Abstract
Our intergenerational authorial team takes up a central—and unresolved—issue within teacher education for inclusion, namely, the role of curriculum in reconceptualizing pre-service programs. We specifically review literature and policy on how special education teacher educators have approached conceptions of curriculum, using this past as prologue to argue that the teacher education curriculum requires a community of educators constructing a balance between a shared equity agenda to support the preparation of all teachers for inclusion, and the simultaneous need to prepare experts who can effectively share and utilize expertise that addresses the specific learning needs of marginalized learners, including those with disabilities. Unless curriculum is addressed comprehensively, deep transformation will be difficult to achieve, and role clarity for prospective special education teachers is likely to remain unclear. Our aim is for readers to consider the complicating power of curriculum theory as essential framework for renegotiating the teacher education curriculum for inclusion.
Keywords
Preparing teachers for inclusive practice in the United States has been a pillar of our field throughout the development of contemporary special education. This goal has been marked historically by the implementation of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) in 1975, with its emphasis on an Individualized Education Program (IEP) for every student with a disability to be implemented in the Least Restrictive Environment (LRE). Although specific terminology and parameters have shifted over time, there is little doubt that securing the place of children and youth with disabilities within the larger community of learners and schooling has marked the work of teacher educators in special education, in collaboration with their general education peers. We viewed our invitation to contribute to this inaugural issue as an opportunity to take up a central—and unresolved—issue within teacher education, namely, the role of curriculum in the reconceptualization of pre-service programs for inclusion. In this article, we focus on the question of curriculum as it relates to the preparation of special education teachers in the context of inclusive education.
We define inclusion as a broad, shared equity agenda designed to assure educational success for every group of marginalized learners. Within this definition, we recognize that learners are often marginalized—and jeopardized—based on multiple, intersecting social markers of identity, and that specialized expertise is required to address the full range of issues for students who have disabilities. A successful teacher education curriculum necessitates a community of educators constructing a balance between a shared equity agenda designed to support the preparation of all teachers for inclusion, and the simultaneous need to prepare experts who can effectively share and utilize expertise to address the specific learning needs of marginalized learners, including those with disabilities.
Teacher education efforts toward inclusion have been undertaken with the intent that students will no longer be isolated in schools and other educational contexts, will have access to the general education curriculum in meaningful ways, and will have a consistent, unassailable place in the community of their classrooms, schools, and settings (e.g., community-based Early Childhood Education [ECE]). As a result of redesigned pre-service programs, teachers across general and special education should be less likely to engage in inappropriate labeling and referral of children for special education, especially children of color, low socioeconomic status, and whose first language is not English. Yet these problems persist as teacher educators continue to grapple with how best to prepare teachers for the aspiration of inclusive practice.
We suggest that these past efforts have not attended to the centrality of curriculum in reconceptualizing teacher education for inclusion. That is, failing to take what does and could constitute curriculum in schools and related educational settings into sufficient account is reflected in—and has narrowed the scope of possibilities for—what it means to restructure teacher education such that it balances a shared equity agenda and the expertise needed for inclusive education. The importance of curriculum and curriculum knowledge—both to improve the practice of special education as well as the preparation of special education teachers—has been noted in the past (Ellis, 1997; Hoover, 1987; Palincsar & Klenk, 1993; Pugach & Warger, 1996a; Reynolds & Birch, 1982). Despite recommendations such as these regarding the significance of curriculum for special education, curriculum has not been taken up with the seriousness or consistency required to enrich and deepen the redesign of teacher education for inclusion—thus, reinforcing the proposition that special education has developed the “habit of being acurricular” (Pugach & Warger, 1996b, p. 12).
Furthermore, the changing roles of special educators and the teacher educators preparing them have also had an impact on how teacher education programs address curriculum in their efforts to scale up the preparation of teachers for inclusion. The roles of special educators expanded in 1975 to include expectations to work with general education colleagues based on the LRE requirement. But those roles were focused on the individual needs of the child as required by the IEP, in essence, treating “individualization as a curriculum goal” (Pugach & Warger, 1996b, p. 9, emphasis added), rather than considering the curriculum writ large as an object of reform—posing a risk in terms of narrowly shaping the way special education teacher education reform for inclusion has addressed curriculum.
Furthermore, special education teacher educators were absent from debates in general education about the nature of the curriculum (Kugelmass, 1995)—the very curriculum that, historically, had led to excluding students from school prior to 1975 based on perceptions that they were unable to profit from it. This further illustrates the extent to which special educators focused their roles on the individual curricular needs of students with disabilities, decontextualized from conceptions and limitations of the general curriculum. The roles of special educators have continued to change, especially in light of new and demanding initiatives (e.g., Multi-Tiered Systems of Support [MTSS]), and the continued imperative for responding to student diversity (Shepherd, Fowler, McCormick, Wilson, & Morgan, 2016). We suggest that these new role challenges require a deep consideration of how special education teacher educators have approached conceptions of curriculum. Unless curriculum is addressed comprehensively in teacher education for inclusion, role clarity for prospective special education teachers is likely to remain unclear.
With this past as prologue in mind, our analysis focuses on the following questions: What has counted as curriculum in special education teacher education for inclusion in the past, both in the literature and in policy/practice? How has this served the aspiration of preparing special education teachers for inclusion, and what has it missed? Finally, what should count as curriculum in preparing special educators for inclusion?
