Mainstream research in the education of students with significant disabilities, which seeks to improve the ways these students can participate successfully in general education settings, has established the importance of teachers and classroom contexts in mediating relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers in the…

The successful participation of students with disabilities in a general education classroom is generally presumed to be contingent on the creation of classroom communities that can nurture the qualities of equity and care and where different forms of diversity are valued. However, there has been less scholarship that documents the production of…

Mainstream research that examines relations between students with significant disabilities and their peers continues to assess such relations on the capacity of students with significant disabilities to evoke and sustain them. This article adopts a "disability studies" approach to situate peer relations within the larger classroom context. The…