The United States and other developed countries have acknowledged and supported the rights of students with disabilities to receive an appropriate education for decades. The role of the principal and school leader in overseeing educational programs and ensuring these entitlements become a reality for students with disabilities has taken center stage. Discussions related to principals and school leaders fulfilling the roles of leader and manager on behalf of students with disabilities linked the complementary disciplines of general and special education leadership. The leadership approach they adopted led to debates surrounding the concept of inclusion and the provision of an inclusive education on behalf of students with disabilities.
Current definitions of inclusive education are typically linked to concepts of equity, social justice, and recognition of the student’s civil right to be granted full membership in all aspects of the educational enterprise. The processes involved in creating an inclusive school environment require principals and school leaders to examine the values and beliefs that influence their own thinking and behaviors before they can communicate a vision of inclusion. Principals and school leaders must be willing to act in concert with others to create the type of school culture that unanimously and positively responds to difference so every student can achieve full membership and feel welcomed and valued.
Article
Barbara Pazey and Bertina Combes
Article
In 2013, the 18th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China initiated fundamental reforms of the Matriculation English as a Foreign Language Tests (the Matriculation EFL Tests hereafter) in order to solve problems in college admissions and K–12 education. Under the guidance of the Ministry of Education, provinces announced their specific reform plans. This round of reforms features holding the Matriculation EFL Tests multiple times per year and involving nongovernment testing companies in test development and administration. This indicates China is on the way to aligning with international educational assessment standards and practices. Meanwhile, some proposed reforms are unexpectedly deviating from the longstanding English fever and have triggered heated debates and disputes in China. Proposed reforms of the Matriculation EFL Tests reflect China’s current language policy and the trend of de-Westernization. These reforms will have both positive and negative influences on test development, the K–12 EFL curriculum, instruction, and learning. Social impacts and potential influences on social justice caused by this round of reforms also deserve attention.
Article
David Connor and Louis Olander
Ideological disputes about what human differences constitute disabilities undergird two very distinct positions that are known as medical and social models of disability. The positions significantly impact how inclusive education is envisioned and enacted, with proponents of each model holding fast to what they believe is “best” for students. Related areas of significant dissension among the two viewpoints include: (a) the concept of disability and “appropriate” placement of students deemed disabled, (b) the purpose of schools, (c) the nature of teaching and learning, (d) a teacher’s roles, (e) the notion of student success and failure, and (f) perceptions of social justice and disability. These interconnected and sometimes overlapping areas convey how medical or social models of inclusive education can vary dramatically, depending upon an educator’s general ideological disposition toward disability or difference.
Article
Vivian Maria Vasquez
Changing student demographics, globalization, and flows of people resulting in classrooms where students have variable linguistic repertoire, in combination with new technologies, has resulted in new definitions of what it means to be literate and how to teach literacy. Today, more than ever, we need frameworks for literacy teaching and learning that can withstand such shifting conditions across time, space, place, and circumstance, and thrive in challenging conditions. Critical literacy is a theoretical and practical framework that can readily take on such challenges creating spaces for literacy work that can contribute to creating a more critically informed and just world. It begins with the roots of critical literacy and the Frankfurt School from the 1920s along with the work of Paulo Freire in the late 1940s (McLaren, 1999; Morrell, 2008) and ends with new directions in the field of critical literacy including finding new ways to engage with multimodalities and new technologies, engaging with spatiality- and place-based pedagogies, and working across the curriculum in the content areas in multilingual settings. Theoretical orientations and critical literacy practices are used around the globe along with models that have been adopted in various state jurisdictions such as Ontario, in Canada, and Queensland, in Australia.
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Melisa Cahnmann-Taylor and Lynn Sanders-Bustle
There are several interrelated themes in arts-informed pedagogies and teacher preparation: (1) the arts as tools to improve students’ academic achievement in other content areas such as math, science, social studies, language arts, and foreign language; (2) the arts as holistic and dynamic process for meaning-making; (3) the arts for teachers’ own professional identity and satisfaction (e.g., for teacher reflection, teacher retention, job satisfaction, and relationship-building); and (4) the arts for social change, social justice, and education advocacy work. There are a series of key questions and concerns regarding where, how, and why arts-informed teacher education practices are used, who uses them, and to what end.
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Floyd Beachum
The words diversity and multiculturalism are ubiquitous in the contemporary educational lexicon. They are certainly hallmarks in many educational conversations. Recent trials, tribulations, and triumphs in the areas of diversity and multiculturalism are not without historical context or educational precedent. The evolution of diversity and multiculturalism in the United States has been and continues to be a struggle. The lofty language that is immortalized in the United States Constitution and the Pledge of Allegiance promises all U.S. citizens the right to life, liberty, safety, happiness, and so forth. However, this promise has not always been kept for all U.S. citizens. The full recognition of one’s rights in the United States has depended on one’s race/ethnicity, gender, social class, religious beliefs, ability status, and so forth. Consequently, the United States has also denied, ostracized, and oppressed groups of people based on these same aforementioned identities (e.g., slavery, segregation, sexism, etc.). This resulted in amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the American Civil Rights Movement, and the Women’s Rights Movement, as well as others. These movements were no panacea; they simply weakened overt manifestations of bias, and allowed for more nuanced, covert, and/or institutionalized forms of bias. The elimination of overt bias also creates the illusion of success. People begin to think that the problems are solved because they are not obvious anymore. This highlights the need for diversity and multiculturalism in order to identify and expose covert bias and remind people that the struggles of the past are not just part of history; they undergird the problems we face today (e.g., achievement gaps, disproportionate discipline, and misidentification for special education).