What We Mean When We Talk About Curriculum
Curriculum is a complex and contested field of study as educators have attempted to define appropriate courses of study for schools based on differing philosophies of teaching and learning. As such, within the field of curriculum studies, definitions vary, and the meaning of curriculum has been debated and transformed over time. Herbert Kliebard (1986), a curriculum historian, suggested that conflicts over curriculum began as early as the end of the 19th century. Given this “history of contradictory impulses” (Joseph, 2011, p. 38), multiple conceptions of curriculum have co-existed based on very different assumptions about the meaning of education—from those concerned with the learning of standard academic content to those concerned with more child-centered approaches to education (Eisner & Vallance, 1974). One of the most influential views of curriculum early on was that of Ralph Tyler (1949), who considered clear objectives to be the basis of all curriculum planning. Eisner (1979) argued that Tyler—whether intentionally or not—influenced a subsequent generation of curriculum scholars who were reductive and technocratic in their views of what counted as curriculum.
As the field of curriculum studies developed, scholars began to complicate the very notion of curriculum itself, creating spaces to think beyond Tyler’s paradigmatic focus on the development of objectives and learning activities (Pinar, Reynolds, Slattery, & Taubman, 1995). These scholars took up more expansive concepts of curriculum, such as the power of the hidden curriculum (Jackson, 1968); the relationship among the explicit (formal, official curriculum), implicit (or hidden curriculum), and null (what is not taught) curriculum (Eisner, 1979); the practical role as well as theoretical challenges associated with the null curriculum (Flinders, Noddings, & Thornton, 1986); and the official, taught, learned, and tested curriculum (Cuban, 1993). Thus, the meaning of curriculum was defined not as static, nor constructed and understood through a neutral, distant, and objective process independent and decontextualized from the full range of human experience—but, instead, “conceived to be an active force having direct impact on the whole fabric of its human and social context” (Eisner & Vallance, 1974, p. 135). Scholars such as Pinar et al. (1995) pushed even further, conceptualizing curriculum studies as a multiplicity of discourses rather than a technical undertaking—making space for historical, political, gender, racial, autobiographical, and institutional “texts” as voices fundamental to curriculum itself.
Current scholars who have complicated the study of curriculum describe an essential function of curriculum studies as fostering deep thinking about the purposes of education. For example, Pinar et al. (1995, p. 8) suggested that the role of curriculum studies is “to provoke thinking” (p. 8) as a means of transforming what takes place in schools—responding to problems not simply with “kneejerk, commonsensical responses, but careful, thoughtful, disciplined understanding” (Pinar et al., 1995, p. 8). Against this backdrop, the standards-based curriculum development and accountability movement in the 1990s—and its culture of assessment—once again reduced curriculum to a narrow focus on activities, content, and products. Contemporary curriculum scholars have pushed back, asserting that curriculum is not apolitical but, instead, situated in a historical-geographical space, and produced through raced, gendered, classed, and disabled bodies and identities (e.g., Erevelles, 2005; Gaztambide-Fernández, 2006).
In this analysis, we encourage readers to expand their notion of what counts as curriculum in teacher education for inclusion by focusing on concepts of curriculum and curriculum theory. We take cues from our past and present colleagues in curriculum and education studies, noting that once again, today, “radical efforts are taking shape to displace traditional notions of curriculum” (Baszile, 2009/2015, p. 119). Our hope is that readers will consider the complicating power of curriculum theory as an essential framework for renegotiating the teacher education curriculum. Curriculum theory pushes us to think in complex and comprehensive ways about what we teach and why—beyond state standards, lesson plans, unit sequences, activities, IEPs, and other formally mandated practices—as we work toward preparing teachers to enact inclusive education.
Positionality of Our Intergenerational Authorial Team
Our intergenerational authorial team, with its multiple, overlapping perspectives and positionalities, provides a unique opportunity to take up conceptions of curriculum in relationship to the preparation of special education teachers for inclusion. As lead authors, Marleen and Linda have been addressing questions of the content and structure of teacher education for inclusion over the course of their careers, working deliberately across both general and special teacher education, originating in their PK-12 experiences as dually certified teachers.
Marleen’s equity orientation across diversity communities is grounded in her experiences attending the integrated public schools in Englewood, New Jersey, during the Civil Rights era (particularly Dwight Morrow High School, featured in Amy Stuart Wells, Holme, Revilla, and Atanda’s [2009] book Both Sides Now: The Story of School Desegregation’s Graduates), shaped by her work across both general and special education in PK-12 and higher education, and informed by her intersectional experiences as both privileged—as White and middle class—and jeopardized, as a woman and a member of a religious minority.
Linda’s views about education were shaped early by her experiences in the segregated schools of the South. As a fifth-grade general education teacher in the same elementary school she had attended as a child, she experienced the chaos of the first year of desegregation in that North Carolina county. In addition, her classroom was located near the only “special class” for students with disabilities, and she formed a long-term friendship with the teacher of that class. These experiences, coupled with her own activism during the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1960s, supported an ongoing commitment to ensuring a quality education for marginalized groups.
Ann is grounded in an Early Intervention (EI)/Early Childhood Special Education (ECSE) perspective and her early career in Part C EI. Her experiences fighting alongside diverse and often marginalized children, families, and professionals for access to services, resources, and meaningful inclusion guide her views on equity. Her engagement in teacher education has spanned general education, special education, and blended contexts across the postsecondary landscape, and she is highly engaged in national service around EI/ECSE personnel preparation. Her personal experiences, marked by her privileged status as a White, middle-class adult, as well as marginalized position, including a childhood characterized by adverse experiences, also continually inform her work.
