Special needs in the twenty-first century: where we've been and where we're going

Alan Dyson, who last year gave the Gulliford lecture on which this article is based, takes a critical look at the relationship between 'inclusion' and 'social inclusion'. He bases his analysis on a review of the history of special needs education and on some of the thinking which emerges from his work on a current research project, Understanding and developing inclusive practices in schools . This project is funded by ESRC (L 1392 51005) as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme and has been undertaken in collaboration with colleagues at Newcastle, Christchurch University College Canterbury and the University of Manchester. The later parts of this article refer to this project, although the views expressed are Alan Dyson's rather than those of the research team as a whole.     

Oppression: the experiences of a lesbian teacher in an inner city comprehensive school in the United Kingdom

This article deals with the everyday working life of a lesbian teacher working in a secondary school. It compares her experiences and the problems she faces with those of other lesbian and gay teachers.     

‘Girls can like boy toys’: junior primary school children's understandings of feminist picture books

Few studies have examined children's understandings of feminist picture books, and thus their potential usefulness for disrupting dominant discourses and providing alternate storylines. This article draws on research conducted in Australia with a class of 6- and 7-year-olds, examining students’ responses to four feminist picture books. The students provided diverse responses to the books, at times reflecting what I viewed as the (feminist) messages of the books and sometimes picking up on other themes or (re)interpreting them as supporting dominant gender discourses. The challenges to understanding the books in straightforward ways related both to the books themselves as well as the gender discourses available to the students. This article argues that there are three key challenges to the feminist potential of these books: a reliance on categories of ‘girl’ and ‘boy’, children's lack of identification with book characters, and the influence of intertextual knowledge.     

National policy and the development of inclusive school practices: a case study

National education policy in England under New Labour Governments has encompassed both a ‘standards agenda’ and an ‘inclusion agenda’, with schools required to respond to both simultaneously. Some previous studies have seen these agendas as contradictory and have seen schools' efforts to develop inclusive practices as being undermined by these contradictions. This paper questions this account with reference to a primary school participating in a collaborative action research project which aimed to develop inclusive practices in schools. It shows how the school, far from finding these agendas contradictory, drew on both in making sense of its situation. It argues that the development of inclusive practices may draw on national policy as a productive resource, and suggests that inclusion scholars and advocates may need to refocus their work if they are to offer such schools alternatives to the formulations of national policy.     

Reading Relative Clauses

This study investigated children's ability to read and understand sentences containing relative clauses (RCs). A small group of seven-year-old children were tested on their comprehension of four different types of sentences containing them. It was anticipated that sentences without relative pronouns would be more difficult to understand than those where they were present: for example, The horse the man is chasing is fat would be more difficult than The horse that the man is chasing is fat. This was indeed the case in sentences where the pronoun functioned as object in the RC. Where the pronoun functioned as subject, presence or absence of the pronoun (plus auxiliary verb) was not an important factor. It seemed that the children did not make consistent use of pronouns to aid their parsing of the sentence. It is suggested that a still incomplete understanding of function words may contribute to beginning readers' difficulties. Moreover, these results did not entirely bear out predictions made from spoken language data, which suggests that syntactic complexity in written language may need special consideration.     

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