Special Educational Needs: A New Look by Mary Warnock was initially published by the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain in 2005. In this new edition, Warnock has updated her argument, ...Brahm Norwich has contributed a counter-argument and Lorella Terzi has provided an introduction and afterword, drawing the two debates together. The issues debated in this new edition of Special Educational Needs: A New Look include: The statement of special educational need The concept of inclusion Special Educational Needs: A New Look raises issues which will be of interest to all involved in special education and inclusion, including teachers, policy makers and educationalists.
The list of indicators is a form of training material used for the Supports Intensity Scale-Children's version (SIS-C). It is aimed at helping interviewers distinguishing between extraordinary and ...age-related typical support needs in children with intellectual and developmental disabilities (IDD) when implementing the SIS-C, and thus improve supports planning. The aim of this study is to adapt and test the list of indicators' content validity and rating scale's functioning in Spain. A total of 222 general education teachers reported their agreement with each indicator description using a 5-point rating scale. A total of 353 of 366 indicators showed evidence of content validity, whereas analyses on the rating scale highlighted the necessity of subsuming one of the scale categories within another. The need for developing research-based training materials to develop training programs on the use of the SIS-C to support decision-making concerning supports planning with students with IDD, the relevance of using the latest methodological approaches available when required, and future lines of research are discussed.
This study reports the development and validation of a questionnaire to assess the holistic development of students with special educational needs (SEN) as a reliable instrument for measuring their ...overall performance in inclusive education. The survey was administered to 981 regular education teachers in Beijing. The identified factor structure contained six dimensions: Academic Performance (AP), School Adaptive Skills (SAS), Social Rules (SR), Motor Ability (MA), Interpersonal Relationships (IR), and Behaviour Management (BM). The data showed that students with SEN gained in the IR, SAS, SR and BM domains. These domains are more closely related to social and life skills than AP, which received the lowest scores. Student development in different domains varied depending on demographic variables, including student characteristics, learning environment and regular education teachers. The findings suggest that teachers prioritise the abilities of students with SEN to adapt to 'learning' and 'life' in inclusive schools. The presence of students with SEN in inclusive schools is a longstanding challenge facing Chinese inclusive education. There remains a long way to go to realise the goal of equitable and appropriate education for all. Continuous reform should be strengthened to support a more equitable education system with increased training and support for inclusive schools in China.
Research demonstrates that the teacher-student relationship is essential for students with special educational needs. This article investigates how pre-service special educators (
n
= 74) perceive ...teachers’ relational competence, as manifested in their relations with students exhibiting behavioral difficulties. The data comprises educators’ written analyses of teacher-student interactions simulated through digital video, both before and after being provided with explicit criteria on teachers’ relational competence. The findings reveal a change in the educators’ perceptions as they shift from a focus on teaching strategies and the learning environment toward an awareness of teacher-student interaction, and from the teacher’s management of problematic student behavior toward an acknowledgment of the communicative and socio-emotional challenges in contexts involving students with different needs.
The article examines the causes of conflicts in inclusive student groups and means of their prevention. It has been found that the success of inclusive education in higher education institutions ...mainly depends on interpersonal relationships in inclusive student groups. This is due to the fact that communicating with each other, students with special educational needs acquire skills of social interaction, widen the range of their social roles, learn more about their own personality. However, the peculiarities of moral attitudes, values, behavior, features of the emotional and volitional sphere development, cognitive processes of students with special educational needs lead to conflict situations in inclusive student groups. To determine the causes of conflicts in inclusive student groups, a diagnostic study was conducted among the full-time and part-time students with special educational needs of Khmelnytsky National University. The results of the diagnosis showed that main causes of conflicts in inclusive student groups are the following socio-psychological characteristics of students with special educational needs: low level of self-esteem due to which they get painful experiences because of critical remarks addressed to them, try to adapt to other people's opinions, have low motivation for achievement, feel lonely and anxious; low ability to establish new contacts for communication, low level of sociability; the desire to avoid conflict or to get out of it with dignity accepting the opinions and interests of others without seeking compromise solutions. Taking this into consideration, we have developed and substantiated conflict prevention tools for inclusive student groups that can help students with special educational needs to interact effectively with other students while studying at higher education institution.
