ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to challenge your thinking about teaching and learning in general as well as in relation to special educational needs. It suggests paths to explore and issues to consider by taking a number of ideas and theories and exploring how these may influence the way in which we set about teaching our classes. There are a number of excellent texts, a few of which are referred to in this book, which are devoted to teaching and learning theory and which explore many more issues and in far greater depth. This chapter does not seek to summarise these and nor are the highlighted issues intended to be seen as necessarily the most significant. What I hope this chapter will do is to suggest lines of enquiry and questions that can be applied when considering any approaches to teaching and learning and not just the ones raised here. Finally, I hope that this chapter might lead you to think about a particularly difficult and emotive question: ‘Do all children who are failing at school and are also identified as having special educational needs really have SEN or might, in some cases, approaches to teaching and learning exacerbate their difficulties or discriminate against some learning styles?’