Mildred, an early career assistant professor, addresses teacher education from the perspective of students’ intersectional sociocultural identities. Since her graduate studies, she has noticed a hyperfocus on “the growing diversity within the P-12 classroom,” with less attention to the identities of pre-service teachers, in-service teachers, or teacher educators. As such, she makes explicit how her embodied intersectionalities as an Afro-Latina without disabilities influence her praxis as a special education researcher. In addition, she has intentionally built a community with colleagues outside of special education, collaborations that expand her understanding of curriculum beyond access to the general education curriculum.
As our writing team worked, we also found ourselves reflecting on the value of writing intergenerationally as a collective positional consideration. The senior authors provided a window into the long view of the history of teacher education for inclusion—which suggests that intergenerational writing enables senior scholars to pass onto younger scholars aspects of institutional memory too often lost over time and not recounted elsewhere. The junior authors considered how their present and intentional focus on collaborating with general education colleagues in their respective research and professional agendas continues to reflect persistent challenges and the need to sustain such efforts in pre-service preparation. With our individual positionalities set alongside this intergenerational perspective, we turn our attention to the curriculum itself as a lens to help understand, interpret, and critique how special education has approached teacher education for inclusion, and a forward look at the relationship between curriculum and teacher education for inclusion.
The Past as Prologue: What Has Counted as Curriculum in Teacher Education for Inclusion in Special Education?
To position the past as prologue and identify what has counted in the past as curriculum in special education teacher education for inclusion in the literature and in policy/practice, we began our review in 1975 to align with the implementation of IDEA. We first scanned early handbooks of research on teacher education (i.e., Houston, Haberman, & Sikula, 1990; Sikula, Buttery, & Guyton, 1996) and another key teacher education handbook (i.e., Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005) to identify how curriculum was theorized and approached. Although we found no explicit attention devoted to curriculum theory, we were able to identify dominant curriculum approaches that special education has used to move forward with teacher education for inclusion.
In addition, it was important that the curriculum approaches we have chosen to highlight reflected actual ways to enact curricular change. For example, although “access the general education curriculum” dominates the discourse in special education, this does not represent an approach to reworking the pre-service curriculum. Given this reasoning, we agreed that two approaches dominate curriculum conceptions in teacher education for inclusion, and organized our review accordingly: (a) enhance existing pre-service curricula in general and in special education while maintaining separate, distinct general and special education curricula; and (b) combine whole or parts of the general and special education pre-service curricula so that collaboration and integration are prominent.
We began by searching for reviews of research relating to these two curriculum approaches. One review (Pugach, 2005) included a section on the category enhance the curriculum. We identified two reviews (Piper, 2007; Pugach, Blanton, & Boveda, 2014) for the category combine the curriculum. Given the paucity of reviews and the fact that much of the literature on the pre-service curriculum consists of program descriptions—and because our goal was to characterize the dominant approaches being used when redesigning the teacher education curriculum for inclusion—we chose to summarize trends in the literature rather than provide an exhaustive review of curriculum references in the literature.
To complete the review, we conducted a thorough examination of literature to help summarize and describe these trends using the following four steps. First, we drew on available reviews of research based on publications in peer-reviewed sources. We included literature reviewed in key journal articles that provided historical analyses (e.g., Kleinhammer-Tramill, 2003). Second, we drew on the historical knowledge of the two senior authors to identify key words for the two curriculum approaches, and conducted searches in major special education journals (i.e., Teacher Education and Special Education [TESE], 1977-present; Remedial and Special Education, 1981-present; Exceptional Children, 1977-present) that would be most likely to address curriculum in teacher education for inclusion. Key words related to “enhance the curriculum” were enhance, infuse, embed, enrich, accommodate; those related to “combine parts of or whole curricula” were combine, unify, blend, merge, integrate. Third, we conducted hand searches to supplement the key word searches to ensure that we had completed a thorough review of the literature in those same journals. Finally, we called on the histories of the senior authors to identify critical references that confirmed trends during specific time periods or across time since 1975.
Enhance the Curriculum
We chose the term enhance as an umbrella to encompass other similar terminology (i.e., infuse, embed, enrich, accommodate) used in describing modifications to existing general and special education pre-service curricula. Regardless of whether articles described or studied embedding or infusing content and competencies into existing programs, or enriching programs with new courses and experiences, existing curricula remained relatively stable except for these additions and modifications. That is, content and experiences were added into existing curricula, rather than revising or transforming the curriculum. Although some examples of deeper curriculum transformation date back to the 1970s (e.g., Blankenship & Lilly, 1977), and some programs may have begun by focusing on enhancement yet aspired to transition to more comprehensive redesign approaches, enhancement has dominated in the years since, and continues to be prominent in the literature (e.g., Little, Sobel, McCray, & Wang, 2015).
Summary of trends in the literature
The literature we reviewed was dominated by descriptions of programs that used an enhance approach to curriculum reform. For example, former editors of TESE examined 744 papers published from 1978 to 2003. Program descriptions were the most frequent topic during that 25-year period (Bauer, Johnson, & Carpenter-Krieg, 2003). Enhance approaches were used whether special educators described modifying the curriculum for general educators or for their own separate special education programs.
General education teacher education for inclusion
Funded from 1974 through 1982 (Kleinhammer-Tramill, 2003) and implemented just as IDEA was rolling out, the Deans’ Grant Projects (DGPs) represented the earliest formal federally funded effort to focus on the pre-service curriculum of general educators for inclusion. Although the aspirations of DGPs were to reconceptualize general teacher preparation for inclusion (Behrens & Grosenick, 1978), and some programs actually achieved this goal, we located only one publication that included reviews of the approaches used to make curricular changes in these projects (Sharp, 1982). While the intent of the DGPs was to more fully reconceptualize the curriculum, in many cases, the outcomes were primarily enhancements in the form of modules and single courses added to existing curricula.
