The fields of special needs education and disability in Singapore have witnessed significant changes and developments especially during the past two decades in the wake of Singapore's evolution towards its vision as an inclusive society. This collection of chapters presents information, knowledge, research, and perspectives across a wide range of topics and issues that are relevant to the lives of persons with disabilities, their families and their communities. This book offers a compendium of local knowledge and research on special needs and disability and integrates international literature, exemplary practices, and innovative ideas for considering future directions and efforts for the fields of special needs education and disability in Singapore.

This book reports on the use of behavioural support – an evidence-based approach developed in the USA to meet students’ special educational needs – in Australia and selected thriving Asian countries. It brings together key issues and insights into how educational policy and practices in different societies and cultures influence the uptake of behavioural support in schools and classrooms. The book provides a balanced and highly informative perspective on the historical paths of development and current expansion of behavioural support into regular schools in the USA. It also offers insights into the progress of its implementation outside the Western context of the USA and Europe and its influence on capacity building among professionals within various contexts across the Asia-Pacific region. Case studies from Australia demonstrate the effectiveness of multi-tiered behavioural support in a state government education system for a population of diverse students, and address the resultant adaptation of tiers when it is implemented in a nongovernment school organisation for students with autism. Case studies from Singapore, Mainland China, Hong Kong, South Korea and Japan reveal the cultural practices and organisational issues that produce distinctive characteristics of behavioural support in inclusive and special education within these countries. This book offers essential guidance to educational decision-makers in these countries and communities around diverse students in considering their next steps towards using behavioural supports proposed in the American blueprints for implementing and building capacity for use in any context.

Inclusive education is an area of growing interest worldwide over the past decade among policy makers, education officers as well as parents. This book tracks the development in the domain of special education in Singapore tracing the provisions made for the inclusion of children with special needs into mainstream schools. While it is observed that there have been actual policies in place to allow this shift in outlook at the primary and secondary level, much more can be done at the preschool level. Children learn the basics of literacy and numeracy as well as life skills at a very young age. Hence, it is important to provide the platform to form the foundation of their habits and attitudes at an early stage. Research has shown that inclusive education benefits children with special needs as they learn from observation and gain a sense of belonging and self-worth through interaction with their typically developing peers. Inclusive education also serves to cultivate acceptance and understanding in typically developing children. Therefore, it is important to ensure that more is done to implement inclusive education at the formative years of children. Some of the challenges faced in implementing inclusion at the preschool level have been identified and suggestions have been made to overcome these challenges. This book intends to create awareness as well as to push for actual changes in the education policies so that inclusive education will be embraced by all and become a reality on a larger scale.

This book offers a comprehensive overview of how inclusion for students with special educational needs (SEN) has developed and is continuing to evolve in mainstream schools across the Asia-Pacific region. The authors provide an applied analysis of inclusive education in 10 geographical settings, covering legislative, historical, and cultural perspectives. A diverse range of factors that influence inclusive policy-to-practice implementation in these contexts are highlighted, and practical strategies to address some key issues are put forward. The settings in focus are the Maldives, Singapore, the Republic of Korea, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Japan, Province of British Columbia Canada, New Zealand, and Australia.

Disability is all around us—among people we meet, the media, sports, our own family and friends. Undeniably, all of us have or will one day come to experience or encounter disability. But how can we reckon with the realities of those who live with disability, or its reality in our own lives? In a city-state slowly moving towards inclusion, how do those meant to be 'included' feel about such efforts? Not Without Us: perspectives on disability and inclusion in Singapore is a groundbreaking collection of essays that takes a creative and critical disability studies approach to centre disability, and rethink the ways in which we research, analyse, think and know about disability in our lives. Across multiple domains and perspectives, the writings in this volume consider what it means to live with disability in a purportedly inclusive and accessible Singapore. “This is a pathbreaking book. Not Without Us weaves together a rich fabric of voices exploring the politics and poetics of disability in Singapore. Moving between lived reality, representation and struggles for social transformation, the collection excavates hidden or forgotten pasts, documents struggles and community formation in the present, and hints at possible futures. The essay collection challenges contemporary discourses of and scholarship on disability in Singapore by centring disabled subjectivities. In the process, it opens up new spaces of empathy, praxis and critique.” —Philip Holden, Independent Scholar and Counsellor "It warms my heart to see another book on disability through the Asian lens. Not just any book or author, but a plethora of contributors who are leaders in the Singaporean disability scene. The tapestry of all the essays inspires the imagination to how we can truly create a place that all of us can call home. Inclusion isn’t just keeping the token seat available, or inviting someone disabled to the party, but truly paving the way forward for all of us to celebrate each other as individuals in all our different shapes, sizes and colours. Thank you Not Without Us for so eloquently celebrating ‘Nothing about us, without us’!" —Cassandra Chiu, Psychotherapist; Social Advocate and Author of A Place For Us "Not Without Us is a richly edited and profoundly written collection of essays about disability in Singapore. It is part of a new and fresh movement to provide local knowledges and global perspectives to a field that has been for too long grounded in the West, particularly the US and the UK. The book will be extremely valuable not only to readers in Singapore but also to those throughout the world who seek a broader perspective on significant issues in disability studies, arts, policy and activism." —Lennard J. Davis, Distinguished Professor, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, University of Illinois in Chicago