Research Paper on:
Philosophy of Mainstreaming

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
result, teachers are having to scramble to adjust their learning styles to accommodate the special needs student whose learning style may be divergent and who very likely has the potential  for being disruptive in the classroom. Whats a teacher to do? PHILOSOPHY The student may wish to begin by stating that originally, mainstreaming was the idea that those with certain  handicaps, be it mental or physical, could still benefit from inclusion with the rest of the normal school society. It was felt that the exposure of these students to the  school population would push them to achieve more than they ever would have attempted in a segregated classroom situation. In the preface to Mainstreaming: Educable Mentally Retarded Children in  Regular Classes (Birch, 1974), Maynard C. Reynolds declared mainstreaming to be "based on the principle of educating most children in the same classrooms and providing special education on the basis  of learning needs rather than categories of handicaps"(Wilcox, Wigle, 1997, pg 371). Birch also did a series of studies in various schools throughout the country to see how effective  mainstreaming actually was and how it benefited or potentially harmed the student. What he discovered was that the more successful schools integrated the student for most of the class subjects,  but in those areas where the student was lagging a remediation course was offered in-house for the student. This seems logical, since a student not operating on the same cognitive  level but mainstreamed into a vastly difficult classroom (such as math) could have terrible ramifications. Those ramifications, one could point out, could run the gambit from disruptive behavior to lowered  self-esteem and perhaps even an acting out by the student in his/her frustration. So, it would seem that mainstreaming is beneficial to some point, but at the point in which