To underscore the trend of enhancing curriculum by adding courses, we identified four studies (i.e., Roberson, 1980; Sattler & Graham, 1983; Voltz, 2003; Wolery et al., 1993) in which questionnaires were used to survey teacher education programs about approaches for supporting teacher education for inclusion. Guided by different research questions, each study’s author(s) analyzed how content was included in programs for general educators. All four studies’ authors found that the majority of programs required single courses in special education. Roberson (1980) reported that including content with modules was as common as a required course. Voltz (2003) found that an infusion model, which she referred to as “collaborative infusion” (p. 5), was next most common, and Sattler and Graham (1983) found that integrating content was common. The authors of the study on ECE preparation reported that most programs offered mainstreamed field experiences (Wolery et al., 1993).
In other studies, course additions were reinforced as a dominant approach, including one where authors examined curriculum materials for elementary programs (Holland, Detgen, & Gutekunst, 2008) and several where state education commissioners or certification officers were commissioned to describe special education requirements for licensure in general education (e.g., Ganschow, Weber, & Davis, 1984; Reiff, Evans, & Cass, 1991). The authors of these studies found that when states enacted requirements in special education for general educators, most often they mandated a single course in special education.
In a review of research on the pre-service preparation of general educators for inclusion, Pugach (2005) noted the scarcity of research on the topic. One section of that review focused on Evidence from Research on Pedagogical Practices and Program Structures in Teacher Education; noteworthy was that the authors of most of the studies reviewed focused on making changes in a course—associated with student teaching, individual methods courses, or as cases within courses.
Although enhancing the general education curriculum has long dominated practice, only the authors of a handful of studies have explored the effectiveness of this approach (e.g., Pugach, 2005). Trends in both the research and informational literature also show that special educators have engaged for quite some time in providing modules or collaborating with general educators to infuse or embed content/experiences in programs for early childhood, elementary, and secondary education pre-service students (e.g., Aksamit & Alcorn, 1988; Brown, Welsh, Hill, & Cipko, 2008). The term accommodations was sometimes used to refer to changes in the pre-service curriculum for general educators (e.g., Heller, Spooner, Spooner, & Algozzine, 1992), but the practices paralleled embedding or infusing content and experiences.
Special education teacher education for inclusion
The federal 325T grant program that began in 2007 was also designed to make changes to the teacher education curriculum for inclusion. Specifically, these grants sought to support programs to prepare special education graduates to meet the Highly Qualified Teacher (HQT) mandate stipulated in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act to assure that all teachers would be well prepared in the content areas they would teach, eventually aligning requirements for the content preparation of special education teachers with those for general education teachers (Kleinhammer-Tramill, Tramill, & Brace, 2008). In their review of the outcomes of the 76 325T projects, Little et al. (2015) used surveys and follow-up interviews to capture features of program improvement and evaluation. Results, particularly those focused on improved curriculum and course content, indicated that enhance approach seemed to dominate program changes (e.g., requirement that “course content and syllabi include IRIS modules”; Little et al., 2015, p. 312). While some programs may have used these grants for greater program reconceptualization, it can be argued that the 325T projects were designed to achieve narrow curricular reform overall.
As teacher education for inclusion has moved forward, special education programs have incorporated other important content and concepts. For example, the third most frequent topic in Bauer et al.’s (2003) review of 25 years of TESE was diversity. Because addressing diversity is a key topic related to teacher education for inclusion, we used it as an example to understand how this topic has been addressed in the special education teacher education curriculum. Correa, McHatton, McCray, and Baughan (2014), in a review focused on working with diverse populations, examined research on the effectiveness of multiple approaches used to include diversity in pre-service programs. Enhance approaches dominate this work, such as infusing diversity in a course, adding learning modules, or offering a stand-alone course on multicultural education. A handful of studies combined coursework with some type of field experience, although only one study included special education pre-service teachers. Immersion within a school or community was a third approach in these studies, although none included special education. Studies that reported results of infusing diversity throughout the curriculum appeared more similar to the combine approach we describe next.
Combine Whole or Parts of the Curriculum
We distinguish combining whole or parts of the pre-service curriculum from the enhance approach on two dimensions: (a) interest on the part of special and general teacher educators to engage in more comprehensive curriculum redesign, either totally or in part, working collaboratively to advance teacher education for inclusion; and (b) the outcome of this collaborative work often resulting in deeper examination of the curriculum and potentially lasting change to courses, experiences, and the overall curriculum. Interest in more comprehensive restructured curriculum approaches for teacher education was evident in the earliest stages of the implementation of IDEA (Grosenick & Reynolds, 1978).
Although projects such as the DGPs often fell short of full reconceptualization of teacher preparation, the aspiration of these early projects was to combine and reconceptualize programs in general and special education. The 1990 IDEA amendments mark another historical example illustrating the combine approach by emphasizing the inclusion of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, which contributed to the movement toward blended preparation programs in ECSE/Early Childhood Education (ECE). The Division for Early Childhood of the Council for Exceptional Children (CEC) and the National Association for the Education of Young Children supported these programs and encouraged professionals developing blended programs to combine the standards of each organization (Piper, 2007)—a collaboration focused on teacher education for inclusion that has remained unique among professional organizations.
