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Ed Roberts was a renowned activist considered to be one of the founding leaders of the American disability rights movement. Although he engaged in numerous political strategies, his main form of activism was teaching in his prolific public speaking career across the United States and around the world. The content and methods of his pedagogy were crafted from his own personal experiences as a disabled man. His teaching featured autobiographic selections from his own life in which he fought and defeated forces of oppression and discrimination. This article examines Roberts’ disability rights teaching in relation to the experiential sources, political content, and teaching techniques.

In this article, we focus on the life and accomplishments of Ed Roberts, leader of the Independent Living Movement for people with severe disabilities, to consider ways he envisioned and enacted a ...

University presses publish works of scholarly, intellectual, or creative merit tailored to an audience of specialists or a group with a shared interest. They also connect their host institution to local and regional communities and generate positive publicity for the institution. In recent years, however, university presses have faced increased scrutiny for myriad financial reasons. The purpose of this study was to measure the extrinsic and intrinsic value of one university press by gathering multiple sources of data on productivity, academic reach, and peer comparisons. Additionally, many of the press’s recently published authors completed an anonymous online survey about their experiences, preferences, and satisfaction with aspects of the publishing process. Despite the press’s recent financial struggles, the results of this study showed evidence of the press’s benefits and value, and authors who responded to the survey reported high rates of satisfaction, personal and scholarly growth, and positive outcomes from their publishing experience. The methods of data gathering undertaken for this study may be instructive for others contemplating a similar evaluation of their press’s value. Specifically, the survey described herein aimed to measure the value of the press in the view of one of its primary stakeholders — its authors — and similarly designed surveys could measure the value of the press in the view of other important stakeholders. Important implications for the press’s practices and future avenues of research are discussed.

Background/Context The current biographic understanding of John Dewey's experience adopting and raising an Italian boy named Sabino emphasizes the theme of finding an emotional replacement for Morris and Gordon, two young sons who had tragically died on family trips to Europe. Lacking is substantive attention to the fact that John Dewey's son had a physical disability who grew up during the early surge of eugenics thought in American popular life. The leading biographer Jay Martin has portrayed John and Alice Dewey as rescuing Sabino from poverty, an experience that gave John Dewey “a special empathy for the second-best, the second-class citizen, the loser in society. “ What is missing from all biographic research on the Deweys is their experience of raising a boy with a physical disability during a historical time when disabilities were highly stigmatized. Purpose/Objective/Research The purpose of this historical study is to supplement the current understanding of John Dewey fathering an adopted son with an account that attends to the fact that young Sabino had a physical disability. Working in the disability studies tradition, this analysis explores both how the Deweys contended with Sabino's bone tuberculosis as an illness requiring medical treatment and how they navigated the complex political context of deeply discriminatory attitudes surrounding disabled persons. The conclusion initiates a discussion of the larger questions concerning how the experiences of fathering a boy impacted directly by disability oppression might have influenced John Dewey's political activity and scholarship. Research Design This historical analysis utilizes prior biographic research, published and unpublished works by John Dewey, and primary historical documents such as family letters and medical and popular publications of the era. Conclusions/Recommendations This analysis finds that John and Alice Dewey were very loving and attentive parents who endured many struggles due to their child's disability. They worried about their son's health, and they capably navigated the available medical options. They were troubled by their son's suffering and pain, and they worked together with great consistency to comfort and support him. Further, they directly confronted disability prejudice, including educational segregation, and worked assiduously against the powerful cultural assumption that their disabled son should lead a life of anything less than full participation in the community. The article concludes with a preliminary examination of how these experiences influenced John Dewey's political writings and activities.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of American students with disabilities educated in general classrooms with their nondisabled peers has risen by approximately 50%. This gradual but steady policy shift has been driven by two distinct narratives of organisational change. The social justice narrative espouses principles of equality and caring across human differences. The narrative of technocracy creates top-down, administrative pressure through hierarchical systems based on quantitative performance data. This article examines these two primary policy narratives of inclusive education in the USA, exploring the conceptual features of each and initiating an analysis of their application in the public schools.

The learning disability construct gained scientific and political legitimacy in the United States in the 1960s as an explanation for some forms of childhood learning difficulties. In 1975, federal law incorporated learning disability into the categorical system of special education. The historical and scientific roots of the disorder involved a neuropsychological discourse that often conflated lower social class identity and learning disability. Lower class, often urban, families were viewed as providing insufficient intellectual stimulation for their young children, thereby causing learning problems. This paper undertakes a historical analysis of a particular form of this class‐based political discourse—romantic agrarianism—developed by leading learning disability researchers Newell Kephart and Marianne Frostig in the 1960s.

Cooperating teachers’ beliefs of effective supervision of student teachers may play an important role in mentoring practices. By systematically analysing metaphors unconsciously expressed in the discourse of cooperating teachers concerning supervision of student teachers, these beliefs could be made explicit. This study explored: (1) what metaphors concerning supervision of student teachers are embedded in the cooperating teachers’ everyday language; and (2) what central concept of effective supervision of student teachers is shared by the cooperating teachers’ metaphors. Analyses of the interviews with the 13 cooperating US teachers showed that their metaphors centred on the issues of interpersonal relationships, power sharing, and tension and conflict. The metaphors converged into a central concept of a non-authoritative approach to supervision of student teachers that embraces relationship issues raised by the participants and provides successful learning experiences for student teachers. A recommendat...

