Douglas Biklen

Syracuse University | SU · School of Education

This article examines the US experience with school inclusion, highlighting effective policies, practices, and school reform efforts. Specifically, it reveals how a case-by-case assessment of whether a child can be included works against the goal of full inclusion. Despite this policy limitation, inclusion is moving forward, especially when guided...

The focus of this chapter is primarily on Burton Blatt's investigations and exposés of closed institutions. These are the catalysts that served to set the stage for subsequent campaigns for inclusive schooling. The chapter also discusses issues of educability, the meaning of the concept of intellectual disability, the role of science in inclusion a...

In this essay, Christopher Kliewer, Douglas Biklen, and Amy J. Petersen unravel the construct of intellectual disability that has dominated both policy and practice in schools and communities. The authors synthesize data from first-person narratives, family accounts, and participatory inquiry to propose a theory of human connected-ness in which int...

Handicapism Update (2013): We wrote “ Handicapism” more than 35 years ago. We were young scholars who were also activists for societal change for people who were labeled “disabled.” That article and others we wrote with a similar theme were meant to clearly and forcefully contribute to reframing the discussion of disability from questions like “wha...

In this article on the literate development of individuate with significant disabilities, the authors describe heal understanding as a relationship in which the value, intelligence, and literate presence of the person with disabilities is presumed and responnve contexts are developed that foster literate growth. Implications for policy and students...

The central research question for this study was the following: What is the experience of families who move to seek inclusive opportunities for their children? Our sampling frame contained mothers and fathers of students with disabilities who had moved from one school district to another and, in some cases, from one county or one state to another,...

At least since the early 1990s, educators in inclusive schooling as well as scholars in Disability Studies have critiqued prevailing notions of intellectual ability and have suggested the importance of interpretive communities for constructing student competence (Biklen, 1990; Goode, 1992, 1994; Kliewer, 1998; Kluth, 2003; Linneman, 2001). This wor...

Through a critical interpretivist frame, the authors use ethnography and archives to examine themes associated with society’s ongoing denial of literate citizenship for people with perceived intellectual disabilities. They link this denial to the experiences of other devalued and marginalized groups to challenge the common perception that citizensh...

Definitions of intelligence have traditionally been rooted in literacy competence. In this article, the authors examine two historical examples where societal prejudices and institutional forces worked to limit and regulate access to literacy. The first example illustrates how racism and denial of competence were so profoundly linked and establishe...

In the January 2002 issue of Studies in Philosophy and Education, Erevelles (Voices of Silence) argues that recent debates over a means of communication known as facilitated communication reveal a tendency by virtually all discussions to ``uphold traditional notions of autonomy.'' While agreeing with Erevelles' basic critique concerning the societa...

In 1989, a group of teenage, male, student athletes in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, was accused of luring a young woman labeled retarded into a basement recreation room in one of their homes and sexually assaulting her. As is customary for sex abuse cases, the name of the victim never appeared in newspaper or television reports. However, her intellectua...

This article presents a non-speaking person's perspectives on independence and the implications of newfound communication abilities for her participation in the world and upon the meaning of intellectual ability. The person with the communication disability also has autism and, early in her life, was classified by school officials as 'severely reta...

Developmental and connectionist research describing a student's development of competent reading and writing skills commonly evokes the image of a normative ladder to literacy. Each rung of the ladder is believed to constitute certain sets of increasingly complex subskills. It is believed that cognitive mastery is required prior to the next step up...

Drawing from critical disability narratives, including disability studies works, autobiographies and school age students' commentaries, explored is how discussions of school inclusion might be expanded to reflect disability voices. The analysis focuses on inclusion primarily as it concerns students with developmental disabilities such as autism, ce...

The advent of the disability rights movement poses what some suggest to be a conundrum for disability researchers concerned with issues of community and education services, supports, and policy: Have we, in fact, now entered a brave new world of policy decisions based not on detached science but on the impulsive desires of a decidedly ideological c...

This book examines a method of communication used by many people with autism, Down syndrome, pervasive developmental disorders, and other developmental disorders. The facilitated communication method has engendered extreme controversy, with some researchers claiming the method has allowed some individuals to demonstrate unexpected literacy and othe...

Comments on a paper by J. W. Jacobson et al (see record 1996-12698-001) on the history of facilitated communication. D. Biklen contends that the authors ignored by omission much data that make facilitated communication an example of the complexities of inquiry on human behavior. Examples of such data are provided on language, intelligence, the exis...

This qualitative study of 7 speech and language teachers and classroom teachers working with 17 students, focused on how and on what basis the teachers determined that the words typed were authored by their students. Teachers provided and described evidence for 13 of the 17 students of message passing skills. Teachers noted that 3 of these 13 and 4...