Summary of trends in the literature
Two reviews of research on combined approaches in pre-service teacher education programs were located, one by Pugach et al. (2014) and another on ECSE/ECE by Piper (2007). Pugach et al. (2014) conducted a comprehensive review from 1997 that included 16 studies of program components, characterized by revising parts of a curriculum, and 11 studies of complete program design. Given selection criteria focused only on research, it is likely that many more examples exist as program descriptions rather than empirical studies. Piper’s (2007) comprehensive review of combined approaches in ECSE identified 43 related articles, only six of which were empirical studies.
Pugach et al. (2014) found that research on components of curriculum efforts focused on transforming courses or experiences beyond simple additions increased dramatically from the earlier review completed by Pugach (2005). Of the 16 studies, the authors of six examined how faculty worked with pre-service students to improve knowledge and skills, and in 10 studies, they focused on some aspect of improving pre-service teachers’ collaboration skills, either in courses and experiences or organizing co-teaching by students and by faculty.
The 11 combined program studies reviewed by Pugach et al. (2014) included seven evaluation studies, one outcome study, two studies of program curricula, and one on candidate socialization and identity development. The six empirical studies in the Piper (2007) review were predominantly surveys of program graduates and program personnel. Both reviews point to the scarcity of research on programs that had been blended, unified, integrated, or merged.
Finally, the assumption underlying programs titled dual certification is that they rely on a combined approach (e.g., Blanton, Griffin, Winn, & Pugach, 1997). Developing such programs where graduates receive two certifications, one in general and one in special education, has been discussed and practiced for decades (e.g., Kearney & Durand, 1992). However, the term dual certification itself does not communicate information about how programs were reconceptualized. In fact, the motivation to offer multiple certificates may sometimes lie more in practical reasons (e.g., making graduates more marketable) than vigorous curricular work among general and special educators (Blanton & Pugach, 2011; Pugach & Blanton, 2012). Nonetheless, dual certification has become synonymous with the combining approach. However, we identified no recent research reviews on dual certification, but did locate one partial listing of dual certification programs developed through the CEEDAR Center that refers to the combine approach to reform in teacher education for inclusion (http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/portfolio/policy-snapshot-dual-certification/).
Policy Influences on Teacher Education for Inclusion
Federal policy has played an influential role in efforts to reform teacher education by setting priorities for pre-service preparation for special and general educators (Kleinhammer-Tramill, 2003). In some cases, this influence has served to initiate reconceptualization of teacher education for inclusion, and in other cases to sustain practices. Influence has also occurred in response to practice or other policy. For example, the DGPs were instrumental in initiating a forum for thinking about change processes in teacher education and how they might support a broader vision of teaching and of diversity, while also generating multiple models for integrating special and general teacher education.
Federal policy has also served to sustain aspects of teacher education reform. This may be most evident at the early childhood level, illustrated by the longstanding, stand-alone federal funding stream for EI/ECSE personnel preparation that has been in place since 1989 (Gallagher, Steed, & Green, 2014). This sustaining role has also translated into state licensure patterns with the onset of blended or unified models at the early childhood level (Danaher, Kraus, Armijo, & Hipps, 2005).
Finally, federal policy has also influenced teacher education for inclusion in response to other aspects of policy and practice. For example, NCLB’s HQT mandate compelled teacher education to address the requirement that all teachers be well prepared in the content areas they teach, resulting in the 325T and its primary focus of supporting special educators in meeting those requirements (Kleinhammer-Tramill et al., 2008).
In terms of the dominant approaches we have identified here, it could be argued that the history of related federal policy shows that it has often started with aspirational ambitions to drive fully reconceptualized models of teacher preparation, and, therefore, embody the combine approach. However, the outcomes of such policy have often been snapped back by the realities of context and practice—reverting to more narrow changes described more accurately as enhancing the curriculum.
In addition to the influence of federal policy, state policy also impacts how teacher education programs might conceptualize redesign for inclusion. As noted above, for example, many states have responded to this need by taking an enhance approach and simply requiring a single course in special education.
The Imperative of Taking Curricular Thinking Into Account
Many—if not most—teacher education programs have moved toward inclusion by tinkering with the existing pre-service curriculum; from a curricular perspective, this enhancement approach is all too familiar. Even as teacher education has worked to create and sustain programs committed to inclusion across general and special education, the scope and discourse of curricular concepts that have operated within teacher education in special education have been grounded chiefly in a traditional view of curriculum as activities, decontextualized program components, and individual courses appended to existing courses of study in general teacher education. This is consistent with conceptions of curriculum as “what schools teach” in “a specific educational activity planned for a particular student at a particular point in time” (Eisner, 1979, p. 34). Consequently, much of this discourse is described in terms of the need for additional or revised special education content as the curricular “fix.” This philosophy, whether in general or special education, treats the pre-service curriculum as a collection of isolated lessons, activities, and clinical experiences that can simply be added to (or subtracted from).
Policy pressures may also contribute to this narrow approach. For example, evidence of progress in funded projects (e.g., the mandated inclusion of IRIS modules), state program approval, and national accreditation are often submitted by constructing matrices indicating what has been added to the curriculum and where it appears. Curriculum mapping activities such as these can assist teacher educators to consider the explicit and null curriculum, but such mapping does not necessarily lead to a deep consideration of what candidates are being asked to do and why. As Flinders et al. (1986) observed, While the means for examining a null curriculum may take rather analytical forms such as making lists or grids which suggest inclusion possibilities, the utility of the “analysis” is heuristic, dependent on the insight, imagination and intuition of those who contribute to the decision making process. (p. 40, emphasis added)
This suggests that a strong curricular perspective should create spaces for values to be questioned and for imagining new and different approaches. While matrices and mapping can be useful tools to support explicit aspects of program redesign, on their own they may mask the rich, challenging curriculum discussions needed to assure a full consideration of curricular opportunities and possibilities, especially if they are contextualized within a strong “activities and lessons” approach.
