Mainstream education

A key feature of that approach is to assist education authorities to include children with special educational needs in mainstream education wherever possible and wherever that is appropriate to the needs of the child. That fits with the committee s recommended definition of inclusive education. .. That does not mean that we take a dogmatic view on inclusion in the main stream regardless of the needs of the individual child. We want every child to receive a quality education that is appropriate to his or her needs (Nicol Stephen,... 

With the right training, strategies and support nearly all children with special educational needs can be successfully included in mainstream education. 

Mainstream education will not always be right for every child all of the time. Equally just because mainstream education may not be right at a particular stage, it does not prevent the child from being included successfully at a later stage Inclusive Schooling -Children with Special Educational Needs - DfES, 2002). 

The Act strengthened the right to mainstream education for children who have statements, and sought to enable more children with special educational needs to be successfully included in mainstream education. Equally, where a parent wants a place at a Special School, their wishes should be taken into account. The new statutory framework for inclusion requires that ... 

Thus, for many, inclusion has been concerned with the placement in mainstream schools of students who have been identified as having special educational needs, and who might, in the past, have attended a special school or other provision separate or different from the majority of students. As this view has gained currency in policy, the term inclusion or inclusive education has begun to be used as a replacement for special needs education . This is particularly important because, as Tomlinson (1982) convincingly showed, special needs are artefacts of mainstream education. 

Another deaf member of staff said she also went to a unit for the deaf that then closed and so she had to go to a mainstream school from Year 9. She felt that time in a specialist unit was a great benefit to her during her years of mainstream education ... 

JW Yes. So are you sayingthatDorsetwouldn thave providedfunding for them toattend mainstream education here ... 

It is important not to forget that staff may be transferring from special to mainstream education as weU, and may suffer from a similar sense of social dislocation one of the LSAs remarked that itwas important to herthat the new school should be welcoming and that other staff should be interested in why the transfer had taken place. 

Mortimer, H. (1995) Welcoming young children with special needs into mainstream education . Support for Learning, 10, 4, 164—9. 

OECD (1994) The Integration of Disabled Children into Mainstream Education Ambitions, Theories and Practices, Paris Oiganisation for Economic Co-operation and Development... 

The responses of a forum of experts in chemical education in the 1990s (Van Berkel, De Vos, Verdonk, Pilot, 2000) were analysed in terms of the curriculum framework outlined above. According to this analysis, the mainstream school chemistry curricula at that time, to be called dominant school chemistry , can be characterised as follows. With respect to the relation between the philosophical substructure and the pedagogical substructure, school chemistry often claims to position itself as an introduction to chemistry. The student is seen as a future chemist. However, the forum of experts in chemical education disagreed with this claim. The next quote epitomises the view that in fact this school chemistry gives an incorrect pichtre of chemistry as a science ... 

This quotation, illustrating the key problematic feature of dominant mainstream (traditional) chemistry courses described above, can be interpreted in terms of Kuhn s theory of normal science and normal science education. Kuhn underpinned his theory of the dynamics of normal science with a less well-known theory on the stmcture and function of tertiaiy and secondary science education (Siegel, 1990). Kuhn s theory (1963, 1970a, 1970b, 1970c, 1977a, 1977b) is instmctive to understand that there is specific view of science education which can be called, in Kuhn s vein, normal chemistry education, and that the dominant version of the school chemistry curriculum can be interpreted in this way. 

With respect to the core concepts of micro-macro thinking in chemistry education, this has been presented in the preceding sections using the curriculum theories of Schwab and Kuhn. Local or national circumstances may be slightly different, and these need to be part of the analysis, although mainstream chemistiy curricula are rather similar from an international perspective. 

There is an increased awareness of the place in history of science, particularly polymer science where many of those who contributed the basic building blocks are still alive. Ray Seymour is doing a series on the Pioneers of Polymer Science for Polymer News. Fred Eirich has been asked by the Journal of Chemical Education to write a history of the development of the "macromolecular concept." (As a side comment, those associated with the Journal of Chemical Education such as Tom Lippincott, have been "friendly" towards polymer chemistry and have assisted in the attempt to bring polymer chemistry into the mainstream of material presented to both the teaching staff and chemistry students alike). 

Practice in Education (CASPiE) program in Chapter 10. These modules provide first- and second-year students with access to research experiences as part of the mainstream general and organic chemistry curriculum create a collaborative research group environment for students in the laboratory provide access to advanced instrumentation for all members of the collaborative to be used for undergraduate research experiences and create a research experience that is engaging for women and for ethnic minorities and appropriate for use at various types of institutions, including those with diverse populations. 

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