Students with cognitive disabilities and their pedagogic rights: the potential of English Language Arts

Including all children in quality education is a continuing international agenda. In some contexts, legislation requires that local schools include children with a disability with their age peers in a mainstream class. However, even with legislation, students with a cognitive disability risk exclusion from the official curriculum and the engaging pedagogies offered to their peers. This vulnerability is especially relevant in the English Language Arts (ELA) where students are expected to read and write as they engage creatively, critically and analytically with a wide range of texts. To improve the inclusivity of ELA teaching, educators need a clear understanding of the curriculum intent and a way to evaluate whether their pedagogy fulfils those intentions in equitable ways. We consider Bernstein’s ideas about pedagogical rights as a lens for investigating the inclusion of students with a cognitive disability. We develop and apply a framework in one case study example of ELA teaching and learning. We found that appropriate scaffolding allowed the student to achieve the intention of the ELA unit and experience her pedagogical rights in a small group context. We propose that the framework could be applied to explore the inclusivity of teaching in a whole-class, mainstream context.