The dynamics of combining programs suggest some level of interest in larger pre-service curriculum questions. However, program descriptions do not necessarily convey whether or how such deliberations may have occurred. Exceptions appear to be a small number of combined programs grounded in a Disabilities Studies in Education (DSE) philosophy (e.g., Ashby, 2012; Oyler, 2011). Taking up curriculum theory in relationship to teacher education, DSE scholars have raised challenging questions about the construction of disability, equity, and intersectionality (Cosier & Pearson, 2016; Siuty, 2019). But a DSE orientation can also appear sporadically within special education pre-service programs, rather than systematically defining a curriculum (Siuty, 2019). Some programs that are referred to as combined never take up overarching curriculum questions at all, instead offering dual certification in traditional divided program spaces (Young, 2011).
These narrow reform trends exist within a curricular context that reflects special education’s complicated relationship with curriculum. That relationship includes (a) relinquishing agency for the general education curriculum, and (b) the hidden curriculum as a significant but only partial curricular focus.
Relinquishing Agency for the General Education Curriculum
Access to the general education curriculum has been codified as the goal for nearly all students who have disabilities; strategies to support access are common in nearly all pre-service curricula in special education. Chief among these is making accommodations and modifications to the curriculum—the backbone of the IEP process—and often governs the dynamics of collaboration.
Dominant discourse and conventional wisdom have long suggested that special educators are experts in instruction, while general education teachers are curriculum content experts. This discourse is problematic because it is based on an assumption that general education teachers may not have valuable pedagogy to offer. It also negates placing value on special educators’ needing to know much about the curriculum or the theories that drive curricular dynamics. Thus, pre-service programs in special education have addressed curriculum by assuming the unquestionable value of the existing general education curriculum and treating it as such. It has then focused almost exclusively on identifying pathways for individual students identified as having disabilities to gain access to it. Far less attention has been paid to asking questions about what that curriculum is in the first place, or its underlying worth—both of which lie at the heart of theoretical curriculum considerations. This illustrates how “professionals in the field [of special education] have not developed a strong ‘curriculum consciousness’” (Pugach & Warger, 1996b, p. 14).
By treating the general education curriculum as the gold standard, special education has operated under the assumption that whatever curriculum is good for all students is good for students who have disabilities. As a consequence, few have raised questions beyond that of access. As an early outlier, Ellis (1997) argued that overemphasizing curricular accommodations resulted in watering down the academic curriculum, “divorced from any meaningful context” (p. 345) and lacking curriculum depth—calling instead for “watering up” the curriculum (p. 326). In contrast, in terms of instruction, the dominant assumption is that whatever is good for students with disabilities is good for all other students, and is likely to help students who do not have disabilities. This discontinuity illustrates how instruction is decontextualized from curriculum considerations.
By minimizing a comprehensive curricular perspective, special education has ceded agency with respect to defining the curriculum. In the press for access to general education—to right the historic wrongs inherent in keeping students with disabilities out of schools—we could say that special education, and the preparation of its teachers, got off on the wrong curricular foot in 1975. Relinquishing agency for curriculum—that is, the failure to develop this “curriculum consciousness”—raises another such discontinuity. Special education has claimed an authentic sense of advocacy in protecting the educational rights of students who have disabilities and assuring that their voices are heard, and securing their access to the general education curriculum. But that same kind of unrelenting advocacy has not extended to preparing special education teachers to participate in the development of strong general education curricula.
It is not that access to the general education curriculum is unimportant for students who have disabilities. Rather, an access perspective is insufficient to support inclusive practice—making it more critical for special educators to be prepared to engage directly with the substance of curriculum and bringing that same sense of agency to bear in terms of curriculum. Yet, even current efforts to reconceptualize teacher education for inclusion, such as those supported through the CEEDAR Center, do not attend to curriculum—at least, as represented in the topics of reviews of literature and reports disseminated on its website (http://ceedar.education.ufl.edu/reports/).
A Partial, Tacit Curricular Embrace—The Hidden Curriculum
In many ways, the hidden curriculum, a crucial concept from curriculum theory, has been the driving force behind much of special education advocacy. The disability rights movement exposed what most students were learning implicitly relative to disability as a result of going to school prior to 1975, namely, that students with disabilities did not belong. By exposing the real educational experiences of students who have disabilities, advocates made this hidden curriculum transparent. The hidden curriculum extends to dynamics such as home-school communications, teacher-student relationships, interactions in hallways, and after-school activities (Eisner, 1979), as well as student agency in IEP meetings, power differentials between high- and low-income parents of students who have disabilities, or how collaboration plays out between general and special education teachers.
The hidden curriculum is also addressed when special education speaks to the disproportionate representation of minoritized children and youth. Multiple efforts to clarify the relationship between disability and cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity mark the history of special education (e.g., Artiles, 2013; Harry & Klingner, 2006). Having surfaced this reality, special educators, and like-minded equity-oriented scholars, continue to seek ways to abate this hidden curriculum dynamic (Artiles, Dorn, & Bal, 2016; Losen & Orfield, 2002). Likewise, DSE shines a light on another long-standing hidden curriculum issue within special education, namely, the dominance of the medical model and the failure to view special education as a socially constructed phenomenon (Baglieri, Valle, Connor, & Gallagher, 2011). DSE has also heightened awareness of the intersectional nature of identity relative to disability, converging with equity-oriented scholars whose work is located within questions of social justice (e.g., Artiles, 2013; Boveda & Aronson, 2019; Pugach, Gomez-Najarro, & Matewos, 2019).
