Abstract
For many children with disabilities, school start is a major challenge. Starting school often prompts an increase in the incongruence between the child and the demands and expectations on the child in terms of social practices, which in turn calls for local adaptations in order for the child to be able to participate, learn and develop. This chapter will discuss some of these challenges, how they emerge from the incongruence and how intervention can take form within a cultural-historical understanding of disability. The overarching purpose of the school has been and still is to facilitate learning. Moving into the institutional setting of the school, childhood disability thus becomes closely associated with the question of whether the child has special educational needs and how to meet them. Developmental delays from earlier periods (eg, in theory of mind, pretend play, own acquaintance with skills and objects in the world) mean that the child with disability has less knowledge to build upon, knowledge that teachers tend to assume children bring to school. Another important theme in school is social development and peer-interaction. The contributions of the child with disability to the class and the peer group through his/her social agency will be mirrored in the social affordances of the child and hold the potential of negative as well as positive developmental trajectories. The danger of cultural deprivation requires us to take care of both sides of the problem: individual development/learning and social agency.
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Bøttcher, L., Dammeyer, J. (2016). Development in Primary School Age for Children with Disabilities. In: Development and Learning of Young Children with Disabilities. International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39114-4_5
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