Schooling Children With Down Syndrome

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.

Christopher Kliewer is an assistant professor in the Department of Special Education at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls.

“In this book, Kliewer thoroughly, with the most carefully drawn evidence, dismantles the prevailing presumption of deficit in anyone so labeled. In wonderfully unrelenting terms, to examine how Down syndrome is constructed, Kliewer asks what it means in the culture, in schools, in families, and to people who ‘have it.’…This book is peppered with example after example, in several schools, of how teachers can create situations in which the student with Down syndrome can move from being an exile or tolerated immigrant to being an active participant, with nondisabled peers, in democratic classroom life….It links how we think about education in general with how we must think about education for students with Down syndrome and other disabilities.”
From the Foreword by Douglas Biklen, Syracuse University