Educational inclusion and social interaction: A literature review

Abstract

Social interactions between disabled children and their peers are not only important to their development of social competence, but may also be indicative of the extent of educational inclusion at the children’s school. The aim of this study was to perform a literature review of Brazilian articles on the topic of educational inclusion and social interactions involving children with disabilities. A total of 465 articles published between 2007 and 2017 were obtained from the Scientific Electronic Library Online (SciELO) and the Brazilian Association for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) databases. The keywords used inclusion, educational inclusion, social interaction, and socialization. After the exclusion criteria were applied, there remained 26 articles and empirical studies published in Portuguese on the topic of social interaction among children with and without disabilities in schools offering educational inclusion programs. Most of the results in these articles described cases of social exclusion within these schools; in these cases, interactions between disabled children and their peers were rare or nonexistent, and the faculty and staff exhibited some distrust in the disabled students’ abilities to learn and develop academically. The review also revealed the need for empirical intervention studies that may ultimately produce proposals for changes in these policies and situations.