Schools, teachers, and students are increasingly able to access and apply assistive technology to enhance inclusion within mainstream classrooms. To ensure that a classroom is truly inclusive, the teacher and other professionals involved in supporting children with disability using assistive technology require appropriate knowledge and skills to bring potential to reality. There are many successful examples of assistive technology successfully embedding into the practices of inclusive setting, but there is still some way to go to ensure this is a seamless approach. There are many benefits and difficulties associated with adopting assistive technology to support students with disability, particularly in developing countries. While the challenges may be great, the potential for assistive technology to impact significantly on the educational, social, and recreational outcomes for students with disability in inclusive classrooms is immense.
Article
Assistive Technology to Enhance Inclusive Education
Dianne Chambers
Article
Differentiated Instruction and Inclusive Schooling
Diana Lawrence-Brown
Differentiated instruction encompasses a wide range of responsive pedagogies, including individualized types and levels of curricula, teaching methods, materials, and assessment strategies. It has at its roots the impetus for effective inclusive schooling, providing supports directly within general education classrooms for students with the full range of exceptionalities (both significant disabilities and giftedness) and other diverse educational characteristics such as cultural and linguistic background and socioeconomic status. To effectively include students with higher levels of need, comparable levels of supports follow the student from the special education setting to the general education classroom. This enriched level of support in the general education classroom benefits not only students with disabilities, but the class as a whole.
The legal and ethical bases for inclusive schooling are connected with various civil rights movements (including race, disability, culture and language, gender); it can be viewed as a response to segregated schooling (and denial of schooling altogether). Schools frequently remove students when traditional educational programs fail, adding on separate programs rather than rectifying the existing system. Such special programs have been routinely promulgated without substantial evidence of their effectiveness over supportive general education classrooms (either for segregated students or for their unlabeled general education peers).
Important aspects of differentiated instruction and inclusive schooling include multilevel instruction; authentic and culturally responsive curricula, methods, and assessment; universal design for learning; assistive and instructional technologies; positive behavioral supports; and a collaborative team approach to instructional decision-making and delivery.
Differentiated instruction and effective inclusive schooling are vital for equitable access to educational opportunities, bringing more responsive curricula, methods, and perspectives to increasingly diverse classrooms and schools.
Article
Engineering Education and Social Justice
Jon A. Leydens, Juan C. Lucena, and Donna M. Riley
Engineering education and social (in)justice are connected in complex ways. Research indicates that while issues of social (in)justice are inherent in engineering practice, they are often invisible in engineering education. The mechanism by which social justice is rendered invisible involves mindsets and ideologies in engineering and engineering education. Hence, innovative strategies and practices need to address these mindsets and ideologies, rendering social justice visible in engineering education. Imagined future scenarios for social justice in engineering education indicate how social justice could be readily marginalized or accentuated, with accompanying detriments or benefits.
Article
Moral Education and Technology
Paul Farber and Dini Metro-Roland
Moral education and technology seem to represent two fundamentally different kinds of concern and domains of inquiry. But these domains are fused in educational practice. Teaching as a fundamental human endeavor and form of activity has been a central component of human cultural evolution and regeneration from the earliest human social groupings. As a distinctive form of activity, teaching braids together ethical and instrumental norms and values. The modern, global institution of schooling has added layers of institutional support, constraint, and governance on the teaching it structures as well as increased scrutiny of the ethical and instrumental values in play; schooling is in effect a kind of moral technology for advancing certain norms and values in an efficient way. At present, technological developments with modern society make possible new forms of teaching and learning that likewise warrant scrutiny as they impact the ethical and instrumental ends of teaching and instructional practices today.
Article
Propaganda and Public Pedagogy
Phil Graham
Propaganda and public pedagogy are rarely juxtaposed in education research contexts. However, the two terms are closely related and require joint consideration for the broader future of critical education research. The terms describe state-based educational processes conducted on a mass scale and are in fact describing “the same thing” to a large degree. Both are forms of mass rhetoric that were swiftly tempered to industrial strength in the early 20th century during World War I. Since then, propaganda has come to be treated as a cultural derogatory, an inherently oppressive force, while public pedagogy has come to be framed as an unmitigated force for good. However, both are nationalist projects that involve the school in both positive and negative ways.
Ultimately, this contribution is about methods, methodology, and axiology (the logic of values). By juxtaposing propaganda and public pedagogy as historically isomorphic terms, and framing both as state-based rhetorics designed to propagate specific habits, actions, attitudes, and understandings en masse, it becomes evident that if public pedagogy is to become an applied research agenda it requires applied methods and methodologies, along with conscious and positive normative theses in respect of purpose. The methods and methodologies, and in many important cases the axiologies developed by the propagandists, provide a rich source for assessment and potential application in the field of public pedagogical research. At some level that suggests a Faustian bargain: surely, the immensely negative connotations of the term “propaganda” preclude the application of its methods and values in the practice of public pedagogic research. Yet if public pedagogy is something that educators aspire to do rather than merely analyze or seek to understand, then the methods of the propagandists are, if nothing else, the most obvious starting point.
