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Being numerate involves the ability to use mathematical knowledge meaningfully across multiple contexts allowing us to order our day, optimise our health and well-being, and function in technology rich environments. Addressing numeracy from the early years of learning, and across all areas of the education curriculum, is key to lifelong learning and quality of life. Being numerate, however, is more than mathematical knowledge; the language that underpins it heavily impacts how we become numerate. This chapter examines numeracy, or mathematical literacy, investigating how literacy can include, and exclude, students from opportunities to learn at school and beyond. This chapter will also examine how numeracy can be used to provide access to educational curricula and personalised goals for students with diverse learning needs in ways that many have ignored.

This chapter provides “viewpoints” on the education of learners with extensive and pervasive support needs. That is, students who require the most support to learn, often categorized as having intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, autism spectrum disorder, or related disabilities. The lenses through which we provide these viewpoints are historical and future-oriented; we begin with historic perspectives on the education of students with extensive and pervasive support needs, and then provide 21st century viewpoints for these learners. We interpret the notion of viewpoints in two ways: first, consistent with a viewpoint as indicating an examination of objects (in this case, practices and interventions) from a distance so as to be able to compare and judge; and, second, viewpoint as indicating our perspective on said interventions and practice.

Since the passage of Public Law 94-142, federal law has prioritized the education of students with disabilities with their non-disabled peers in the context of the general education classroom. This chapter examines the progress, and often lack thereof, with regard to educating students with extensive and pervasive support needs in inclusive settings. We examine current trends in placement, factors that contribute to those placement practices, and what IDEA says about the education of students with extensive and pervasive support needs. We examine what the research suggests happens in substantially segregated settings and then, in contrast, examine impacts and outcomes for students with extensive and pervasive support needs who are educated in inclusive settings. We also examine trends resulting from changing paradigms of disability that provide new opportunities for re-invigorating efforts to educate students with extensive and pervasive support needs in inclusive classrooms.

There has been a policy for including pupils with severe, profound and multiple learning difficulties in mainstream schools in England since the 1980s. However, effective inclusive education has proved to be very difficult to achieve in practice. Currently, there is a mixed economy of special and mainstream schools offering inclusive education, and we argue that the place of education is less important than the quality of that education. Ideally, pupils with S/PMLD would be educated in their own local communities, alongside their non-disabled peers, but this situation is not yet established in English schools.

In this chapter, I offer some insights into what I learned over the course of my inquiry into the living and learning that took place on the edges of community. I highlight the inconclusive nature of narrative inquiry as well as demonstrate my recognition that in any narrative inquiry we exit as we entered, in medias res, in the middle of things. Even though the inquiry ends, we continue to compose stories and to share those stories. Our understanding is only ever partial in the same way the stories we compose are incomplete, unfinished. In seeking a conclusion that is not a conclusion, then, I contend that experiences are complex and the stories we compose about those experiences are also complex. The insights and wonderings that emerged from the analysis of my own experiences as well as the experiences of my participants shaped themselves into the overlapping areas of identity-making, curriculum making, and community. In particular, I explored the stories people composed from the edges of community; those spaces conventionally described by the dominant narrative as marginalized. The participants discussed in this chapter demonstrated how profoundly they were each impacted by their positioning as marginalized. At the same time, their stories had a strong thread of self-definition that was insubordinate to that positioning. In varied ways, the participants refused to be defined by others or as other. Their experiences suggested that those spaces conventionally thought of as peripheral, the edges, were actually the defining features of communities.

In the United States, students with disabilities have moved from learning in a segregated environment to being included in the general education classroom. Legislative mandates have encouraged this shift to occur in public schools in order to equal the playing field for students with disabilities. Both general and special education students with learning disabilities (LD) have been affected from inclusion. This chapter describes the legal, historical, psychological, and instructional concepts shaping the way students with LD are educated today.

Historically, the condition we now refer to as intellectual disability has been conceptualized using models that were extension of the medical model. Recent advances, however, have emphasized person-environment fit models of disability that view disability, intellectual, and other cognitive disabilities, as the lack of fit between a person’s capacities and the demands of the context. This chapter examines these shifts in conceptualization and the ways in which this changes how interventions are designed to provide support to enable people with intellectual disability to live, learn, work, and play in their communities. Such interventions and supports include issues pertaining to Universal Design for Learning, multi-tiered systems of supports, and the primacy of promoting the self-determination of people with disabilities. The importance of efforts to promote social inclusion is also discussed, as well as strategies to promote transition to adulthood. Authors from several countries provide examples of how these new intervention paradigms are being implemented across the world.

This chapter describes assistive technology (AT) and inclusive education and examines the juncture where AT works to support the inclusion of students with disabilities in mainstream settings, including classrooms, home and community settings. AT consists of a range of devices and services which work to support students to augment existing abilities, compensate for or bypass difficulties they may experience. Some AT has been specifically developed for functional use, while other, particularly emerging technology, can be adapted for, or used, in an assistive capacity. Where the AT promotes social interaction, curriculum access and the ability to express understanding, there is the potential for heightened inclusion in the classroom.

Functionality of generating human capital of educated workers and citizens is core to higher education. This chapter explores the long-term relationship for the academy to support the needs for advanced degree and certificate programs, executive education, career preparation, and lifelong service opportunities focused on companies and their needs.

While educational infrastructure is consistently identified as a key lever for educational change, it is often overlooked in research and practice and specifically in relation to technology in schools. By using educational infrastructure as a lens to examine a group of districts' implementation of 1:1 programs, this work provides opportunities for understanding and approaching technology programs in new, and potentially more effective, ways.

Using the concept of educational infrastructure (Mehta and Fine, 2015; Peurach and Neumerski, 2015), this multiple-case study explores the ways superintendents and district technology leaders understand and enact 1:1 technology initiatives to support educational change.

The authors find these leaders see 1:1 technology as both embedded in, and engaged in changing, the physical, cultural, instructional and leadership infrastructures. This suggests that 1:1 technology can act as an infrastructure itself and has the potential to support changes to teaching and learning across the system.

This study offers a new perspective to understand and enact the opportunities of 1:1 technology. Specifically, it helps to reframe technology programs away from discrete classroom or school-based interventions to consider and attend to the system-level resources they require and thus increase benefits they can produce. While always useful, such considerations are particularly important in the current context and the proliferation of online learning for so many.