Schooling Children with Down Syndrome: Toward an Understanding of Possibility

This engrossing volume explores Down syndrome and disability in the cultural context of school. The author traces the history of community banishment inflicted on people with Down syndrome, exposes artifacts of this history in certain contemporary school practices, and then, based on extensive fieldwork, describes numerous school contexts currently resisting traditions of segregation. Using real classroom examples, the book analyzes restructured educational communities in which the meaning of mental retardation is directly challenged. Some of the issues addressed include literacy and language, friendship, behavior, and the cultural construction of disability. The author ends with a call for the elimination of segregated schooling.