Intertextual Voices of Children, Parents, and Specialists in Individual Education Plans

Abstract

Planning support and education services requires multifaceted information from professionals, parents, and children. Despite this, educators have emphasized professional opinions in individual education plans (IEPs), whereas the perspectives of children and parents have remained inconsequential. In this study, we examine the intertextual voices of children, parents, and specialists in IEPs (N = 287) drafted in Finnish early childhood education and care (ECEC). The findings show that educators use intertextual voices to serve the following functions: 1) Creating a more multidimensional image of a child, 2) presenting evidence for their argumentation, and 3) assigning the responsibility to others. Consequently, the children, parents, and specialists were positioned as either speakers without influence, legitimators of educator's knowledge, or powerful decision-makers.

Special education documents and young children's right to be heard

“…Intertextuality refers to how texts draw upon, incorporate and recontextualize elements of other texts (Fairclough, 2003). The term intertextual voices stands for reports on perspectives other than the author (Heiskanen et al, 2021). For example, parents share information in a meeting, which the EPS recontextualize in the context of expert assessments.…”

“…In regard to research on special education documents, systematic international research reviews point to a need for further research, including studies on children's' participation in these documents (Andreasson et al, 2013; Blackwell & Rossetti, 2014; Moen et al, 2018). A study from Finnish ECEC reveals that references to children's opinions are uncommon in IEPs (Paananen & Lipponen, 2018) and that young children's voices are mostly heard on a symbolic level, without influence (Heiskanen et al, 2021). Previous research has primarily focused on older children in school, for instance, in England regarding the Educational Health Care Plan (e.g., Palikara et al, 2018; Pearlman & Michaels, 2019; Sharma, 2021) and in Norway regarding pupils' participation in special education decisions and documents (Heide & Løkås, 2020; Kolnes et al, 2021; Kolnes & Midthassel, 2022; Tveitnes, 2018).…”

Parental participation and connectedness through family social capital theory in the early childhood education community

“…Furthermore, the parents' expectations of the teaching and the quality of ECEC has been researched (Hu et al, 2017;Kekkonen, 2009;Zhang, 2015). There are also studies of parents' potential to influence and become involved in ECEC (Formosinho & Passos, 2019;Heiskanen et al, 2019), but there is a lack of studies and literature on parents' own views of participation and connectedness among the parents in the ECEC. The aim of this study is to begin to fill this gap by locating some of the factors that parents consider meaningful to them regarding their activeness in participation.…”

Setting Individual Goals for Pupils with Profound Intellectual and Multiple Disabilities—Engaging in the Activity Area-Based Curriculum Making

“…Families have often been left outside the decision-making process and decisions concerning goals might have been made before the meeting; see [17,27,28,[31][32][33]. In addition, pupils' participation has been reported as being notably sparse, especially among pupils with lower functional cognitive and social skills; see [23,29,[34][35][36][37].…”

“…In addition, Kurth and colleagues [27], who studied parents' input and power structures through 88 IEPs prepared for pupils with intellectual and developmental disabilities, revealed that parents' hopes and concerns recorded in the IEPs were formulated into goals or services only two-thirds of the time; see also [36]. The power structures could also be seen in their analysis of the wording of the IEPs, which implied that the IEP teams were composed of school personnel who gathered information about the families ("the IEP team has requested and considered the concerns of Parents(s)/Educational decision maker") [27] (p. 494).…”