Widening the Circle: The Power of Inclusive Classrooms by Mara Sapon-Shevin

Widening the Circle is an ambitious, impassioned argument for inclusive schools powered by a vision that goes far beyond the mutilated version of ‘mainstreaming’ common in American schools today. To Sapon-Shevin the current state of affairs is a caricature of inclusive education, reductive and impoverished, a place where every student is defined by a putative deficit, imprisoned in a label. She shows us that huge questions of democracy and freedom can be discovered in a simple game of musical chairs, that our deepest values are enacted in our everyday classroom practice. Her goal–breathtaking in its sweep–is to break through the walls of the prison, and to set us all free. A dazzling manifesto and call to arms.