General and Special Education Teachers’ Advice Networks: A Social Network Analysis

Meaningful professional connections are crucial to enacting inclusive education policy. Yet, extant qualitative research suggests that special education teachers’ (SETs) professional experiences are often marked by isolation, devaluation, and subordination. Informed by homophily theory, in the present study, we extend beyond SETs’ individual experiences to take an organizational perspective. We explore patterns of advice and information seeking, providing, and brokering between general education teachers (GETs) and SETs regarding English language arts (ELA) and mathematics using social network data from 14 elementary schools in one district. Our results suggest that SETs were differently positioned in content area networks, the work necessary to be a part of these networks tended to fall on SETs, and GETs tended to have a slightly greater influence on their ELA networks than SETs. Results have implications for efforts to support and sustain meaningful connections between teachers, a crucial aspect of collaboration for inclusive practice.