Addressing Cultural And Linguistic Diversity In Special Education

Designed for primary and secondary teachers, this text connects theory to practice while presenting foundational teaching and assessment practices for culturally and linguistically diverse exceptional (CDLE) students. It examines current and alternative practices, explores the multicultural movement, and brings together foundational information from special education and ELL/bilingual fields to target the specific needs of CDLE students. Practical in nature, the book and its resources include hands-on suggestions for immediate classroom implementation, case studies, examples of authentic student language, and video clips of teachers in action. The book is organized into four main sections: - Understanding student and family backgrounds - Strategies for assessment and planning for instruction - Strategies for content and language acquisition - Strategies for literacy instruction

This volume presents four articles on cultural and linguistic diversity in special education from the perspectives of three ethnic groups: African Americans, Asian/Pacific Islanders, and Mexican Americans. The first chapter focuses on issues related to education reform as embodied in the General Education Initiative and service delivery to African-American students with disabilities. The second chapter reviews the current bilingual special education efficacy literature, offers a prototype ecobehavioral approach, and reports on a pilot study utilizing this approach. The third chapter examines academic performance of Asian and Pacific Islanders in San Diego (California) as it relates to referral of this population to gifted programs, and draws implications for practitioners in the form of recommended multidisciplinary practices. The fourth chapter discusses assessment strategies that provide qualitative data for the identification of gifted Mexican-American students. These strategies are grouped into four categories: student production, informant data, language and cognitive style data, and data organization systems.

A critical reality of contemporary education in a globalised world is the growing cultural, racial and linguistic diversity in schools and the issues involved in educating increasing numbers of students who are still learning the dominant language. This poses extraordinary challenges for second and foreign language teachers in many countries, where such students must engage with the mainstream curriculum in a new language. What do these increasingly plurilingual and multicultural classrooms look like? And how do language teachers address the challenges of such diverse classrooms? This book brings together a group of well-recognised language education scholars who present their research in a range of international settings. They focus on the key areas of pedagogy, language policy and curriculum and exemplify new research directions in the field.

What is assessment and how is it a cultural practice? How does failure to account for linguistic and cultural variation among students jeopardize assessment validity? What is required to achieve cultural validity in assessment? This resource for practicing and prospective teachers – as well as others concerned with fair and valid assessment – provides a thorough grounding in relevant theory, research, and practice. The book lays out criteria for culturally valid assessment and recommends specific strategies that teachers can use to design and implement culturally valid classroom assessments. Assessment plays a powerful role in the process of education in the US and has a disproportionately negative impact on students who do not come from mainstream, middle-class backgrounds. Given the significance of testing in education today, cultural validity in assessment is an urgent issue facing educators. This book is essential reading for addressing this important, relevant topic.

Because of recent demographic changes in our society, general and special educators are challenged to look for innovative ways to maximize all students' potential in school programs. Multicultural Special Education: Culturally Responsive Teaching is a timely book that examines multiculturalism, disability, and education and focuses on how to make education better for all multicultural learners. Contributions from leading experts examine categories of exceptionalities (from multicultural perspectives), while integrated case studies and chapter material focus on ways to be an effective and culturally responsive educator. Divided into four parts, this new offering examines the foundations of multicultural special education; the categories of exceptionalities from multicultural perspectives; lifespan issues; and the future of the field.

The Wiley Handbook of Diversity in Special Education is a state-of-the-art reference showcasing cutting-edge special education research with a focus on children and youth with disabilities from diverse cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and economic backgrounds. Cutting-edge special education research focusing on children and youth with disabilities from diverse cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and economic backgrounds An authoritative contribution to the field, this work charts a new path to effective interventions and sets an agenda for future research Addresses disabilities from an international perspective

The concept of "funds of knowledge" is based on a simple premise: people are competent and have knowledge, and their life experiences have given them that knowledge. The claim in this book is that first-hand research experiences with families allow one to document this competence and knowledge, and that such engagement provides many possibilities for positive pedagogical actions. Drawing from both Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspectives in designing a methodology that views the everyday practices of language and action as constructing knowledge, the funds of knowledge approach facilitates a systematic and powerful way to represent communities in terms of the resources they possess and how to harness them for classroom teaching. This book accomplishes three objectives: It gives readers the basic methodology and techniques followed in the contributors' funds of knowledge research; it extends the boundaries of what these researchers have done; and it explores the applications to classroom practice that can result from teachers knowing the communities in which they work. In a time when national educational discourses focus on system reform and wholesale replicability across school sites, this book offers a counter-perspective stating that instruction must be linked to students' lives, and that details of effective pedagogy should be linked to local histories and community contexts. This approach should not be confused with parent participation programs, although that is often a fortuitous consequence of the work described. It is also not an attempt to teach parents "how to do school" although that could certainly be an outcome if the parents so desired. Instead, the funds of knowledge approach attempts to accomplish something that may be even more challenging: to alter the perceptions of working-class or poor communities by viewing their households primarily in terms of their strengths and resources, their defining pedagogical characteristics. Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms is a critically important volume for all teachers and teachers-to-be, and for researchers and graduate students of language, culture, and education.

The achievement of students of color continues to be disproportionately low at all levels of education. More than ever, Geneva Gay's foundational book on culturally responsive teaching is essential reading in addressing the needs of today's diverse student population. Combining insights from multicultural education theory and research with real-life classroom stories, Gay demonstrates that all students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through their own cultural experiences. This bestselling text has been extensively revised to include expanded coverage of student ethnic groups: African and Latino Americans as well as Asian and Native Americans as well as new material on culturally diverse communication, addressing common myths about language diversity and the effects of "English Plus" instruction.