Voice skills are extremely important for people who use their voice as a means of everyday work, especially for teachers who stand out as a subgroup of voice professionals who are exposed to many ...risk factors for voice disorders. Little is known about the extent to which the specificities of the students, in terms of the additional demands that their teaching puts on the teacher, can negatively affect the voice abilities of the teacher. Here we mainly consider the difference in the the manner of vocal performance of teachers working in mainstream schools as compared to vocal performances of those working in schools for special educational needs. In this study, two groups were examined: teachers working in a regular primary school (N = 40) and teachers conducting a regular program in special conditions with students who have communication, language, speech and/or hearing impairment (N = 30). The aim was to examine self-assessment of voice difficulties between two groups of teachers on VHI (Voice Handicap Index) and to identify the possible predictivity of chronological age, years of working experience, gender and positive medical history on voice disorders on the results of self-assessment. Results show that statistically significant differences between two groups of teachers exist on the VHI subscale emotionally in terms of poor results of teachers of students without difficulties, whereas on the other two subscales and the overall result there are no significant differences. Regression analysis confirms the predictivity of positive medical history on VHI results. Results of this research confirm less occurrence of voice disorder within the group of teachers who work with students with specific educational disorders. Less prevalence and incidence of voice disorders is probably a consequence of a better knowledge of voice production and hygiene, a smaller number of students and the use of electroacoustical equipment during the teaching process. However, given the small sample of respondents and only the results of the research participants' self assessment, future research should include a larger sample and objective variables in order to verify the results of this research and its implications.
In March 2020, the first wave of the Covid-19 pandemic hit Italy and had dramatic and unforeseen consequences for millions of schoolchildren. Students with special educational needs or disabilities ...(SEND) were faced with drastic changes to their local environment caused by the lockdown. This impacted their ability to function in ways in which they were acquired and posed new challenges for their teachers. This qualitative exploratory study aimed to capture and understand special education teachers' perspectives of their own work and their perceived changes in SEND. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 21 special education teachers at the end of the 2020 school year in Italy. The interview guide was based on the structure of a microsystem, as described by Bronfenbrenner's model, and targeted questions about perceived changes in their roles, relationships, and activities due to the lockdown. The interviews were examined by deductive thematic analysis. The lockdown situation caused marked changes in the teacher's work and their students' lives and significant losses in the developmental and educational processes compared to a pre-pandemic ordinary school setting. In some cases, teachers employed effective coping strategies that helped build resilience in SEND. Critical aspects of privacy and the lack of centralized online learning tools are discussed with relation to the vast and unregulated use of ICT. We conclude that three key aspects essential for good support are: providing specific teaching tools and caring human contact, having a supportive home environment, and having adequate ICT devices and a good internet connection. Our findings will inform teachers, caregivers, public administrators, stakeholders, and social services on support mechanisms for schooling during the lockdown.
Adjustments to the academic process are one of the most crucial factors that enable students with special educational needs (SEN) to succeed in higher education. They can also be viewed as positive ...discrimination, enabling students with SEN to fully participate in their studies and achieve their educational goals. Students with SEN can be as successful in their studies as their peers without SEN, provided that higher-education teaching staff adjust the academic process. However, willingness to adjust in the academic process is also influenced by teachers' attitudes toward and provision of adjustments. Research shows that the more positive higher-education teacher' attitudes toward adjustments are, the greater their willingness to adapt the academic process. In the present study, we investigated the attitudes of higher-education teaching staff involved in the teaching process at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, towards adjustments in the academic process for different groups of students with SEN. We found that higher-education teaching staff have a positive attitude towards adjustments in the academic process for all groups of students with SEN, but there is a greater reluctance to adapt the academic process for students with emotional and behavioural problems, blind and visually impaired students, and students with speech and language disorders.
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