Teaching Students with Special Needs in Inclusive ClassroomsSpecial Educational Needs

Special Educational Needs (SEN) refer to learners with learning, physical, and developmental disabilities; behavioural, emotional, and communication disorders; and learning deficiencies. What we now call SEN has a long history, and has undergone many transformations which over the years have been manifested, among other ways, by the different names it has been given. These days, SEN refers to teaching learners who for intellectual or medical reasons fall behind with their education when compared to most of their peers. This means SEN does not include remedial teaching, gifted education, or teaching children who are economically or culturally disadvantaged, and for these reasons are left out from its definition. Marie Delaney, in Special Educational Needs (p. 12) maintains that: Students have special educational needs if they have significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of students of the same age and special educational provision needs to be made. Some educators and experts may propose different definitions and use different terminology, for example ‘struggling learners’, ‘inclusive classrooms’, or ‘disability’ (Teaching Students with Special Needs in Inclusive Classrooms, p. 7), ‘specific learning differences’ (Kormos and Smith 2012), or SEND—Special Educational Needs/Disability (Silas 2014a, 2016). The language and terminology used to talk about SEN often reflect the period in history when they were used, the legislation of the time, the political and educational contexts of the given country, and, finally, social attitudes and awareness including political correctness. For example, wording like ‘handicapped’, ‘crippled’, ‘retarded’, ‘ineducable idiots’, ‘mentally defective’, or ‘dull and backward’ will no longer be used regarding SEN learners, and if they are used, they are violently objected to (O’Brien 2016: 11).