Ultimately, diversity/multiculturalism has the ability to provide a kind of interconnectedness among people by having them face the perplexing problems of equity, equality, social identity, and personal philosophy. Embracing and understanding diversity/multiculturalism is the key to unlocking its transformational power.
Article
Michelle Bae-Dimitriadis
Decolonizing girlhood illuminates an attempt to refuse and recover the pathological representation of Indigenous refugee girls by going beyond the discourse of the Western construction of girlhood. It takes an anticolonial, critical race feminist approach to the understanding of girlhood that challenges the intersectional, racialized exclusion and the deficit representations of Indigenous refugee girls, which are often reinforced by humanitarian schemes of embodied vulnerability. The digital visual fiction stories created by Karen tribe refugee girls in a media arts summer workshop reposition their presence by creating spaces in which they can speak their own desires, share their imaginings, and portray their struggles. Through this experience, these girls challenge colonial social realities and the fantasies of democracy. Ultimately, their futuristic visual fiction acts as a form of counter-storytelling that illustrates an alternative curriculum space and flips the hegemonic script for empowerment.
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Alexandra C. Gunn
Formal early childhood education is a relatively modern institution to which increasing numbers of children are routinely exposed. Since the modern invention of childhood, the early childhood years have been increasingly established as a site for public and private investment in the name of individual and community development, the achievement of educational success, increased human productivity, and ultimately labor market productivity and excellence. As various forms of early childhood education have developed around the world, each has been imbued with values, perspectives, norms, and standards of its pioneers. They have also drawn upon and reinforced certain truths, knowledges, practices, and expectations about children, childhood, education, and society. As microcosms of society whose inhabitants are largely novice members of the communities of which they are part, teachers in early childhood education are routinely addressing issues of exclusion, injustice, and inequity with children and families. French historian and poststructural philosopher Michel Foucault’s (1926–1984) interests in the nexus of power-knowledge-truth and its consequences for life offer avenues for comprehending how modern institutions, such as systems of early childhood education, invest in and bring about certain forms of knowledge and practice. His methods of genealogical inquiry and discourse analysis make visible the workings of power as it moves on, in, and through human bodies. The perspectives made visible by Foucauldian analyses show how techniques, developed and applied within institutions, form humans in particular ways. Thus, it is possible to see the interplay between power-truth-knowledge, how things come to be, and how they may change.
Article
Zeus Leonardo
Education is both a racial and class project. This means that a multidimensional theory of educational stratification is necessary if an accurate appraisal of schooling’s modern appearance in capitalist, racialized states is central to the research endeavor. Critiques of capitalism are found in critical pedagogy and Marxist studies of education since the 1970s, which argue that schooling’s intellectual division of labor mirrors the material structures of a capitalist division of labor. In addition, the advent of critical race theory in education since 1995 provides compelling evidence that schooling is not only an ideological apparatus of the capitalist state but also equally of the racist state. Together, developing a critical class theory and critical race theory of education offers a more complete explanation of educational stratification in order to understand its processes and perhaps ways to intervene in them.
Article
Elisa Gavari Starkie and Paula Tenca Sidotti
The democratization of university access made possible the arrival of new university students from different backgrounds. At this time access was opened to all individuals coming from all different backgrounds. The new student population had a strong impact on the university life. Some university professors complained that although some students were talented, they could not communicate in complex scenarios. The article will focus on the theoretical principles that inspired the democratic curriculum and the psychological approach that allowed new individual cognitive perspectives and a new vision of the university population. At this time the education principles by Freire and Dewey generated an impulse for democratic education. From this framework the article will analyze the research and educational principles that inspired the Writing Across Curriculums (WAC) movement and the supplementary Writing in the Disciplines (WID). Both programs were very successful and led to the establishment of the Writing Academic Centers that since then and until now guarantee a democratic university education. These centers have fostered WAC, which developed into WID. The need to address global classrooms has inspired Writing Across the Communities, which considers race and social justice within language programs. The university scientific approach is aligned with the international organization’s objectives for the 20th century.
Article
Jeff Share, Tatevik Mamikonyan, and Eduardo Lopez
Democracy in the digital networked age of “fake news” and “alternative facts” requires new literacy skills and critical awareness to read, write, and use media and technology to empower civic participation and social transformation. Unfortunately, not many educators have been prepared to teach students how to think critically with and about the media and technology that engulf us. Across the globe there is a growing movement to develop media and information literacy curriculum (UNESCO) and train teachers in media education (e-Media Education Lab), but these attempts are limited and in danger of co-optation by the faster growing, better financed, and less critical education and information technology corporations. It is essential to develop a critical response to the new information communication technologies, artificial intelligence, and algorithms that are embedded in all aspects of society. The possibilities and limitations are vast for teaching educators to enter K-12 classrooms and teach their students to use various media, critically question all types of texts, challenge problematic representations, and create alternative messages. Through applying a critical media literacy framework that has evolved from cultural studies and critical pedagogy, students at all grade levels can learn to critically analyze the messages and create their own alternative media. The voices of teachers engaging in this work can provide pragmatic insight into the potential and challenges of putting the theory into practice in K-12 public schools.
