their lives? Who will teach, and what will happen to special educators? And so on.

A three-year research effort followed, during which I learned a good deal about what inclusion is and isn’t. Perhaps the most troubling realization was that – even when students were assigned to general education classrooms and spent most (or even all) of their time there with various kinds of special education supports – their participation often fell short of the kind of social and learning membership that most proponents of inclusion envision and that Ian achieved in that one drama class. Even to casual observers, some students seemed set apart – immediately recognizable as different – not so much because of any particular impairment or disability but because of what they were doing, with whom, and how.

During the years of our research, my colleagues and I saw students walking through hallways with clipboard-bearing adults “attached” to them or sitting apart in classrooms with an adult hovering over them showing them how to use books and papers unlike any others in the class. Of ten these “Velcroed” adults were easily identifiable as “special education” teachers because the students called them by their first names while using the more formal Ms. or Mr. to refer to the general education teacher. The included students seemed in, but not of, the class. Indeed, we observed teachers who referred to particular students as “my inclusion student.” It seemed to us that these students were caught inside a bubble that teachers didn’t seem to notice but that nonetheless succeeded in keeping other students and teachers at a distance.

We also saw other students “fitting in,” following the routines, and looking more or less like other students. But their participation seemed hollow. They looked like they were doing social studies or math, but it seemed more a “going through the motions” than a real learning engagement. Maybe they were learning in the sense of remembering things, but, we wondered, did they know what they were learning? Or why? Or whether they would use this learning in their lives outside of school?

Even the protection of an individualized education program (IEP) – a key component of P.L. 94-142 and now of the updated Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) – seemed yet one more barrier to real membership. Special education teachers became “teachers without classrooms,” plying their skills in many places, following carefully designed and complicated schedules that deployed support personnel in the form of classroom assistants to teach, manage, and assist the “inclusion students” so that they could meet the goals and objectives of their IEPs. Classroom teachers struggled to understand how to “bond” with their new students.

Even more challenging was how to negotiate teaching. The peripatetic special educator usually remained primarily responsible for writing IEPs that only distantly related to the classroom teacher’s curriculum and teaching plans. At the same time the general educator would strive to assume “ownership” of the shared student’s teaching, often by following the instructions of the special educator. Special educators who were successful at moving out of their separate classrooms struggled with the sheer logistics of teaching their students in so many different places. They also struggled with whether they were teachers of students or teachers of other teachers. And some wondered what would happen to them if the general educators ever “learned how” to include students without help.

Bursting Bubbles

Gradually I came to see these examples and the experiences that have been detailed elsewhere as problematic for everyone precisely because they failed to challenge underlying assumptions about student learning differences.⁵ Too much inclusion as implemented by special education seems to succeed primarily in relocating “special” education to the general education classroom along with all the special materials, specially trained adults, and special curriculum and teaching techniques. The overriding assumptions remain unchanged and clearly communicated.

These “inclusion” students are “irregular,” even though they are in “regular” classrooms.
They need “special” stuff that the “regular” teacher is neither competent nor approved to provide.
The “special” educator is the officially designated provider of these “special” things.

In trying to change everything, inclusion all too often seems to be leaving everything the same. But in a new place.

My colleagues and I also saw lots of examples of things that did not remain the same, examples like my son’s experience in drama class. The challenge was to try to understand what made these experiences different.

Gradually I began to realize that, if inclusion is ever to mean more than pretty good integration, we special educators will have to change our tactics. To resolve the debates about roles, ownership, accountability, student learning achievements, the meaningfulness of IEPs, and the achievement of genuine student membership in the regular classroom, we must begin with the majority perspective and build the tools and strategies for achieving inclusion from the center out rather than from the most exceptional student in. Devising and defining inclusion to be about students with severe disabilities – indeed, any disabilities -seems increasingly wrongheaded to me and quite possibly doomed to fail. It can only continue to focus everyone’s attention on a small number of students and a small number of student differences, rather than on the whole group of students with their various abilities and needs.

