Lifespan transitions and disability: a holistic perspective

This scholarly book, published within Routledge’s Foundations and Futures of Education series, offers a practical and evidenced-based discussion of how special education professionals can support and manage phases of transition in the lives of disabled children and their families. The authors endorse a holistic approach in the management of transition, drawing on Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory of human development, which is modelled as a series of concentric circles of systems, with the individual at its heart. The layers surrounding the individual range from the ‘microsystem’, which includes those people who are close to the individual such as family members and school peers, to the ‘macrosystem’, where the authors locate ‘society’s views, theories, research, evidence-based practices’ (5). The outside layer of the ‘onion’ is the ‘chronosystem’, which infuses the diagram with the dimension of time.

As a disabled person who has always found transitions difficult, the focus of Lifespan Transitions and Disability strikes me as an important one. Moving into a new environment can be much more challenging for a disabled person than for a non-disabled person. The authors note that transition planning is not new in the literature on education for people with disabilities, but observe that to date the ‘earlier and later transitions in the lives of the members of this population were frequently ignored’ (1). Strnadová and Cumming seek to address this oversight by attending to transitions in the early childhood years and transitions to primary school, as well as transitions into work, further education and even retirement. They also include a chapter on transitions out of juvenile justice settings.

A major strength of this book is its emphasis on a holistic, multifaceted approach to managing transition. It advocates a multi-disciplinary, multi-agency way of working and highlights the need for forward-planning among agencies, to ensure that transitions can be managed as smoothly as possible. The chapter on wraparound services recognises that disability is experienced alongside other life issues. The authors argue that an intersectional approach, which explores emotional difficulties (for example) alongside access difficulties, may be highly effective in resolving some of the barriers to participation faced by individuals. This is a sound approach: disability is often experienced as a range of overlapping factors, and it cannot be reduced to any one element (Shakespeare 2014).

Because I am not a special education professional, but rather an academic within a parallel field, I am not the target audience for this book. I read the book from a rather different disciplinary location: that of critical disability studies. This raises philosophical questions about what it means to read and to review across disciplinary boundaries: who is an appropriate reviewer, and why?

Perhaps one of the ways of characterising the difference between our disciplines would be in terms of idealism versus realism. For example, although concepts of involvement and person-centredness were frequently invoked in the book, it often seemed to me that these ideas were operationalised in a rather limited way within broader bureaucratic and institutional structures. As a result, a binary division between the service provider, whose agent is assumed to be non-disabled, and the disabled person as beneficiary seemed to occur in the text. From where I stand, this assumption would be something to challenge. However, this binary is at work continuously in society, especially when a disabled person has legal status as such, and so this is the reality which many Special Educational Needs (SEN) practitioners are working with. The authors are clear that active involvement of the disabled person is central to the success of transition processes. For example, in a discussion of ‘[s]tudent-focused planning’, they make direct reference to the slogan deployed by the Disabled People’s Movement, ‘nothing about us without us’, when they state: ‘[i]t is fundamental, though, that the planning process is not carried out in a spirit of “About us without us!”’ (95).

The book makes good use of vignettes describing the stories of individuals undergoing particular transitions, which I found very helpful: the stories make abstract debates come alive with specific and concrete detail. However, speaking once again with my critical disability studies hat on, I would have liked to have seen these stories presented as first-person accounts written by the disabled people in question. This would have given me a better understanding of how these people felt about the interventions, and would have been – for me – as powerful an evidence base as the numerous studies cited by the authors.

The second chapter – ‘Transitions: Historical Perspectives and Current Practices’ – situated transition practices within country-specific contexts. The vignettes were also situated geographically, and taken from a range of locations around the world. In this respect, the book provided a helpful level of detail about where particular practices were being used. Yet there were occasions when the book appeared to speak from an indeterminate cultural location: for me, further discussion of the authors’ situatedness would have helped to understand and place their recommendations for good practice.

Reading this book led me to question how my own thinking about how disability is structured, because its approach was so different to my own. It made me think about questions of evidence and about my own methodological stance. My own work to date has often focused on themes which are very hard to evidence: the place of ideology and the unconscious in creating and sustaining concepts of disability.

Lifespan Transitions and Disability offers an accessible, well-written and evaluative presentation of the evidence for different approaches to supporting disabled people’s transitions through the life course. Its practical, problem-solving approach make it ideal for practitioners working in the field of SEN, and its detailed evaluation of the evidence bases will orient students and academics who are seeking to develop their knowledge of the transitions literature.

Harriet Cooper
Norwich Medical School, University of East Anglia, Norwich, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 Harriet Cooper
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1221664