The Curriculum and Students with Intellectual Disabilities in Inclusive schools: What have we learned and where to from here? Special Issue, 2024
Call for manuscripts for a Special Issue of the International Journal of Disability, Development and Education (IJDDE) on the topic of “The Curriculum and Students with Intellectual Disabilities in Inclusive Schools to be published in Volume 71, Issue 4, 2024 to appear late October 2024.
Guest Editors are Tobias Buchner (University College of Teacher Education Upper Austria, Austria), Rhonda Faragher (University of Queensland, Australia) & Judith McKenzie (University of Cape Town, South Africa)
Curricula define what should be taught in schools and – at least to a certain degree – how this should be done. Curricula are influenced by societal norms, ideas and developments and because these change, so do curricula. Therefore, due to societal transformations, curricula and their contents, and also norms inscribed in them, change over time as well.
We argue that these developments apply to the population of students with intellectual disabilities (ID) in a specific way. Students with ID have been subject to a specific, curricular calibrated program of education in special schools – which changed over time. Up until the 1980’s, the focus on fostering so-called functional life skills dominated the content of curricula for students with ID. However, since the 1990’s, with the increase of inclusive education policies, this emphasis has shifted towards self-determination and participation in the general curriculum – leading to debates among scholars concerning which focus of teaching/curricular content can be considered as more empowering: fostering functional life skills, participation in academic learning of the same subjects as peers without disabilities or both? (Shurr & Bouck, 2013). Furthermore, we note that students with ID seem to be at the centre of recent reforms of curricula towards inclusive education: while access to the general curriculum is mostly regarded as possible for other students with disabilities by practitioners and political decision makers, this is often not the case for students with ID. Indeed, when it comes to students with ID, the inclusive education imperative to adapt learning environments and structures (including curricula) is suspended in favour of individualistic, ableist considerations, legitimizing the special education curriculum for this group of learners. Indeed, within these curricular debates, students with ID are constructed as the ‘constitutive outside’ of mainstream schooling (Buchner, 2021).
Interestingly, in comparison to other fields of inclusive education research, the field of curricula and students with ID can be considered as rather under researched. As one of the few systematic studies on curriculum and students with intellectual disabilities has shown (Moljord, 2018), until recently, this field has been structured by discussions around functional life skills or participation in the general curriculum and interlinked designs. However, this focus has produced some notable gaps – and we would like to invite authors to address these gaps in our special issue:
- There is a lack of comparative studies of curricula across countries. We encourage scholars to submit research that includes this comparative dimension.
- Studies have primarily focused on Europe, North America and Australia and, thus, issues around curricula and people with ID in low and middle-income countries have been neglected and may not be relevant or informative for low resource contexts. Thus, the curriculum and students with ID as Western constructions have remained unquestioned.
- Similar to the category of disability (Erevelles et al., 2018), research that is informed by Dis/ability studies concepts, such as ableism or the social model of disability, is almost absent in the field of curriculum studies. Research from the perspective of Disability Studies in Education is sought to address this gap.
- Qualitative empirical research on the relation of the curriculum and the micro level of classroom and schooling practice is rather rare.
- School curricula for students with ID have frequently been criticised for not supporting the transition to work. Research on how this issue can be addressed proactively in schools as well as programmes that bridge this gap in post-secondary education is very much needed.
Other related topics may well be relevant for this special issue. Please contact the Guest Editors for guidance.
Guidelines for Submission:
Submission deadline for Abstracts: November 19, 2023
Submission deadline for Articles: March 31, 2024
Abstracts should have no more than 250 words and develop one or more of the themes discussed in this call from papers. Upon review of those abstracts received the Guest Editors will solicit articles from particular individuals. Each article should be between 5,000 and 7,000 words, word-processed in English and conform to guidelines of the 7th Edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2020). Please remove all identifying information following the title page. The IJDDE is a peer reviewed journal and every article included in this Special Issue will go through the customary double anonymised peer review process before publication.
Please send abstracts (or requests for further details) to:
Tobias Buchner (tobias.buchner@ph-ooe.at)
Department of Inclusive Education
University of Education Upper Austria
Kaplanhofstr. 40
4020 Linz
Austria