Curricula for Students with Severe Disabilities: Narratives of Standards-Referenced Good Practice

Students with severe disabilities comprise 2 percent of the population of learners who are impacted by intellectual, communicative, social, emotional, physical, sensory and medical issues. Increasingly, however, teachers are required to meet the challenges of creating a pedagogical balance between an individual student’s strengths, needs and preferences, and core academic curricula. The need to embrace the current initiative of curriculum state standards in the debate of curricula relevance, breadth, balance and depth for students with severe disabilities is not just timely-it contributes to the evolving debate of what constitutes an appropriate curriculum for severely disabled learners.

Curricula for Students with Severe Disabilities supports the development of greater understandings of the role that state curriculum standards play in the pedagogical decision-making for students with severe intellectual disabilities. The book first discusses the nature and needs of these students, the curriculum for this group of learners and the recent contributions of state curriculum standards, before presenting narratives of real classrooms, teachers and students who have meaningfully integrated state curriculum standards at the kindergarten, elementary and high school levels.