Special Education Today in the United Kingdom

This chapter attempts to provide a critical analysis of special needs education within the United Kingdom today. Central to such an analysis is an understanding of the rapidly changing social and political milieu within which special needs education is embedded, including the rapidly changing demographics of schooling, and the devolution of political power into four separate but linked countries - England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Following a discussion of such wider social, political and educational issues, the authors thoroughly explore the convergences and divergences in policy and practice across the four devolved administrations. They describe a plethora of contemporary texts within each of the four administrations that speak to the need for special needs education to change in response to 21st century concerns about the problems of access to, and equity in education for all children. Despite this, they explain why they remain circumspect about the potential of such developments to lead to successful inclusive practices and developments on the ground. Their analysis in the last section centres on the issue of teacher education for inclusion and some very innovative UK research and development projects that have been reported to successfully engage teachers with new paradigm thinking and practice in the field of inclusive special needs education.

Mapping the End Times:American Evangelical Geopolitics and Apocalyptic Visions

Over the last quarter-century, evangelicalism has become an important social and political force in modern America. Here, new voices in the field are brought together with leading scholars such as William E. Connolly, Michael Barkun, Simon Dalby, and Paul Boyer to produce a timely examination of the spatial dimensions of the movement, offering useful and compelling insights on the intersection between politics and religion. This comprehensive study discusses evangelicalism in its different forms, from the moderates to the would-be theocrats who, in anticipation of the Rapture, seek to impose their interpretations of the Bible upon American foreign policy. The result is a unique appraisal of the movement and its geopolitical visions, and the wider impact of these on America and the world at large.

Understanding the 'production' of the schooling identities of young working class boys: time to move beyond the sociological/psychological divide?

In recent times the sociology of childhood has played an important role in challenging the dominance of Piagetian models of child development in shaping the way we think about children and childhood. What such work has successfully achieved is to increase our understanding of the socially constructed nature of childhood; the social competence and agency of children; and the diverse nature of children’s lives, reflecting the very different social contexts within which they are located. One of the problems that has tended to be associated with this work, however, is that in its critique of developmentalism it has tended simply to replace one orthodoxy (psychology) with another (sociology) rather than providing the opportunity to transcend this divide. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate some of the potential ways in which the sociological/psychological divide might be transcended and the benefits of this for understanding, more fully, the ‘production’ of children’s schooling identities. In particular it shows how some of the key sociological insights to be found in the work of Bourdieu may be usefully extended by the work inspired by the developmental psychologist, Vygotsky. The key arguments are illustrated by reference to ethnographic data relating to the schooling experiences and identities of a group of 5-6 year old working class boys.