These issues undergird most efforts to prepare new teachers for inclusive practice across special and general education, setting a clear philosophical bar that demands a more complicated and authentic understanding of disability within the institutional structures of society. DSE scholars advocate a greater grounding in DSE to support such critical inclusive practice (e.g., Siuty, 2019). Many programs rely on some DSE concepts, even if inconsistently (Siuty, 2019). In a few combined pre-service programs (e.g., Ashby, 2012; Oyler, 2011), DSE guides the entire program.
However, this unvarnished attention to hidden curriculum is not positioned discursively within larger curriculum theory frameworks. In fact, it is rarely referred to as a hidden curriculum issue in the first place. Hoover (1987) attempted to make a connection early on, but he limited the discussion of hidden curriculum to preparing special education teachers for adaptations for student behavior. This divorced his curriculum concerns from larger institutional practices that diminish students’ chances for success—reinforcing the distance between the exposed problem and the full range of solutions that are needed in practice.
Drawing on hidden curriculum discourse decoupled from discourse around teaching and learning, an issue noted poignantly by Ashby (2012), responds to only part of the problem. For example, embedding units on disability rights or disproportionality (Cosier & Pearson, 2016), and assuring that stories underscoring the experiences of individuals with disabilities are heard (Annamma & Morrison, 2018; Boveda, Reyes, & Aronson, 2019), address curriculum from the perspective of what has previously been absent (the null curriculum). This can prepare teachers to open up important conversations to build critical awareness and shift how disabilities are conceptualized. But this additive approach by itself is not sufficient for addressing the challenges in teacher education for inclusion, as it does not take on questions of, for example, how the curriculum as a whole is structured, or how concepts like funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 1992) could help change the dominant general education curricular structure and advance new student learning. When attempts to make connections between critical stances toward special education and what this means for the practice of teacher education do occur (e.g., Ashby, 2012; Cosier & Pearson, 2016), larger questions of curriculum and curriculum development are uncommon, especially in the discourse of collaboration—where accommodations and modifications for individual students typify (and limit) how special education teachers address curriculum.
Curriculum theory has the potential to attend to the hidden and unvoiced lessons, values, and attitudes toward people with disabilities and other(ed) minoritized communities that are reinforced by how special education has approached—and neglected—teacher education curriculum for inclusion. Curriculum depth as an essential aspect of pre-service programs is critical in attending to the gaps between this critique of education and identifying and implementing pedagogies that can support deep academic accomplishment for all students.
The Need for Curriculum Depth—Now More Than Ever
The empirical and informational literature does not yet reflect much about the way teacher educators in special education are addressing newer dynamics of the field, for example, MTSS, Universal Design for Learning (UDL), or High Leverage Practices (HLPs)—all of which have major implications for how special education teachers take up curriculum going forward. We believe MTSS, UDL, and HLPs will be strengthened if inclusion-minded special education teachers are prepared to work from a robust curriculum framework and if these emerging practices are disciplined by deep curricular thinking. This is consistent with Darling-Hammond and Oakes’s (2019) call for preparing teachers for deeper learning, with “knowledge of subject matter and curriculum goals” (p. 54), including curriculum design, as one of the three pillars that inform this deeper practice.
For example, the quality of Tier 1 is key, is regularly acknowledged as the foundation for the success of multilevel systems of support (Kretlow & Helf, 2013), and is viewed as an important reason why special education teachers should obtain prior certification in general education (Leko, Brownell, Sindelar, & Kiely, 2015). This is fully warranted, as Tier 1 is where the greatest potential lies for meeting students’ needs, where disproportionality should be mitigated, and where the quality of teaching in general education classrooms—executed collaboratively—should be at its best. It follows that collaboration for MTSS should differ from traditional collaboration focused on accommodations, modifications, and assessment in that it requires a deep interest in, and mature knowledge of curriculum on the part of special and general educators alike.
If they are to hold up their end of the MTSS bargain in their shifting roles, special education teachers’ Tier 1 practices should reflect deep capacities to represent the curriculum in multiple ways, especially to struggling students—which requires both highly sophisticated curriculum knowledge and sophisticated knowledge of culturally relevant teaching in their pre-service preparation. This level of curricular thinking is equally critical to Tier 2, especially in view of Ellis’s (1997) early caveat that the academic curriculum for students who have disabilities needs to be “watered up” instead of down. However, as Murphy and Marshall (2015) found in their study of teacher and teacher educators’ preparation for the Common Core, special educators tend to overlook the role of curricular knowledge compared with their general education peers.
Alongside the habit of taking the quality of the general education curriculum for granted, special educators may be unprepared to focus on issues such as the failure of the Common Core’s primary-level text exemplars to include disabilities, or their treatment of gender and race in mostly stereotypical ways (Gomez-Najarro, 2019). The depth and breadth of curricular knowledge required to shift paradigmatically toward engaging fully and contextually with curriculum and curriculum theory are not yet characteristic of pre-service curricular redesign on the part of special education.
