mainstreaming

1. 1
   noununcountable

   The process of bringing something previously on the edges into common use or general acceptance.

   Like an underground band that goes from playing tiny clubs to topping the charts everyone hears.

   The mainstreaming of electric cars has reshaped how major automakers plan their factories.

   Critics worry that the rapid mainstreaming of the genre will dull its original edge.

   Similarnormalization, popularization

   Oppositemarginalization

   Note

   In policy writing the word usually takes an object: a government is praised for mainstreaming sustainable development, or a concern like climate change is mainstreamed into development work. Here it means building an issue into ordinary decision-making. Jonathon Porritt used it this way in 2010. Joyeeta Gupta and Nicolien van der Grijp insist the same year that it involves governments, civil society, industry and local communities, with change pushed "as far upstream as possible."

2. 2
   nounUSuncountable

   The practice of educating students with special needs in regular classes rather than in separate ones.

   District administrators credited mainstreaming with raising graduation rates among students with mild disabilities.

   Her teaching certificate required a full course on mainstreaming and classroom accommodations.

   Similarinclusion, integration

   Oppositesegregation

   Note

   A term of the classroom, chiefly American, and the name for a whole philosophy of placement rather than a single act. Barbara Gerbasi, writing in The New York Times in 1985 about her own son, looks back to 1979 as the year when, for many educators, mainstreaming "was an idea whose time had come." Outside schools the word slides back toward the general sense of going mainstream.

3. 3
   verb

   Present participle of mainstream.

   Advertisers are mainstreaming styles that fashion houses once kept to the runway.

   By mainstreaming its research into popular podcasts, the institute reached a far wider audience.

   Note

   The verb behind this form works in both directions. It is transitive when someone is mainstreaming a style or an idea, and intransitive when a trend is simply mainstreaming on its own, becoming common without anyone pushing it. In American usage it can also take a pupil as its object, as in a school mainstreaming a disabled student, the action that the classroom noun names.

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