Promising Practices for Providing Alternative Media to Postsecondary Students with Print Disabilities

For postsecondary students with disabilities influencing reading performance, printed class materials pose a substantial barrier and have a negative impact on academic achievement. Digital technologies offer alternative ways of accessing print materials for students with print‐related disabilities. Alternative media is a broad term that encompasses a variety of formats into which printed text is converted. Alternative media, together with assistive computer technologies designed to read aloud the text, provide a means to access textual information and bypass the difficult reading process. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of model programs and pertinent research on the use of alternative media by postsecondary students with print disabilities; we will identify promising practices for students whose disabilities negatively influence reading performance.     

The Role of Critique in Philosophy of Education: its Subject Matter and its Ambiguities

The role of critique in the Anglophone analytical tradition of philosophy of education is outlined and some of its shortcomings are noted, particularly its apparent claim to methodological objectivity in arriving at what are clearly contestable positions about the normative basis of education. Many of these issues can be seen to have a long history within European, and especially German, philosophy of education. In the light of this the discussion moves on to a consideration of similarities and contrasts between the Anglophone and German‐inspired deployment of the concept of critical rationality in philosophy of education. The claims to objectivity of the Anglophone tradition are contrasted with a more self‐conscious concern for social justice and improvement in other European traditions, which has been followed more recently by a greater scepticism concerning the potential of critique for delivering social justice and improvement in education. This has parallels with the growing Anglophone disillusion with ‘classical’ analytic philosophy of education. This in turn has resulted in a greater awareness of the limitations of critique: its ideological character, its rootedness in specific contexts, its own potential dogmatism and its ambiguities. The various contributions to this volume are briefly described and related to each other.