Abstract
The purposes of the present study were to investigate teachers' practices at a special school for children who were hospitalized(“hospital school”) and to describe characteristics of the teachers' practices. A qualitative approach was applied to episodic data obtained from participant observation and from semistructured interviews with the teachers at one hospital school. The analysis was done in 5 stages, from labeling the raw data with concepts to building up a conceptual model. The results revealed that the hospital school could be defined as a composite place with 8 elements: special education, ordinary school education, small school education, pre-school education, family care, medical care, social work, and counseling. These findings may provide a new perspective for understanding the education of children who are hospitalized, and could help teachers, especially ones newly assigned to hospital schools, understand and construct their educational practices.
