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Inclusion Is The Educational Practice Of Educating Children With Disabilities

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Inclusion is the educational practice of educating children with disabilities in the classroom with children without disabilities. In the past, people believed that children with disabilities were not capable of learning. This thought process hindered children with disabilities from being included in the general education population. After the ruling of Brown v Board of Education, families with children with disabilities began to fight for the rights of their children. Various families believed that separate but equal weren’t acceptable as it pertained to minorities or children with disabilities. Initially educators were startled and enraged by what was envisioned to be the overriding of Public Law 94-142, The Education of all Handicapped Children Act of 1975 (Odom 2011). This act laid the foundation for childhood inclusion policies and practices. The definition of inclusion has been a topic of debate for years. Terminologies such as mainstreaming, reverse mainstreaming, and integrated special education were used initially. The term inclusion replaced the previous terminology in the early 1990s, and continues to be used by the members of the field today. The change in terminology was pushed in part by the philosophy that inclusion would mean more than only physical placement of children with disabilities in the same classroom, but rather it would convey that children with disabilities would become a part of a larger social community and society system (Odom, Buysse, &

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