A World Away From IEPs

This week's review moves beyond the classroom and Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), considering the value of nontraditional learning spaces for disabled students.

Posted on April 3, 2023 in Reviews of the Month

A World Away from IEPs: How Disabled Students Learn in Out-of-School Spaces

McCloskey, Erin. Teachers College Press, 2022
128p bibl index, 9780807766736 $111.00, 9780807766729 $36.95, 9780807780916

A World Away from IEPs: How Disabled Students Learn in Out-of-School Spaces book cover.

This concise but informative book by McCloskey (Vassar College), part of the “Disability, Culture and Equity” series, looks at how disabled students learn outside the classroom. Chapter 1 focuses on in-school learning, while the subsequent chapters focus on learning outside the traditional classroom. These nontraditional spaces include the dojo, the theater, and a music studio. Students with disabilities are often labeled and boxed into learning and behavioral expectations bound by their Individualized Education Programs (IEPs) throughout their schooling, but as the book demonstrates, without these constraints students learn to thrive and excel in spaces outside classroom walls, where they can have more of a say in what they want to learn, accomplish, and achieve. They are no longer bound by their labels and can take an active role in their development. This volume incorporates a good mix of theory and practice, with reflection questions at the end of each chapter to help students synthesize the material. It would be an excellent resource for teacher preparation programs and disability studies programs designed to shake up conventional methods of treating disabled students.

Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students; professionals.
Reviewer: G. Colosi, Syracuse University
Subject: Social & Behavioral Sciences – Education
Choice Issue: Feb 2023

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