Teaching Safety, Compliance, and Critical Thinking in Special Education Classrooms

Special educators are tasked with teaching students with disabilities to understand and adhere to social norms for their own safety and acceptance in society. This chapter explores ways special educators can teach critical thinking alongside these social and cultural norms in order to support student agency. One special educator shares her experiences working with students with disabilities in urban public schools as she grapples with teaching her students what they need to know to be safe, while also teaching to challenge oppressive social and behavioral expectations.

The Push and Pull of Inclusive Practices in Contemporary Public Schooling

In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay, Carrie C. Snow reflects on her experiences as both a recipient of pull-out services as a young child and as a special educator. She highlights the complex nature of special education services and how their provision is rife with gray areas. Negotiating various tensions in decision-making around whether to provide push-in or pull-out services to students with special educational needs, special educators can embrace this sense of gray to create and sustain flexible practices that forefront quality learning for their students. She discusses ways that pull-out services for students with distinct needs can work to support their learning, as well as ways they do not. For students to cultivate a trust for schooling, feel an interconnectedness, and experience joy in learning, teachers’ decisions around special education service delivery can never be cut and dried.

Instagram as a Special Educator Professional Development Tool: A Guide to Teachergram

Instagram is a free, online social media application that facilitates social networking. Since Instagram is image dependent, educators create visuals accompanied by captions of up to 2,200 characters. By adding specific hashtags to captions, educator posts are curated by the algorithm into a broad community of practice, colloquially known as “Teachergram.” As a technology-facilitated PD tool, Teachergram lends itself to many of the characteristics of high quality and sustainable professional development (PD). In this paper, we focus on how Instagram can be used as a PD tool that supports collaboration, reflection, and feedback loops of educators. We focus on how the unique characteristics of Teachergram lead to the creation of communities and affinity spaces, aligned with existing PD frameworks, built to support the retention of special education teachers and related service providers.

Students With Emotional and Behavioral Disorders as Tutors

Teachers implementing tutoring programs in which their students with emotional and behavioral disorders (EBD) serve as cross-age tutors (CAT-EBD) for younger students in need of additional instruction have reported improvements in academic, social-emotional, and behavioral skills for both tutees and tutors. This practitioner-lead article features firsthand experiences and insights from a special educator implementing such a program. In addition to identifying the perceived strengths, challenges, and overall outcomes of a CAT-EBD program, the experiences within the case study highlight connections and recommendations for effective planning, training, supervising, and supporting of students with EBD as tutors. Practical strategies are provided in support of the challenges identified in implementing and sustaining a CAT-EBD program.

Natalia Han-Ilgiewicz’s Concept of Rehabilitation and its Contemporary Interpretation

The aim of this article is to analyse the concept of social rehabilitation developed by Natalia Han-Ilgiewicz, who went down in the history of Polish science as an outstanding and special educator. Her achievements are cited not only by educators: Researchers in juvenile criminology, child psychology and psychiatry also refer to her research in the area of the social maladjustment/derailment of children and adolescents. She was a brilliant methodologist of revalidation work, a talented writer and academic teacher. The article is based on the method of content analysis. Based on selected sources from the literature on the subject, the author explores the concept of social rehabilitation described and practised by Natalia Han-Ilgiewicz and determines its meaning in contemporary social rehabilitation pedagogy.

CASE STUDY- AUTISM SPECTRUM DISORDER

Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) is a life-long, pervasive neuro-development disorder that begins early in childhood and lasts throughout a persons life. It is characterised by deficits in three core areas - communication (both verbal and nonverbal), social interaction, and behaviour (which is restricted and repetitive). Case study refers to the in-depth study of a particular case. A case study employs multiple methods for collecting information such as interview, observation and psychological tests from a variety of respondents who in some way or the other might be associated with the case and can provide useful information. The information was collected by interviewing the case as well as the special educator (the teacher who assists the child at Vasant Valley school). In the case study, the details of the symptoms, causes, treatment, prevention, and management of the respondent were documented.