Argues that there are 2 opposing views of mental retardation, normative and competence, and 2 comparable research approaches in the literature. Mental retardation is viewed as a social construction that accounts for events, behaviors, and phenomena. The experimental and phenomenological approaches to research are contrasted. The controversy about f...

"Communication Unbound" reveals the wonder of expression by people who had previously been trapped in silence and diminished by presumptions of their incompetence. . . . Facilitated communication is the means by which these children—as well as thousands of other people who cannot speak or whose speech is highly disordered, and who were previously b...

Douglas Biklen has done extensive research into a method for facilitating communication for people with autism. His article is a rich qualitative study of a facilitative communication method developed by Rosemary Crossley and her colleagues at the Dignity through Education and Language Communication Centre in Melbourne, Australia. This method chall...

People with autism have a variety of communication difficulties that have been assumed to be related to cognitive deficits. The communication difficulties include an inability to speak words, speaking with echolalia or repetition of words or phrases previously heard, pronomial reversals, seeming inattentiveness, problems with social interaction, an...

Facilitated communication involves hand-over-hand or hand-on-forearm support of students as they communicate through pointing at pictures, letters or other objects. Over time, it is expected that the hand and arm support can be faded back. This observational study describes an effort to introduce facilitated communication to 22 students, ranging in...

Professions that provide services to people with disabilities typically do so from a clinical perspective. Yet evidence on the exercise of clinical judgment raises a number of questions about its influence. Other factors such as economics, bureaucratic exigency, politics, service traditions, and societal prejudice may render reliance on clinical ju...

This report describes family support through the experiences and testimony of eight families. The eight families, who had children with very difficult health and behavioral problems, were participants in the Macomb-Oakland Regional Center's Family Support Program, near Detroit, Michigan. Interviews were conducted to give voice to the families who w...

A case study is presented of Westport Associates, a corporation in Westport, Massachusetts, which operates small group homes for formerly institutionalized men and women with severe disabilities. Westport Associates was founded to create the antithesis of an institution, to treat residents as individuals worthy of respect, and to offer residents ch...

In our field, the intent of all advocacy is to benefit those with learning disabilities. Currently, there is great emphasis on case-by-case advocacy designed to ensure client rights to services and to guarantee that informed consent and due process practices are followed correctly. And there also continues to be class advocacy, which moves the focu...

Twenty-five years ago, the treatment of choice for children with special needs was the special class or special school. Today, more and more programs have sought to “mainstream” even severely disabled students. But does “mainstreaming” work? And if it works, why does it work and how does it work? At Syracuse University. a group of colleagues spent...

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Few concepts have been more controversial, important and misunderstood than the "least restrictive environment principle." The author explores the history of the concept, particularly as it relates to the design and provision of educational programs to children and youth with disabilities. This historical account traces its origins to several legal...

What rights do retarded children have not to be institutionalized? What rights do retarded people have to aggressive medical treatment that will help prolong their lives? These are questions that the Supreme Court has been asked to decide in recent years. This article examines how the court has responded to these issues and what these responses mea...

Reviews the book, Educational Handicap, Public Policy, and Social History: A Broadened Perspective on Mental Retardation by Seymour B. Sarason and John Doris (1978). If one were to deride to write a history of America, it is unlikely hat one's starting point would he the subject of mental retardation. But this is in great measure. the approach of S...

Three major aspects of mental retardation and criminal justice are examined: myths frequently associated with the relationship of mental retardation and criminality; mistreatment of the mentally retarded offender in the criminal justice system; and the perils of reform in the field of mental retardation and criminal justice. The author suggests tha...

The author examines the concept of advocacy as a new helping relationship Principles behind advocacy are discussed and a list of specific advocacy methods is provided. The article considers difficulties associated with advocacy as well as justifications for an expanded advocacy movement.

Token economy behavior modification has become a popular and voluminously reported strategy for altering the behavior of patients in mental hospital back wards. This paper provides a qualitative, process view of one such token economy program. It reports subject perspectives, as well as interactions among experimenters, hospital staff, and patients...

Over 50 law suits have been filed on behalf of children with special needs in more than 30 states. The author summarizes those federal court cases that offer the most far reaching precedents concerning the rights of children with disabilities to receive educational services. While the courts have avoided the issue of what constitutes 'quality' educ...

in society in terms of what takes place in the schoolhouse. Although we do not believe that such a model works very well for any child or, for that matter, any teacher, it works especially poorly and leads to serious problems when the children are the so-called handicapped and the teachers have been charged with the develop­ ment of responsible pro...

This article originally appeared in Vol.3 No. 3 (May, 1995) of the Facilitated Communication Digest, [pp. 3-5]. Does a student with a disability have a right to learn to use facilitated communication in public school? If a student is using facilitated communication, does he or she have the right to attend regular classes with nondisabled peers? Rel...

Thesis--Syracuse University. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 352-379). Microfilm of typescript.