Inclusive Education in New Zealand: culture,context and ideology

Parents and teachers in New Zealand who have developed inclusive, non‐ discriminatory classrooms and schools are supported by education and human rights legislation and by recent policy on special education. Resistance to inclusion within the education system may be seen as reflecting disablist attitudes and practices. Inclusion values diversity, not assimilation. It is consistent with separate development, which might be chosen, for example, by those in the deaf and Maori communities as a means to maintain their language and culture. Education policies and practices are examined from the perspective of disability as a sociopolitical issue within a broader context of new right, libertarian ideologies that have impacted on the resources and structure of education and other state activities in New Zealand over the last decade.     

Social work with service families

Our aim in this paper is twofold. We wish to describe the work done with families referred for various problems, including child abuse, to one Area Social Services Team (Section 2). We then offer (Section 3) some comparisons to indicate the extent of the problem. The second task in subsequent sections is to use data from various sources on child abuse (Section 4), and our own information (Section 5) to suggest that Army life has inherent features exacerbating risk of child abuse. We make various conclusions, and proposals for improvement (Section 6). We draw material from the Army Welfare Inquiry Committee Report, known as the Spencer Report. 1 We would argue that the welfare of Service families requires special concern.     

Fostering the Development of Reading Skill through Supplemental Instruction: Results for Hispanic and Non-Hispanic Students

This paper reports the effects of a two-year supplemental reading program for kindergarten through third grade students that focused on the development of decoding skills and reading fluency. Two hundred ninety-nine students were identified for participation and were randomly assigned to the supplemental instruction or to a no-treatment control group. Participants' reading ability was assessed in the fall, before the first year of the intervention, and again in the spring of years 1, 2, 3, and 4. At the end of the two-year intervention, students who received the supplemental instruction performed significantly better than their matched controls on measures of entry level reading skills (i.e., letter-word identification and word attack), oral reading fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension. The benefits of the instruction were still clear two years after instruction had ended with students in the supplemental-instruction condition still showing significantly greater growth on the measure of oral reading fluency. Hispanic students benefited from the supplemental reading instruction in English as much as or more than non-Hispanic students. Results support the value of supplemental instruction focused on the development of word recognition skills for helping students at risk for reading failure.     

Centralized administration and academic credit base in experiential education

The Off-Campus Term (OCT) Program of the University of South Florida is a model in experiential education of centralized administration and in granting academic credit. In contrast to many programs where the experiential office serves in a coordinating role, but the academic work is under the supervision of classroom faculty, the OCT Program encompasses all of this under one program umbrella. Further, the program is comprehensive in nature providing for any kind of off-campus experience desired by the student. The methods and systems used, both functional and academic, are described along with the strengths and weaknesses of the OCT centralized model.