Search results for "51"
showing 10 items of 3506 documents
A cross-sectional study of pre-service teachers’ views about disability and attitudes towards inclusive education
2016
Teachers’ attitudes towards students with disabilities and special educational needs (SEN) and their inclusion in regular education classrooms have been internationally identified as a key factor in the implementation of inclusive education. In this study, 501 participants representing a cross-section of pre-service teachers from three public colleges of education in Ghana were surveyed about their views regarding disability, level of discomfort interacting with people with disabilities and attitudes towards inclusive education. The results indicate that the pre-service teachers understood disability as an interaction between biological and environmental factors and felt comfortable interac…
Forbidden option or planned decision? Physically disabled women’s narratives on the choice of motherhood
2016
This narrative study explores personal narratives by disabled women on their choice to become a mother. Eleven Finnish physically disabled mothers were interviewed. The interview data were analysed using Greimas’ actant model. The women produced three types of narratives about their journeys to motherhood: compensation, forbidden option and planned choice. In these narratives, the disabled women struggled with the disabling, oversimplifying and suppressive cultural master narratives of ‘good’ motherhood. Through the narratives, the women distanced themselves from these dominant cultural narratives and constructed strong agency for themselves as mothers. peerReviewed
Effects of maternal singing during kangaroo care on maternal anxiety, wellbeing, and mother-infant relationship after preterm birth: a mixed methods …
2020
Introduction: Preterm birth may disturb the typical development of the mother– infant relationship, when physical separation and emotional distress in the neonatal intensive care unit may increase maternal anxiety and create challenges for early interaction. This cluster-randomized controlled trial examined the effects of maternal singing during kangaroo care on mothers’ anxiety, wellbeing, and the early mother– infant relationship after preterm birth. Method: In the singing intervention group, a certified music therapist guided the mothers (n = 24) to sing or hum during daily kangaroo care during 33–40 gestational weeks (GW). In the control group, the mothers (n = 12) conducted daily kanga…
‘Celebrating diverse motherhood’: physically disabled women’s counter-narratives to their stigmatised identity as mothers
2018
This study examined how disabled women negotiated their stigmatised identity as mothers by presenting counter-narratives to the culturally dominant narrative of disabled motherhood. Eleven Finnish physically disabled mothers were interviewed. The data were analysed by focusing on these counter-narratives, their linguistic features and their functions in the interviews. The disabled mothers produced four types of counter-narratives about their motherhood experiences: (1) celebrating diverse motherhood through individual coping; (2) performing motherhood through collaborative caring; (3) boosting motherhood through praising one’s children; and (4) normalising (disabled women’s) motherhood thr…
Children with Down syndrome in Finland and Italy: comparing adaptive behavior and services
2016
Objectives: The aim of this study was to compare a sample of Italian (n = 29) and Finnish children (n = 32) with Down syndrome for possible differences emerging from diverse educational surroundings. Besides the level of adaptive and challenging behaviors, some other issues were compared, including teacher satisfaction. Methods: We used the children’s teachers as informants. They were interviewed using standardized scales. Results: No differences in adaptive behavior or challenging behavior were observed between the samples. All children from the Italian sample were fully included in mainstream classes, while in the Finnish sample, 92% of all the school years were spent in self-contained sp…
Learning about students in co-teaching teams
2021
Teachers are facing increasingly diverse classrooms globally. To support all students efficiently, teachers need to know their students. Drawing from the literature of teacher learning and inclusive education, we explored how teachers learn to know their students in a co-teaching context. Analysis of interviews and diaries of five co-teaching teams showed that teachers learned about their students in a co-taught classroom by observing students and by obtaining knowledge from and co-constructing knowledge with their co-teaching partner. Moreover, teachers’ learning led to shared responsibility for the student and a better understanding of student diversity. Thus, sharing knowledge of student…
Development and validation of the Healthy-Unhealthy Music Scale.
2015
Background Music is an integral part of life in youth, and although it has been acknowledged that musical behavior reflects broader psychosocial aspects of adolescent behavior, no measurement instruments have been specifically designed for assessing musical engagement as an indicator of adolescent wellbeing and/or symptomatology. This study was conducted in order to develop and validate a scale for assessing musical engagement as an indicator of proneness for depression in youth. Method Items were developed based on the literature and a prior grounded theory analysis and three surveys (N = 54, N = 187, N = 211) were conducted to select, refine, test, and validate the items. Scale structure …
The social networks of young people with intellectual disabilities during the On-Campus supported adult education programme
2016
<p>This article describes the social networks of four young people with intellectual disabilities in supported adult education, focusing on their inclusion in school and leisure environments. A multiple case study approach with content analysis was used. Data were collected through interviews with young people and their family members, relationship maps, observation journals and notes from Personal Futures Planning meetings. Relationships with family members, other relatives and neighbours were close. One participant had a friend of her own age with no disabilities. The other three had varying, superficial peer relationships and friends of the family. All the participants had heteroge…
Getting into the Same Boat – Enabling the Realization of the Disabled Child’s Agency in Adult–Child Play Interaction
2021
The purpose of this study was to find out how an adult can enable or hinder the realization of a disabled child’s agency in play interaction. We focused on the child’s play invitations, which were constructed as dispreferred by the adult. The data consisted of nine videotaped playing situations with five nurses and five disabled children in a children’s neurological ward. The microanalysis with interventionist applied conversation analysis focused on one playing situation between one nurse and one three-year-old boy with no spoken language. The nurse responded to the child’s play invitations constructed as dispreferred by her in three different ways. Two of them were about trying to control…
Special education without teaching assistants? : The development process for students with autism
2020
Many children may need the help of another person to attend school. It is common for children with disabilities to receive help from a teaching assistant at school. Assistants are provided in many countries as a legal right and are often publicly funded. It is also widely assumed that having teaching assistants in the class is an effective and cost-efficient way to support students with disabilities. In this study, the research task was to monitor and document the development process carried out by the teacher, with the aim of making visible the development of a more dynamic classroom interaction. The focus in this development process was the teacher&rsquo;s idea of minimizing the conta…