Content area
Full Text
In this Voices: Reflective Accounts of Education essay, Carne C. Snow reflects on her experiences as both a recipient of pull-out services as a young child and as a special educator. She highlights the complex nature of special education services and how their provision is rife with gray areas. Negotiating various tensions in decision-making around whether to provide push-in or pull-out services to students with special educational needs, special educators can embrace this sense of gray to create and sustain flexible practices that forefront quality learning for their students. She discusses ways that pull-out services for students with distinct needs can work to support their learning, as well as ways they do not. For students to cultivate a trust for schooling, feel an interconnectedness, and experience joy in learning, teachers ' decisions around special education service delivery can never be cut and dried.
Keywords: inclusion, special education, push-in, pull-out, public education
When I was a young child, somewhere between grades first and third, a woman with a warm smile and kind eyes would stop by my classroom and motion for me to come with her. My school, a couple hours south of the Oregon border in California, was set within vast surrounds of agriculture and abutted by Interstate 5 and was made up of families that were mostly white, and some Hispanic. Many families were poor or working class, and others were middle class, as was mine.
Never did this woman, Ms. E, take just me. Another girl, as quiet as I was, would also be pulled out. Upon seeing Ms. F. enter the classroom, I would drop what I was doing to join her at the door. Temperamentally an introvert, I was at my quietest then, circa 1983-1984.
In the library, Ms. F. would gather us in a circle, our chairs facing each other. She would then pull out puppets and begin talking to us through them, each puppet a distinct character. My classmate and I would laugh as we chatted with the puppets, because how ridiculous was it for a grown woman to speak to us through puppets? So gloriously ridiculous!
And how about this alternate universe that existed within our school? This sanctuary of calm and safety stood in relief to...