This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Licensecourse, prevent you from taking advantage of unexpected or spontaneous classroom events as well in order to
enrich the curriculum. But it does mean that an educational program for a student with a disability cannot consist
only of the unexpected or spontaneous. The second consequence is that you should not expect to construct an
educational plan alone, as is commonly done when planning regular classroom programs. When it comes to
students with disabilities, expect instead to plan as part of a team. Working with others ensures that everyone who
is concerned about the student has a voice. It also makes it possible to improve the quality of IEPs by pooling ideas
from many sources—even if, as you might suspect, it also challenges professionals to communicate clearly and
cooperate respectfully with team members in order to serve a student as well as possible.
Categories of disabilities—and their ambiguities...........................................................................................
So far I have said a lot about why inclusion has come to be important for teachers, but not much about the actual
nature of students’ disabilities. Part of the reason for delaying was because, to put it simply, disabilities are
inherently ambiguous. Naming and describing “types” of them implies that disabilities are relatively fixed, stable,
and distinct, like different kinds of fruit or vegetables. As many teachers discover, though, the reality is somewhat
different. The behavior and qualities of a particular student with a disability can be hard to categorize. The student
may be challenged not only by the disability, but also by experiences common to all students, disabled or not. Any
particular disability, furthermore, poses problems more in some situations than in others. A student with a reading
difficulty may have trouble in a language arts class, for example, but not in a physical education class; a student
with a hearing impairment may have more trouble “hearing” a topic that he dislikes compared to one that he likes.
Because official descriptions of types or categories of disabilities overlook these complexities, they risk stereotyping
the real, live people to whom they are applied (Green, et al., 2005). Even the simplifications might not be a serious
problem if the resulting stereotypes were complimentary—most of us would not mind being called a “genius”, for
example, even if the description is not always true. Stereotypes about disabilities, however, are usually stigmatizing,
not complimentary.
Still, categories of disabilities do serve useful purposes by giving teachers, parents, and other professionals a
language or frame of reference for talking about disabilities. They also can help educators when arranging special
support services for students, since a student has to “have” an identifiable, nameable need if professionals are to
provide help. Educational authorities have therefore continued to use categories (or “labels”) to classify disabilities
in spite of expressing continuing concern about whether the practice hurts students’ self-esteem or standing in the
eyes of peers (Biklen & Kliewer, 2006). For classroom teachers, the best strategy may be simply to understand how
categories of disabilities are defined, while also keeping their limitations in mind and being ready to explain their
limitations (tactfully, of course) to parents or others who use the labels inappropriately.
That said, what in fact are the major types of disabilities encountered by teachers? Let us take them one at a
time, beginning with the more common ones.
Learning disabilities........................................................................................................................................
A learning disability (or LD) is a specific impairment of academic learning that interferes with a specific
aspect of schoolwork and that reduces a student’s academic performance significantly. An LD shows itself as a
major discrepancy between a student’s ability and some feature of achievement: the student may be delayed in
reading, writing, listening, speaking, or doing mathematics, but not in all of these at once. A learning problem is not
Educational Psychology 91 A Global Text