In the mid-1970s, Donald Hammill and his colleagues authored three scathing critiques of the two most trusted scientific traditions of learning disability treatment — movement education and psycholinguistic training (Hammill, 1972; Hammill & Larsen, 1974; Hammill, Goodman, & Wiederholt, 1974). These critical reviews of research rejected the older model of clinical science that had served as the foundation of the field of learning disabilities and celebrated an actuarial form of research. Was Hammill actually proclaiming a change in the orientation toward scientific research, a paradigm shift involving philosophical commitments and methodological practices? This article explores the history of both the foundational clinical science and the new actuarial science that rose to prominence in the field of learning disabilities in the 1970s.

In 2004, when I first started to investigate the history of the learning disability construct, I quickly found that the available literature on the topic fell into two categories, valid historical scholarship and celebrationist narratives. There were a small number of serious historical works by Carrier (1983, 1986, 1987) and Franklin (1987, 1994), who examined the growth of the learning disability diagnosis as a political and scientific development over many decades. I framed my own research in the tradition of Franklin (1987, 1994) and Carrier (1983, 1986, 1987), upholding the standards of research methodology and critical analysis set by historians (e.g., Danto, 2008; McDowell, 2002). My goal has been to determine where this notion of learning disability came from and how it grew in the work of many scientists over time. I have assumed neither that learning disability is a correct way of understanding the learning difficulties of some children nor that this construct was built as some sort of farce. I view the construct as a historical product, an idea cultivated through scientific practices and theories over generations of research. My research efforts resulted in a book entitled The Incomplete Child: An Intellectual History of Learning Disabilities that chronicled the scientific ideas and practices that brought about the learning disability construct (Danforth, 2009). It is a story of multiple lines of intellectual traditions conflicting and melding, of pre-WWII German holistic science blending with Chicago School functionalism and the environmentalism of the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. In addition, I have written a recent series of articles, including the Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities piece that I co-authored with Laura Slocum and Jennifer Dunkle. In these historical articles I addressed topics ranging from the pronounced social class bias of learning disability researchers of the 1960s and 1970s (Danforth, in press, a) to the 1970s epistemological shift toward objectivism (Danforth, in press, b). The Mather and Morris (2011) response paper belongs to the celebrationist category of historical writing that does not meet the standards of methodological rigor and critical analysis set by professional historians. This paper continues a professional line of insider accounts, self-congratulatory, poorly researched historical overviews written by special educators that celebrate the field and its pioneers (e.g., Cruickshank & Hallahan, 1981; Hallahan & Mercer, n.d.; Hallahan & Mock, 2003; Wiederholt, 1974). These works, although often informative, are overwhelmingly acritical. The authors fail to ask serious and troubling questions about the development of the field and the social impact of the ideas in the field. The purposes and the work in the field are lauded without the kind of rigorous scrutiny that historians apply to their subject matter. In their paper Mather and Morris’s (2011) attempt to preserve ‘‘the legacy that Dr. Samuel A. Kirk left behind’’ (p. 118). Their primary goal is to perpetuate a purified narrative of a man living, thinking, and acting without contradictions and errors, without moral uncertainty and fallibility. The truth of the matter is that Sam Kirk was far from clear and definitive in his handling of the learning disability construct. In fact, he articulated 16 substantively different versions of the learning disability construct. I devote an entire chapter in my 2009 book to this issue. In this short rejoinder, I briefly illuminate Kirk’s multiple contradictory articulations of the concept of learning disability between 1960 and 1984. Then I probe for possible lessons we might draw from Kirk’s inconsistencies.

Leading researchers describe the field of special education as sharply divided between two different theories of disability. In this article Scot Danforth takes as his project addressing that division from the perspective of a Deweyan philosophy of the education of students with intellectual disabilities. In 1922, John Dewey authored two articles in New Republic that criticized the use of intelligence tests as both undemocratic and impractical in meeting the needs of teachers. Drawing from these two articles and a variety of Dewey’s other works, Danforth puts forward a Deweyan educational theory of intellectual disability. This theory is perhaps encapsulated in Dewey’s observation that “The democratic faith in human equality is belief that every human being, independent of the quantity or range of his personal endowment, has the right to equal opportunity with every other person for development of whatever gifts he has.”1

The rising incidence of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses and consequent medication prescriptions has stirred great controversy in the USA. The very meaning and social utility of the disorder are hotly contested in the public sphere and in the schools. Since 1997, changes in federal law have led to increased involvement of students with ADHD diagnoses in American special education. This paper undertakes a preliminary metaphor analysis of ADHD in the writings of leading expert Russell A. Barkley. Two dominant metaphors are identified: the brain as a cybernetic control system; and people with ADHD as prisoners. Implications of these metaphors for inclusive education are examined.

A growing, interdisciplinary field of cognitive linguistics has developed in recent decades, bringing together research from many fields to explore the ways that metaphors provide structure and semantic content to thought and language. In this article, the American public school disability emotional/behavioral disorder (E/BD) is examined in regard to the primary metaphors that frame the basic concepts of the disorder. The metaphors of 2 versions of E/BD, psychodynamic and behavioral, are investigated. A series of critical questions about the E/BD construct are posed, and possibilities for new metaphors are proposed.