Designing effective literacy interventions is a primary topic of importance in educational law, research, and practice (IDEA, 2004; International Dyslexia Association, 2020). The purpose of this article is to examine inclusive approaches to literacy instruction and reading comprehension for students with autism that in turn supports instructional…

This article draws attention to the discrepancy between how math is taught in special education and general education classrooms, the consequences of this discrepancy, and how teachers can teach higher order math concepts to a wide range of learners, including students with moderate special needs, using empowerment math principles. Students…

Mending the Net: The Learning Zone considers how the principles of Whole Schooling can be incorporated into the high school setting to reach students at risk of disassociating from their learning. Whereas schools strive to create a safety net to catch students in need, there are often holes in that net some students fall through. This project was…

Coteaching is becoming a common practice in secondary classrooms as a way to provide special education services to students with disabilities (SWD). Effective coteaching supports an inclusive philosophy of schooling by creating appropriate learning spaces for diverse learners, allowing learners access to general education curricula, building a…

We facilitate a year-long teacher induction program in the United States involving early-career teachers in urban elementary schools as a means to advance their inclusive mathematics practices. The participants in this program joined in professional learning experiences and discussions focused on advancing inclusive mathematics education with…

Throughout this practitioner-oriented paper, we provide a rationale, framework, and supporting materials to promote the development and implementation of personalized, contextualized, and holistic individualized education plans (IEPs) with a strength-based orientation. We believe that adopting strength-based IEP writing practices is vital to…

Formal special education in many southern African countries can be traced back to the early Christian missionary activities in the region. Like elsewhere in the world, the development of special education in this region has been marked with both challenges and accomplishments. The challenges and barriers to the development of special education in…

Diversity has been the focus of countless books, articles, and conferences in higher education. Unfortunately, for many of us in the majority culture, this issue never required too much investment of time or concern because we were already benefitting from the existing system of racial and/or gender privilege. In this essay I recount my awakening…

In this article, I offer an ontological theorization of belonging. The article interrogates the quality of belonging from a Bourdieuian perspective by critiquing exclusion generated from psychological or biological discourses; I aim to question the way that "belonging" is applied in a technical or an emotional sense within the field of…

This article describes how a Teacher Educator teaches her university students (pre-service teachers) about belonging; how it feels to belong to a group, why they need to spend their time and energy during the school day working to make K-12 students feel that they belong, what belonging looks like, and how to make it happen in the pre-service…

Reading is creating meaning with print. It makes sense that interventions for struggling readers be similarly meaning-based and take place, to the greatest extent possible, in a general education setting. This article describes a meaning-based Response to Intervention plan that is economical, pragmatic, research-based, and effective. Based on a…

Personal experiences promoting inclusive mathematics education for my own child have mostly been met with staunch resistance on the part of educators, and a resulting breakdown in collaborative efforts during individualized education program (IEP) meetings. However, I found that utilizing certain strategies and introducing innovative mathematics…

This article presents the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) framework as one way to understand how to support learners with severe disabilities and how to support their access to authentic and appropriate curricula that improves their quality of life. Two key ideas from the UDL framework, (a) understanding learner variability and (b) supporting…

Facilitative leadership, in the context of whole school development for greater inclusive practices offers a positive contribution to the discourse of school leadership. This article presents an exploration of the development of greater inclusive practices across an early years service and an elementary school that are both adopting a whole school…

The core questions in the modern school are: What is a good teacher like? And, how do we educate good teachers? Different eras, theories, ideologies, and conceptions of human beings influence how people can become the best kind of teacher. The fundamental idea in this article is that pedagogical love and pedagogical authority form a salient part…