Inclusion

Inclusion represents a philosophical and adminis-trative-curricular practice that places students with special needs in the general educational setting of the school as opposed to placing students in a self-contained classroom. Two central questions in curriculum studies have long been associated with the concept of inclusion: For whom are we designing school curricula and toward what ends? The movement for inclusive schools, classrooms, and practices brings these questions into sharp relief. To understand the inclusive schools movement, it is helpful to first examine the long history of exclusion that characterizes much of the history of schooling. Schools and school curricula have often acted as what Joel Spring calls sorting machines, and nowhere is this more evident than in the exclusion of students with disabilities from formal ...