ABSTRACT
This chapter gives an account of a project which involved part-time integration from a special school into a mainstream primary school – a growing practice in recent years. For one term, a class from a special school for pupils described as having moderate learning difficulties worked for one morning each week with a class from a mainstream primary school. The project was about the Second World War. The methods involved active collaborative learning, with a strong emphasis on talk. The work was based around interviews, conducted by pupils, with people who lived in the local area during the war. One aim was to organise learning activities so that the two groups of pupils would have real reasons to work together and learn from each other. Chris Morris, one of the teachers involved, describes how the project was organised, how pupils responded and how the project altered the two groups’ conceptions of each other.
