Specialpedagogik förr och nu : Tre stockholmsskolors specialpedagogiska arbetssätt

Sammanfattning: Abstract This paper is about the organisation of the special needs education in three nine-year compulsory schools in Stockholm and the pedagogical thoughts and theories that underlie these organisations. The main purpose of the paper was to investigate whether the special needs education of these schools should be interpreted in accordance with a segregating or an including view on integration as these perspectives are presented by the Norwegian professor Peder Haug. In addition to this I also wanted to investigate if there were any historical arguments in favour of one or another of these perspectives that were still being put forward in today’s debate. The methods that I used were a study of literature regarding special needs education and interviews of a qualitative character with three special educationalists and a special teacher that were working on three different nine-year compulsory schools in Stockholm. The result of the study shows that a big part of the special needs education of the schools that I visited can be interpreted in accordance with the segregating view on integration. The organisation of the special needs education of the three schools differed slightly from school to school but the common trait was that the largest part of this work took place outside of the student’s regular classroom and sometimes outside of the scheduled school day. Two of the schools had special groups where students that were believed to have a need of special education got some, or their entire schooling. That the schools chose to build a big part of their special needs education upon solutions that should be regarded as segregating was motivated on the basis of an effect oriented view on education. According to the persons that I interviewed the weakest students had to be given an opportunity to learn as much as the others, and the most effective way of accomplishing this was by giving them education outside of the normal classrooms. Another reason for giving priority to effective learning, at the expense of the participation in the social life of the regular classrooms, were the common goals set up by the national school curriculum. Furthermore the special educationalists that I interviewed argued that segregating special needs education wasn’t stigmatising for the students that got it. On the contrary this type of education could strengthen its students self esteem compared to classical school education, in which weak students often failed. To give this type of students an opportunity to learn separated from the other pupils was to give them an opportunity to succeed.