Special Education and Teaching Commons^™

Exploring Community College Faculty And Administrators Work Providing Educational Opportunities For Students With Intellectual And Developmental Disabilities (Idd): An Integral Framework For Inclusive Postsecondary Education, Stacy Eldred

Education (PhD) Dissertations

There is a growing number of inclusive postsecondary education (IPSE) programs and scholarship in higher education. Providing a spectrum of educational opportunities for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) in higher education plays a pivotal role in creating inclusive and meaningful access to postsecondary education. However, little is known about the ways in which the faculty and administrators who are integral stakeholders on campus perceive their work developing and supporting higher education as a socially valued experience for students with IDD. Utilizing constructivist grounded theory, this study examines the ways in which community college faculty and administrators working in …

Special Education: Inclusion And Exclusion In The K-12 U.S. Educational System, Erik Brault

Dissertations

The U.S. Department of Education defines students with disabilities as those having a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more life activities. Previous research has found that students with disabilities placed in inclusive environments perform better academically and socially compared to students with disabilities who are placed in segregated environments. Yet, we know that inclusion in K-12 general education classrooms across the country is not consistently implemented.

The purpose of this study was to better understand the effects, if any, of general education high school teachers’ personal and professional experiences and knowledge on their attitudes toward educating …

The Elusiveness Of Inclusiveness: A Discursive Analysis Of Inclusion In A District Level Exceptional Student Education Leadership Team, Karen Ramlackhan

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This poststructural study utilizes Foucault’s theories of power/knowledge nexus and disciplinary power to explore the discursive formation of inclusion of a district level Exceptional Student Education leadership team in order to understand how the discourses are constructed, practices are normalized, and power relations are legitimized. This type of analysis interrogated the assumptive groundings of special education in the district, and how these have been taken-for-granted and normalized in the professional knowledge, policies, and practices of the field. Data from multiple sources: semi-structured interviews, observations, multimodal forms of communication, observation journal, and researcher reflexive journal produced findings within four dominant discourses---the …

Understanding The Push-In/Pull-Out Method: Why Support Matters For Socialization, Christina L. Raiti

Senior Theses and Projects

My research combines qualitative and quantitative methods in order to answer: How do the social dynamics of children with autism change as they transition throughout the day from general ed to special ed settings in a Hartford public school? Findings are based upon coded observations of three third-grade students with autism for more than twenty hours in various classroom settings, and also thematic analysis of interviews with three of their classroom educators at the site in Hartford, Connecticut. The findings shows that students with autism are more likely to have positive physical and verbal interactions in structured environments rather than …