Inclusion isn’t about eliminating the continuum of placements⁶ or even just about eliminating some locations on the continuum,⁷ though that will be one result. Nor is it about discontinuing the services that used to be attached to the various points on that continuum.⁸ Instead, a more systemic inclusion one that merges the reform and restructuring efforts of general education with special education inclusion – will disassociate the delivery of supports from places and make the full continuum of supports available to the full range of students. A more systemic inclusion will replace old practices (which presumed a relationship between ability, service, and place of delivery) with new kinds of practice (in which groups of teachers work together to provide learning supports for all students).

Inclusion isn’t about time either. Another continuing debate involves whether “all” students should spend “all” of their time in general education classrooms.⁹ One form of this discussion relies largely on extreme examples of “inappropriate” students: “Do you really mean that the student in a coma should be in a general education classroom? What about the student who holds a teacher hostage at knifepoint?” Other forms of this argument seek to emphasize the inappropriateness of the general education classroom for some students: “Without one-to-one specialized instruction the student will not learn and his or her future will be sacrificed.” Another version of the same argument points out that the resources of the general education classroom are already limited, and the addition of resource-hungry students will only further reduce what is available for regular education students.

Of course these arguments fail to note that labeled students are not always the most resource-hungry students. Indeed, when some students join general education classrooms, their need for resources diminishes. In other instances, the labeled student can bring additional resources that can be shared to other classmates’ benefit. These arguments also fail to note that the teaching in self-contained settings, as well as the resource management, can sometimes be uninspired, ordinary, and ineffective. Consider how many students with IEPs end up with exactly the same goals and objectives from year to year.

Like the debates about place, debates about time miss the point and overlook the opportunity of a shift from special education inclusion to more systemic inclusion. Every child should have the opportunity to learn in lots of different places – in small groups and large, in classrooms, in hallways, in libraries, and in a wide variety of community locations. For some parts of their schooling, some students might spend more time than others in some settings. Still, the greater the number and variety of students learning in various locations with more varied approaches and innovations, the less likely that any student will be disadvantaged by not “qualifying” for some kind of attention, support, or assistance. If all students work in a variety of school and community places, the likelihood that any particular students will be stigmatized be cause of their learning needs, interests, and preferences will be eliminated. All students will benefit from such variety in teaching approaches, locations, and supports.

The Real Challenge of Inclusion

Coming to understand the limits of inclusion as articulated by special educators was only part of my journey. I also had to spend time in general education classrooms, listening to teachers and trying to understand their struggles and efforts to change, to help me see the limits of general education as well. The general education environment, organized as it still is according to the bell curve logic of labeling and grouping by ability, may never be accommodating enough to achieve the goals of inclusion, even if special educators and their special ideas, materials, and techniques become less “special” and separate.

It seems to me that the lesson to be learned from special education’s inclusion initiative is that the real challenge is a lot harder and more complicated than we thought. Neither special nor general education alone has either the capacity or the vision to challenge and change the deep-rooted assumptions that separate and track children and youths according to presumptions about ability, achievement, and eventual social contribution. Meaningful change will require nothing less than a joint effort to reinvent schools to be more accommodating to all dimensions of human diversity. It will also require that the purposes and processes of these reinvented schools be organized not so much to make sure that students learn and develop on the basis of their own abilities and talents, but rather to make sure that all children are prepared to participate in the benefits of their communities so that others in that community care enough about what happens to them to value them as members.¹⁰

No longer must the opportunity to participate in life wait until some standard of “normalcy” is reached.

My own journey toward challenging these assumptions was greatly assisted by the faculty of one of the elementary schools in our research study on inclusion. Most of our research had really centered on the perspectives of special educators. While we talked with many other people in the schools, our access had always been through the special educator who was trying to move out into the school. Finally, however, we began to shift our attention to the whole school through the eyes of all its members. For me, it was a shift from special education research to educational research that also happened to “include” special education teachers and students. I began to learn the language of schooling, became able to “talk education” rather than just talk special education, and sought that same bilingualism for my students and colleagues through a series of reframed research and demonstration projects.

