The Norris and Dorothy Haring Center for Research and Training in Inclusive Education is an integrated early childhood program dedicated to improving the lives of children with developmental disabilities and other special needs as well as their families and those who work on their behalf.
The Haring Center is animated by a vision of an inclusive world in which all children are recognized for what they can do. In this world children with a variety of developmental disabilities and other differences grow and learn alongside their typically developing peers and see barriers disappear as they reach their full potential.
The heart of the Haring Center is the Experimental Education Unit, or EEU, a school with over 250 children with and without disabilities, located on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus. The work of the center continues well beyond the EEU. The Haring Center’s larger objective is to make inclusive education, like that the children at the EEU participate in every day, available to all children with special needs, regardless of where they live and go to school. The center does this by:
• Seeking new avenues of research and keeping the pipeline at the Applied Research Unit full of promising new ideas and approaches.
• Transforming research into effective, proven teaching practices and strategies, working through the classrooms, staff and students at the Experimental Education Unit.
• Making those proven new practices available to schools, organizations and professionals through the Professional Development Unit.
• Training the next generation of teachers who will carry the practices and values of the Haring Center to schools across the state and nation.
The Haring Center has its origins in work begun at the University of Washington in the 1960s that led to national breakthroughs in education for children with disabilities. The EEU opened in 1969 to serve both the university’s research mission and the needs of local families. The three units were formed into the Haring Center in 2009, beginning a new era of excellence in research, training and service and national leadership in inclusive education.