Article
Racheal Banda, Ganiva Reyes, and Blanca Caldas
Curricula of care and radical love encompass a collective and communal responsibility for education practitioners, leaders, and researchers to meet the needs of the historically marginalized communities they serve and of their work toward social change. These articulations are largely drawn from the ontologies, ways of knowing, communal practices, and traditions of the Global South as articulated by Black and Chicana/Latina women. Starting in the 1980s, Nel Noddings’ work around ethics of care sparked philosophical discussions of care within the education field. Educational scholars, including critical scholars of color, have been influenced by care theories that emphasize care as rooted in relationships and everyday interactions between educators and students. Feminists of color and critical education scholars have expanded theories of care in education by pointing out the ways in which race and other social identifiers impact interpretations of care. Even before the work of current care theorists, by the turn of the twentieth century, Anna Julia Cooper argued for a love-politic that decentered romantic love and instead centered a self-determining and emancipatory form of love. This opened a pathway for a radical, Black feminist conceptualization of love. Black feminist scholars have since further developed and expanded upon conceptualizations of a love-politic contributing to a more robust understanding of care and love.
Latina/Chicana feminists have also contributed to onto-theoretical insights that highlight how care is a necessity toward critical understandings, personal connections, self-work, and movement building. Concepts such as convivencia and cariño from Latina/Chicana feminists demonstrate how care is co-constructed through relationship building over time and through the sharing of life experiences. Moreover, practices like othermothering and radical love further reveal how intimate and personal interactions are necessary for critical self-growth and communal love toward liberation. From this view, to love and care in ways that advance justice in education requires an expansive approach to curriculum and pedagogy, which includes spaces beyond classroom walls like the home, families, communities, culture, and non-school organizations. Taken together, scholars, educators, and other stakeholders in education may find use in drawing upon feminist of color conceptions and literature of care and love to reimagine transformative possibilities for education research, policy, practice, and curriculum.
Article
Jeremy Garcia, Valerie Shirley, and Sandy Grande
Red Praxis centers Indigenous sovereignty rooted in epistemological and ontological orientations to place—to land. Applying Red Praxis requires teachers to understand, in greater detail, the ways in which settler and Indigenous ontologies represent not only different but also competing ways of being in the world. Red Praxis asks teachers to reconceptualize an intellectual space that reaffirms, reclaims, and (re)stories our relations to land as a decolonial practice and pedagogy of refusal. Red Praxis calls for Indigenous teachers and community educators to ground teaching in decolonial practices and aims to regenerate a sense of hope in rebuilding Indigenous communities. The exigencies of Red Praxis can be found within Indigenous teachers’ application of critical Indigenous theories and ongoing acknowledgement and protection of our relationship to land—the origin for our claim to exist as Indigenous peoples. In doing so, Red Praxis is about creating curriculum and enacting pedagogy that makes evident and mitigates the impact of settler colonialism on Indigenous communities’ knowledge systems and ways of being.
Red Praxis is an extension of Sandy Grande’s theory and model of Red pedagogy. Grande proposed the pedagogical framework of Red pedagogy to rethink the ways in which teaching can confront the challenges Indigenous communities face in the 21st century. Red pedagogy is about critically analyzing the material realities resulting from the settler colonial project and creating decolonial spaces of resistance, hope, self-determination, and transformative possibility in Indigenous education. In addition to addressing structural issues, it is important for Indigenous teachers to address what is taught in schools—the curriculum—as well as how it is taught—pedagogy—as key factors in revitalizing and transforming Indigenous education.
Article
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
Lily Orland-Barak and Evgenia Lavrenteva
The global move toward advanced strategic, constructivist, and sociocultural orientations to student teacher learning is reflected in the stated vision, mission, and curricula of local teacher education contexts worldwide. Six major themes in teacher education programs worldwide are integral to this vision: the establishment of school–community–university partnerships; bringing more of school practice focused on pupil learning into the preparation of future teachers; a shift from a focus on teaching and curriculum to a focus on learning and learners; the inclusion of activities that promote reflective practice and the development of the teacher-as-researcher; the design of academic and school spaces for fostering teacher learning that attends to social justice and inclusion; and the preparation of teacher educators and the provision of mentoring frameworks to support student teacher learning. Among the challenges shared across contexts is the need to strengthen partnerships in education, structure stable mentoring frameworks, adopt a more focused approach to student teacher placement, and better articulate expectations for student teaching. Notwithstanding these challenges, promising directions include the establishment of more meaningful links between universities, schools, and communities; developing programs that deal with authentic teacher preparation through injury- and-research-informed clinical practice, and providing mentoring models that involve different community stakeholders.