Learning about various reform agendas within education that support and facilitate systemic inclusion enormously reassured and encouraged me, and I have begun yo refocus my efforts toward nurturing them. For example, in response to the changing demands of work and community life in the 21st century, some initiatives within general education reform and restructuring are focusing on students’ understanding and use of their own learning rather than on whether or not they can recall information during tests. Employers and community leaders want citizens who are active learners and collaborators as well as individuals who possess the personal confidence and ability to contribute to a changing society.¹¹

In response to these broader social demands, teachers at all levels of schooling are trying to rethink curriculum. They are looking for ways to help students develop habits of learning that will serve them long after formal schooling ends. In pursuit of this goal, they are moving from seeking to cover a large number of “facts” to exploring in more depth a smaller number of topics of interest and relevance to students.¹² An important aspect of this curriculum shift is that not all students will learn exactly the same things, even with in the same lesson or activity.

These changes in general education are being pursued because of increasing social complexity and student diversity. Educators are less and less confident that learning one standard, “official” curriculum will help students achieve the kind of competence they need to lead satisfactory lives. Greater numbers of educators are concerned not so much that some bit of content knowledge is learned, but rather that students use their learning in ways that make a difference in their lives outside of school. The difficulty in making this happen in classrooms is that students bring with them all manner of differences that teachers must take into consideration. These include different abilities, of course, but also different interests, different family lifestyles, and different preferences about schools and learning. Students’ linguistic backgrounds, socioeconomic status, and cultural heritage must also be considered when making curriculum and teaching decisions. Finally, some students have different ways of thinking and knowing – sometimes emphasizing language, sometimes motor learning, sometimes artistic intelligence, and so on.¹³

To general education teachers who are experimenting with these kinds of curricular and teaching reforms, students with official disabilities become different in degree rather than in type. Tailoring the learning event for them might require adjustments or supports not needed by some other students. But the essential process remains the same for all. Fear of “watering down” the official curriculum remains only for those classrooms that have not responded to the need for more systemic reform of curriculum and teaching. Classrooms and teachers seriously engaged in preparing students for the future have already expanded and enriched the curriculum to respond both to the demands for broader student outcomes and to the different interests, purposes, and abilities of each student.

A New Inclusion Initiative

These are just a few of the ongoing discussions within general education. There are many more. Some, like the pressure to articulate new national standards and benchmarks, are less clearly supportive of student diversity. Reform initiatives are emerging from all parts of the system from the efforts of small groups of teachers to those of state and federal policy makers. Often these various pressures for change contradict one another, but in the end all will have to be accommodated, understood, and transformed into a single whole.

Changing schools at all, never mind actually improving them, is an extraordinarily complex and arduous task. Public education is like a web: each strand touches many others, depending upon as well as providing support for the entire structure. Any change, even a small one, ripples through the web, sometimes strengthening, sometimes weakening the whole. When many things change at once, it is a time of both great risk and great energy.

Public education is in just such an exciting period of change. Perhaps for the first time, changes in all parts of the system can begin to converge. My own journey to understand inclusion has led me to propose my own definition of inclusion:

Inclusion is a process of meshing general and special education reform initiatives and strategies in order to achieve a unified system of public education that incorporates all children and youths as active, fully participating members of the school community; that views diversity as the norm; and that ensures a high-quality education for each student by providing meaningful curriculum, effective teaching, and necessary supports for each student.

Perhaps there are “rabid inclusionists,” foaming at the mouth over some specific change and having but little awareness of the challenge their agenda represents to fundamental assumptions. I suppose that there are also “rabid separatists,” just as fanatically insisting on preserving the present system and similarly unaware of the fundamental assumptions that influence their positions.

