Handbook of Research-Based Practices for Educating Students with Intellectual Disability

Karrie A. Shogren, Michael L. Wehmeyer, Karrie A. Shogren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317566236
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

The Handbook of Research-Based Practices for Educating Students with Intellectual Disability provides an integrated, transdisciplinary overview of research-based practices for teaching students with intellectual disability. This comprehensive volume emphasizes education across life stages, from early intervention in schools through the transition to adulthood, and highlights major educational and support needs of children and youth with intellectual disability. The implications of history, recent research, and existing information are positioned to systematically advance new practices and explore promising possibilities in the field. Driven by the collaboration of accomplished, nationally recognized professionals of varied approaches and philosophies, the book emphasizes practices that have been shown to be effective through multiple methodologies, so as to help readers select interventions based on the evidence of their effectiveness.

Part I
Understanding Intellectual Disability

1
Historical Understandings of Intellectual Disability and the Emergence of Special Education

Michael L. Wehmeyer, J. David Smith

This text is intended to serve as a resource for researchers, graduate students, educators, and others involved in the enterprise of educating learners with intellectual disability. In Chapter 2, you will learn about contemporary ways of understanding what is meant by what we now call “intellectual disability” and how the field of special education developed from civil rights legislation ensuring a free, appropriate public education for all children to today’s context of evidence-and research-based practices—the focus of this text.

The editors of this text believe, however, that to understand the current context and the challenges for the future with regard to the education of students with intellectual disability, one must understand the past. In far too many situations, the practices established in the mid-1970s by the newly emerging field of special education reflected only the limited knowledge available at that time with regard to educating this population—knowledge derived from a history of segregation (Jackson, Ryndak, & Wehmeyer, 2010). The history of special education in America did not begin with the passage of Public Law (P.L.) 94–142 in 1975. It began in a small village in the north of the Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrenees region of southern France in the late 1700s; in a private school established in 1840 in Paris; at a physician’s residence in Barre, Massachusetts in 1848; in a wing of the Perkins School for the Blind in 1848; on the grounds of an institution in Vineland, New Jersey; and in the halls of early 20th-century New York City public schools. And, at every stage of the development of this field, practices were shaped by how intellectual disability was understood. This chapter provides a necessarily abbreviated introduction to that history and those meanings through to the passage of federal special education legislation in the mid-1970s.¹

Educating the “Idiot:” Itard, Seguin, and the Infancy of Special Education

We begin this exploration in the 17th century. Even that early, the term idiot was the predominant term to describe people who had difficulty performing daily life activities. Idiot or idiocy referred, in general, to the observable “differentness” of people with intellectual disability. The term itself was derived from the Greek words idatas and idios. Idatas refers to a private person, and idios means “peculiar.” Together, they refer to a person who is peculiar, set aside, different. That differentness has always been associated with how what we refer to as intelligence has been understood. Of course, the intelligence construct is a fairly modern invention, but even back to antiquity, societies praised and valued what we might now call “intelligence.” The Greeks saw “intelligence” (sophos, or a wise person, someone who has attained the wisdom a philosopher seeks) as associated with the divine, and individuals manifesting clear intellectual and physical impairments were not highly valued (Privateer, 2006).

Appeals for the decent treatment and education of people considered to be inferior because of race, ability, social class, or gender were rare during the 17th century. Calls for more equal treatment and humane care of stigmatized people are not readily evident in historical records. Individual acts of compassion, concern, and advocacy were likely numerous but these are not documented because such actions were performed by people who were not in a social position to express their concerns in a broader way, and in a manner that would become part of the historical record. Surviving documents rarely provide arguments for more equal treatment and humane regard for people with disabilities in particular. It is important that before exploring the efforts of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and other early pioneers in educating people with intellectual disability, to consider those unusual instances in which a person of some prominence and visibility stepped forward as an advocate for these people.

The Enlightened Voices of Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe

One example of an influential person in the 17th and 18th centuries who did demonstrate advocacy and action on behalf of people with intellectual disability is the life of Jonathan Swift. As a social critic and satirist, Swift is best known for Gulliver’s Travels and A Modest Proposal. Swift saw charity as a moral obligation, and he practiced what he preached. His account books show expenditures for “charity,” “poor woman,” “gave old woman,” and “poor boy.” He was also supportive of numerous hospitals and schools for poor children, and an active director of several charities (Damrosch, 2013).