Furthermore, UDL is meant to bridge the gap between access to the curriculum and curriculum redesign, reflecting a commitment to creating conditions where learning the general education curriculum is maximized. Like MTSS, UDL demands a high level of curricular knowledge to assure that special educators are prepared to implement the multiple means of presentation, action and expression, and engagement so fundamental to its definition (Rose & Meyer, 2002). Implemented without sufficient curricular knowledge on the part of special education teachers to make it work, however, UDL might instead function narrowly as a decontextualized program enhancement. Furthermore, UDL also seems to be decontextualized from cultural diversity, leading Waitoller and Thorius (2016) to make the case for drawing on Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and UDL simultaneously—as linked “asset pedagogies” that only taken together have the capacity to transcend traditional accommodation and modification. In this sense, the whole question of disproportionality must be viewed not only through the critical lenses of equity and intersectionality (Artiles, 2013), but to be fully appreciated and acted upon, must also be viewed as a problem of curriculum. Consequently, although UDL was developed with the intent of addressing issues of equity in the process of learning, it does not appear to have sufficiently taken into account all of the curricular dynamics associated with the hidden curriculum. Absent a comprehensive understanding and consideration of curriculum, the implementation of UDL may be diminished in value.
Similar to the high-profile work on HLPs in general teacher education (Ball & Forzani, 2009), HLPs have also been identified to serve as a core curriculum for practice-based teacher education for special education (Leko et al., 2015; McLeskey, Billingsley, & Ziegler, 2018). An HLP-oriented, practice-based pre-service “core curriculum” resonates with special education’s historical and acurricular focus on explicit instruction. While identification and skill development in a set of targeted practices is appropriate for teacher education, such practices do not in and of themselves represent a fully contextualized approach for the preparation of curriculum-rich, inclusive-minded special education teachers. For example, instructional HLPs use the language of access to and accommodation and modification of the curriculum, reflecting the existing special education infrastructure. McLeskey et al. (2017) call for special educators to be prepared to become more sophisticated about practice, but we caution that practice cannot be sophisticated when it is detached from the full curricular context in which it is to take place.
CEC’s HLP document (McLeskey et al., 2017) further states that special education teachers will carry out their practice with knowledge of culturally responsive teaching, “value ethnic, cultural, linguistic and contextual diversity” (p. 20), and consider “the background, socioeconomic status, language, culture, and priorities of the family” (p. 32) during collaboration. These statements acknowledge the importance of multiple diversities, but provide little guidance for what culturally responsive, equity- and asset-oriented pedagogy might look like in this practice. In addition, equity-oriented scholars outside of special education have begun to question treating practice as a core pre-service curriculum, arguing that it is not oriented toward students’ assets, and has the “potential to inflict material, emotional, and symbolic harm on historically marginalized communities” (Philip et al., 2019, p. 259). In this way, HLPs, as developed for general and special education alike, appear to be decontextualized from larger questions of the purposes of and privileges in the education system.
Making Curriculum Consciousness a Viable Goal
By contextualizing our analysis both historically and in terms of curriculum, our intention is not to denigrate the focus on practice in special education. We hold deep respect for the commitment to practice that has always characterized special education, with its emphasis on explicit forms of instruction and clear strategies that open avenues to learning for many students with disabilities. Rather, our goal is to name curriculum as a missing consideration, and to elevate its place in preparing special education teachers for inclusion. On one hand, the pull of special education’s tradition that is so strongly embedded in practice may be more difficult to overcome than we realize. Habits of collaboration, a narrow focus on access, and the overriding influence of the codification of special education in policy dynamics such as the IEP may all contribute to the current situation. On the other hand, special education may generally be disinterested in curriculum—viewing it as “not our responsibility.” Consequently, what has been enacted in the name of redesigning teacher education for inclusion on the part of special education has benefited only from partial curriculum resources—both conceptually and practically.
It may also be that curriculum and curriculum theory seem too far afield for teacher education in special education. In this regard, we would like to reframe Danforth’s (2006) recommendation that “disability researchers should reach across the aisle to create deep and purposeful engagements with general education researchers working in inquiry areas that traditionally and ostensibly have little to do with disability research” (p. 343, emphasis added). Teacher educators in special education should likewise be reaching across the teacher education, special education, DSE, and curriculum studies “aisles” to build a multipart alliance to help enact “deep and purposeful engagements” that will enable teacher education for inclusion to be actualized in its highest form. Such alliances might be useful in closing the gap, for example, between DSE and teacher education. Consequently, DSE’s presence could animate a more consistent conversation about how issues of equity might translate into the full range of practice.
We have chosen not to privilege practice because we view practice as always being situated within a larger curriculum context. And it is this context itself that deserves consideration when practice is addressed in teacher education for inclusion—as a way of interrogating the special education infrastructure, which is codified in requirements such as the IEP, and traditional collaboration. Given that the learning of students with disabilities has continued to lag—even when HQT requirements were in place—it may also be appropriate to question how successful special education’s current approach to practice has been.
This is the conversation about curriculum we hope to animate across teacher educators in general and special education, curriculum theorists, DSE scholars, and curriculum developers. A starting point, it seems, is for special educators to step into the world of curriculum proper—much in the same way we routinely—and without reservation—ask our general education colleagues to step into the world of special education to support inclusion. In this way, we can begin to address the fundamental questions, such as, “What is worth learning for every student?” and “How best shall we help students who are struggling to get there?” We are confident that teacher educators in special education, who have always concerned themselves with complex questions of instruction, are sophisticated enough to continue their commitment to instruction and practice, while at the same time placing this work within a rich curricular framework.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.