My own journey led me to a different destination. It led me to take the risk of admitting that I have changed my mind about many things. (Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that I have not so much “changed” my mind as “clarified” and expanded my thinking.) I am still an advocate for inclusion, but now I understand it to mean much more than I believed it meant when I first began to study and experience it through my son. As I and others who share this broader understanding work to create genuinely inclusive schools, we will be encouraging people in schools, on every strand of the complex web, to change in three directions.

The first shift involves moving away from schools that are structured and organized according to ability and toward schools that are structured around student diversity and that accommodate many different ways of organizing students for learning. This shift will also require teachers with different abilities and talents to work together to create a wide array of learning opportunities.¹⁴

The second shift involves moving away from teaching approaches that emphasize the teacher as disseminator of content that students must retain and toward approaches that emphasize the role of the learner in creating knowledge, competence, and the ability to pursue further learning. There is a good deal of literature that seeks to blend various theories of teaching and learning in to flexible and creative approaches that will accomplish these ends. The strength of these approaches is that they begin with an appreciation of student differences that can be stretched comfortably to incorporate the differences of disability and the effective teaching technology created by special educators.¹⁵

The third shift involves changing our view of the schools’ role from one of providing educational services to one of providing educational supports for learning. This shift will occur naturally as a consequence of the changes in teaching demanded by diversity. Valuing diversity and difference, rather than trying to change or diminish it so that everyone fits some ideal of similarity, leads to the realization that we can support students in their efforts to become active members of their communities. No longer must the opportunity to participate in life wait until some standard of “normalcy” or similarity is reached. A focus on the support of learning also encourages a shift from viewing difference or disability in terms of individual limitations to a focus on environmental constraints. Perhaps the most important feature of support as a concept for schooling is that it is grounded in the perspective of the person receiving it, not the person providing it.¹⁶

The new challenge of inclusion is to create schools in which our day-to-day efforts no longer assume that a particular text, activity, or teaching mode will “work” to support any particular student’s learning. Typical classrooms will include students with more and more kinds of differences. The learning enterprise of reinvented inclusive schools will be a constant conversation involving students, teachers, other school personnel, families, and community members, all working to construct learning, to document accomplishments, and to adjust supports. About this kind of inclusion I can be very rabid indeed.