Swift left his entire fortune to establish a hospital in Dublin for idiots and lunatics. At the end of his own satiric obituary, Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift, he sarcastically penned:

He gave the little wealth he had
To build a house for fools and mad,
And showed by one satiric touch
No nation wanted [needed] it so much.

(Damrosch, 2013, p. 416)

Daniel Defoe, the English author, journalist, and social critic who lived during the years 1659 to 1731, provides an even more compelling example of disability advocacy in the 17th and 18th centuries. After business failures and bankruptcy earlier in his life, he changed both his name (from Foe to Defoe), and his values (Frank, 2011). Defoe was an early proponent of the novel as a literary form and is best known for his book Robinson Crusoe. It is within several of his other works, however, that his sensitivity to the needs, treatment, and education for people considered to have intellectual disability becomes apparent.

Defoe’s first publication was entitled An Essay Upon Projects. The 1697 book consisted of a series of proposals for social and economic improvements in English society. In this publication, Defoe spoke of people who were at the time referred to as “fools.” Defoe (1697) stated that, of all of the “persons who are the object of our charity, none move my compassion like those whom it has pleased God to leave in a full state of health and strength, but deprived of reason to act for themselves” (p. 63). He went on to say that the lack of care for these people was a cultural oversight and that the time had come in this “wise age” to care for these people as one would do for younger siblings.

Defoe (1697) therefore proposed that a “fool-house” be erected by governments “into which all that are natural or born fools, without respect or distinction, should be admitted and maintained” (p. 63). The most interesting aspect of Defoe’s proposal is his idea for funding the “fool-houses.” He asked that the houses be supported by those who profited from their extraordinarily high intellectual abilities. That is, he thought that the best way of doing so was by making the care of people with lesser intellectual ability a contribution by those of higher ability. To do so, he proposed that “without damage to the persons paying the same, [funds] might be very easily raised by a tax upon learning, to be paid by the authors of books” (p. 2). To supplement the tax support for these houses, Defoe (1697) further asked that additional funds be raised voluntarily by the means of a lottery.

I propose to maintain fools out of our folly. And whereas a great deal of money has been thrown about in lotteries, the following proposal would very easily perfect our work … for a hundred thousand tickets at twenty shillings each … an immediate sum of one hundred thousand pounds shall be raised.

(p. 3)

Of greater relevance to his earlier writings with relation to the history of the education of people with intellectual disability, however, is his pamphlet titled Mere Nature Delineated, published in 1726. His observations concern a boy who was found in a forest in northern Germany, a scenario we will see play out at the end of the 17th century as well. He was described as being discovered naked, and as living on grass, mosses, and the leaves of trees. He was uncommunicative and walked on his hands and knees. He was thought to be about 12 years old and came to be known as Peter the Wild Boy. Speculations concerning Peter’s condition ranged from having been raised by wild animals to being an incurable idiot (Moorhouse, 2010). Peter was soon brought to London and attracted the attention of the leading intellectuals of the time including both Jonathan Swift and Defoe. He was adopted into the household of King George I and lived to be approximately 65 years old (Historic Royal Places, 2013).

Defoe’s (1726) assessment of Peter differed radically from the speculations of others:

… however, he gives us a view of mere nature, perhaps, the clearer for that … his soul is capable of improvement, [and] differs from us only in the loss it has sustained under so long a denied education. If that be the case, he is then only to be considered as an infant, and that he is just now in the mere state of infancy and childhood.

(Defoe, 1726, p. 60)

Defoe (1726) went on to express his faith in education as the only answer to the mysteries of human diversity. He showed significant confidence in the malleability of the human condition, becoming consequently an early proponent of universal educability. He stated:

Education seems to me to be the only specific remedy for all the imperfections of nature; that all the difference in souls, or the greatest part at least, that is to say, between the dull and the bright, the sensible and insensible, the active and the indolent, the capable and the incapable, are owing to, and derive from this.

