Since the mid 1980s, there has been a strong national movement to include all children in general education classrooms within their neighborhood schools. This movement has met with much support; however, there are many challenges professionals encounter when implementing inclusionary programs. Although, for years, we have acknowledged the challenges and concerns teachers have, these issues continue to plague our educators. To rectify the problems, we need to specifically identify the teachers' concerns and then begin to establish methods to directly address the issues. This study investigated the attitudes of elementary school teachers towards inclusion within three rural school districts in a southwestern area of United States. Summary information was obtained, analyzed and used to make recommendations to address the teachers' concerns for implementing effective and successful inclusionary programs.
The field of special education has a historical precedent for establishing ethical practices for professionals. These practices have evolved through legal mandates, scientific inquiry, professional research, professional organizations, and consumer concerns and input. A pivotal component of special education ethics focuses on the involvement of parents and/or family members as equal partners within the special education process. The purpose of this article is to examine the ethics of parental involvement in special education from a primarily rural special education perspective. This article reviews current research to date and discusses implications of the disconnect between the ethical responsibility of assuring equal parent participation and research findings. This article provides specific recommendations for future directions in promoting parental involvement in rural special education contexts.
This study contrasted the perspectives of families of American Indian students on discipline issues to the typical classroom management practices of K-12 schools on two rural reservations. In general, school strategies used for behavior improvement focus on individual students and are micro-managed by teachers. Families were concerned that these practices may elicit resistance in children who were raised to evaluate their conduct and self-impose behaviors that meet the standards of the group. Results suggest that American Indian students respond to modeling in a context that supports independence and the practice of humility to facilitate group process.
Parental grief reactions have typically been examined in situations where parents have a child diagnosed with a major medical or mental health condition. This study used the grief and loss model as conceptualized by Kubler-Ross (1969), Lamb (1988, and Kubler-Ross and Kessler (2005) as a foundation in examining parental reactions when a child has been referred for special education services. The model was expanded to include definitions of the concepts as applied to a special education setting and incorporated additional stages. Findings suggested almost half of the sample had reactions typically associated with the initial stage of grief, which encompasses feelings of denial, shock, and anger. Implications for school-based personnel are provided.
This manuscript discusses educational practices used in a K-12 reservation school system and speculates how these practices may be culturally insensitive to American Indian students and their families in the community. Focus group discussions were conducted with seven teachers, who were students in a graduate program, and were working on a reservation school located in a rural community in the southwestern United States. The students were queried as a group during class meetings on educational practices. These discussions revealed a list of commonly used teaching methods that are incompatible with this population and reasons for the incompatibility. Since the teachers were familiar with the American Indian culture, they were able to generate a list of culturally responsive educational practices (solutions) to address each problem area. These findings have major implications for this population of students as they have one of the highest special education referral and placement rates of all minority groups.
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