John Gliedman and William Roth, The Unexpected Minority: Handicapped Children in America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1980).
Jeff Strully and Cindy Strully, “Friendship as an Educational Goal,” in Susan Stainback, William Stainback, and Marsha Forest, eds., Educating All Students in the Mainstream of Regular Education (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1989), pp. 59-68.
Dianne L. Ferguson et al., “Figuring Out What to Do with Grownups: How Teachers Make Inclusion ‘Work’ for Students with Disabilities,” Journal of the Association for Persons with Severe Handicaps, vol. 17, 1993, pp. 218-26.
Dianne L. Ferguson, “Is Communication Really the Point? Some Thoughts on Interventions and Membership,” Mental Retardation, vol. 32, no. 1, 1994, pp. 7-18.
Dianne L. Ferguson, Christopher Willis, and Gwen Meyer, “Widening the Stream: Ways to Think About Including Exceptions in Schools,” in Donna H. Lear and Fredda Brown, eds., People with Disabilities Who Challenge the System (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, forthcoming); and Dianne L. Ferguson and Gwen Meyer, “Creating Together the Tools to Reinvent Schools,” in Michael Berres, Peter Knoblock, Dianne L. Ferguson, and Connie Woods, eds., Restructuring Schools for All Children (New York: Teachers College Press, forthcoming).
Michael Giangreco et al.,” I’ve Counted on Jon’: Transformational Experiences of Teachers Educating Students with Disabilities,” Exceptional Children, vol. 59, 1993, pp. 359-72; and Marlene Pugach and Stephen Lilly, “Reconceptualizing Support Services for Classroom Teachers: Implications for Teacher Education,” Journal of Teacher Education, vol. 35, no. 5, 1984, pp. 48-55.
Russell Gersten and John Woodward, “Rethinking the Regular Education Initiative: Focus on the Classroom Teacher,” Remedial and Special Education, vol. 11, no. 3, 1990, pp. 7-16.
Douglas Fuchs and Lynn S. Fuchs, “Inclusive Schools Movement and the Radicalization of Special Education Reform,” Exceptional Children, vol. 60, 1994, pp. 294-309.
Lou Brown et al., “How Much Time Should Students with Severe Intellectual Disabilities Spend in Regular Education Classrooms and Elsewhere?,” Journal of the Association of Persons with Severe Handicaps, vol. 16, 1991, pp. 39-47; and William Stainback, Susan Stainback, and Jeanette S. Moravec, “Using Curriculum to Build Inclusive Classrooms,” in Susan Stainback and William Stainback, eds., Curriculum Considerations in Inclusive Classrooms: Facilitating Learning for All Students (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1992), pp. 65-84.
Dianne L Ferguson, “Bursting Bubbles: Marrying General and Special Education Reforms,” in Berres, Knoblock, Ferguson, and Woods, op. cit.; and Terry Astuto et al., Roots of Reform: Challenging the Assumptions That Control Change in Education (Bloomington, Ind.: Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation, 1994).
See, for example, Anthony D. Carnevale, Leila J. Gainer, and Ann S. Meltzer, The Essential Skills Employers Want (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1990).
David T. Conley, Roadmap to Restructuring: Policies, Practices, and the Emerging Visions of Schooling (Eugene: ERIC Clearinghouse on Educational Management, University of Oregon, 1993); Robin Fogarty, “Ten Ways to Integrate Curriculum,” Educational Leadership, October 1991, pp. 61-65; Jacqueline G. Brooks and Martin Brooks, In Search of Understanding: The Case for Constructivist Classrooms (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1993); Nel Noddings, “Excellence as a Guide to Educational Conversations,” Teachers College Record, vol. 94, 1993, pp. 730-43; Theodore Sizer, Horace’s School Redesigning the American School (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1992); and Grant Wiggins, “The Futility of Trying to Teach Everything of Importance,” Educational Leadership, November 1989, pp. 44-59.
Thomas Armstrong, Multiple Intelligences in the Classroom (Alexandria, Va.: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development, 1994); Howard Gardner, Multiple Intelligences: The Theory in Practice (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and Gaea Leinhardt, “What Research on Learning Tells Us About Teaching,” Educational Leadership, April 1992, pp. 20-25.
Linda Darling-Hammond, “Reframing the School Reform Agenda: Developing Capacity for School Transformation,” Phi Delta Kappan, June 1993, pp. 753-61; Jeannie Oakes and Martin Lipton, “Detracking Schools: Early Lessons from the Field,” Phi Delta Kappan, February 1992, pp. 448-54; and Thomas M. Skrtic, Behind Special Education: A Critical Analysis of Professional Culture and School Organization (Denver: Love Publishing, 1991).
Conley, op. cit.; Robin Fogarty, The Mindful School: How to Integrate the Curricula (Palatine, 111.: IRI/Skylight Publishing, 1991); Brooks and Brooks, op. cit.; Nel Noddings, The Challenge to Care in Schools (New York: Teachers College Press, 1992); Sizer, op. cit.; and Wiggins, op. cit.
Philip M. Ferguson et al., “Supported Community Life: Disability Policy and the Renewal of Mediating Structures,” Journal of Disability Policy, vol. 1, no. 1,1990, pp. 9-35; and Michael W. Smull and G. Thomas Bellamy, “Community Services for Adults with Disabilities: Policy Challenges in the Emerging Support Paradigm,” in Luanna Meyer, Charles A. Peck, and Lou Brown, eds., Critical Issues in the Lives of People with Severe Disabilities (Baltimore: Paul H. Brookes, 1991), pp. 5.