Strengths-Based Approaches to Educating All Learners with Disabilities: Beyond Special Education

by Michael L. Wehmeyer

Michael Wehmeyer, a leading scholar with over four decades of experience as a teacher, teacher educator, researcher, and advocate, provides a cogent but accessible account of the evolution of special education. Offering a compelling vision of where the field should be headed in the next decade, he notes how the digital revolution has made it possible for all learners to gain access to content and instruction. This text focuses on the need to consider how young people with (and without) disabilities learn and the importance of creating personalizable education as strengths-based approaches to disability are moving education away from diagnosis and remediation to school-wide instruction for all students. This book is not written as a criticism of traditional special education models, but instead examines the big ideas for going beyond special education that can improve outcomes for learners with disabilities and prepare them for the 21st-century world.

Book Features:


Provides a framework for reconceptualizing how students with disabilities are educated. Content aligns with changing contexts and innovations in education, including personalizable education and self-determined learning. Identifies current, well-established practices that can facilitate efforts to address 21st-century learning needs for learners with disabilities. Written in a conversational voice for a broad audience to stimulate consideration of future directions for special education.

120 pages, Paperback

Published March 8, 2019

About the author

Michael L. Wehmeyer, PhD, is Distinguished Professor Emeritus and former Director, Beach Center on Disability and Kansas University Center on Developmental Disabilities at the University of Kansas. He has edited or authored 50 books and almost 500 scholarly articles and book chapters on topics related to special education, understanding intellectual disability, eugenics, and self-determination. He is a Fellow and past-president of the American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities and a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, Division on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities.

Reviews

[Kara Loftin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best books I have read regarding students with exceptionalities!