(Defoe, 1726, p. 61)

Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and Victor

Defoe’s (1726) observations on the case of Peter presages an event that is often referred to as the initiation of the much later concept of special education, that of Jean Marc Gaspard Itard and another young boy found in a forest, this one named Victor. The perspectives of Swift and Defoe to the contrary, most people—and particularly most professionals in medicine—held pessimistic views of the malleability of intelligence (as we would now think of it).

Take, for example, Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), who is regarded as the founder of psychiatry. Pinel was a distinguished physician spurred to study mental illness as a result of the suicide of a close friend who had developed a mental disorder. As a physician at the Bicetre, a French asylum for people who were considered insane, he studied mental illness up close. Later, he became chief physician for the Salpetriere (a Paris hospital for the mentally ill). To Pinel are attributed many advances in the treatment of people with mental illness and intellectual disability, including the removal of restraints (chains, straightjackets) and the abandonment of techniques like bleeding and leaches in favor of a more humane, observational treatment method called the Traitement Moral, or moral treatment method. In spite of Pinel’s accomplishments and improvements in care, like most physicians at the time, he regarded people with intellectual disability—who were often institutionalized along with people with mental illnesses—to be incurable and uneducable.

One of Pinel’s students at the Salpetriere, Jean Etienne Esquirol (1772–1840), provided the first systematic differentiation between mental illness (dementia) and intellectual disability (amentia). Writing in Mental Maladies, the first modern text on mental disorders, Esquirol proposed that:

… idiocy is not a disease but a condition in which the intellectual facilities are never manifested or have never been developed sufficiently to enable the idiot to acquire such amount of knowledge as persons of his own age reared in similar circumstances are capable of receiving.

(Esquirol, 1838, p. 26)

Although Esquirol’s distinction between mental illness and intellectual disability is an important road mark in the history of intellectual disability, it is perhaps his adherence to Pinel’s view of the ineducability of people with intellectual disability that had the most direct effect on the field of special education: “Idiots are what they must remain for the rest of their lives” (Esquirol, 1838, p. 26).

Pinel, Esquirol, and, indeed, almost all physicians and psychiatrists, believed the ineducability of people with intellectual disability to be an immutable and unchangeable fact. Into this milieu walked Jean Marc Gaspard Itard (1775–1838)—who was Chief Physician at The National Institution for Deaf-Mutes in Paris and who had been a student under Pinel—and a young boy who was discovered by hunters on January 8, 1800 in the woods near Aveyron, a small village in south-central France (Lane, 1976). At the time it was thought that the boy, later named Victor, had lived in the wild for most, if not all, of his 11 or 12 years, thus earning him the epithet, “The Wild Boy of Aveyron.” Victor was examined by Philippe Pinel and declared, not surprisingly, an “incurable idiot.”

Eventually, though, Victor came under the care of Itard, who did not share his teacher’s conviction of Victor’s ineducability, and so he began a series of interventions to teach Victor to speak, recognize words and letters, and care for himself. Among other firsts, Itard’s efforts were the first to emphasize the importance of an enriched environment in remediating deficits. Ironically, Itard considered his work with Victor a failure because of his pupil’s inability to acquire speech, but in reality Victor gained a number of social, academic, and independent living skills (Lane, 1976).

Edouard Seguin and the Physiological Method

In 1837, Itard was approached by the director of a children’s hospital about the possibility of taking on another pupil like Victor. Itard, whose health was failing and who was experiencing considerable pain, declined, but suggested that a young doctor who had previously studied under him, Edouard Seguin (1812–1880), might be willing to work with the boy. Seguin was persuaded to take up the cause, though he was not entirely persuaded Itard was correct in his optimism regarding educability and intellectual disability (and despite the fact that Esquirol told him he would be wasting his time). He was, however, sympathetic to Itard’s devotion to people like Victor, who were so poorly treated. Consequently, he took up the challenge and began working with the child, adapting, adopting, and refining his mentor’s methods and continuing the work even after Itard’s death one year later. Unlike Itard’s experience with Victor, 18 months after he began, Seg...