The discursive practice of learning disability: Implications for instruction and parent-school relations

This article serves as an invitation to rethink and to broaden the scope of learning disabilities (LD) research and practice. We begin with 3 assumptions: Education in a representative democracy is inevitably a political enterprise; social justice is everyone's responsibility, but educators have a special role to play; and segregated schooling is neither equal nor equitable. After an analysis of the primary extant discourses, we argue for a more comprehensive and more openly political vision of the LD field, which we think is supported by Disability Studies in Education. Finally, we draw 3 conclusions relevant to our collective work as researchers and educators. First, learning disabilities are not objective fact; they are historically and culturally determined. Second, disability is both a personal and a societal attribute. Finally, learning disabilities are not and have never been immutable. We contend that we are ethically bound to transform educational practices to both welcome and accommodate everybody's children.     

A Foucaultian critique of learning disability discourses: personal narratives and science

In this article, I present a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two discourses in learning disabilities (LD) – the academic research literature on emotions of students labeled as LD and retrospective autobiographies from adults labeled as LD writing about their emotions as students. Drawing mainly on Foucaultian explanations of power, I investigate how these two discourses differentially position persons labeled as LD as human subjects. I raise research and theoretical concerns to further interpret power as discursively and historically situated and point out opportunities for resisting ways the dominant positivist, scientific discourse positions students labeled as LD.     

The end of innocence: historiography and representation in the discursive practice of LD

In this article, I discuss two interrelated sets of challenges that the discursive practice of learning disability (LD) will need to address, namely, issues associated with the development of a historiography of special education and a more complex understanding of representation issues. I use social theory to address these challenges and raise questions the LD field will need to grapple with as we move toward the consolidation of discursive practices.     

Schooling as a regime of equality and reproducing difference in an Afro-Ecuadorian region

In this article I compare and contrast curricular, ceremonial and pedagogical practices with how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination at the Jaime Hurtado Academy in the city and province of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, which is the only region of the nation where Afro-Ecuadorian people comprise a majority of the population. On the one hand, I found that schooling was structured as a regime of equality, where social science textbooks make invisible the concepts of race and Blackness while school ceremonies enforced membership to the nation. In addition, I demonstrate that pedagogical practices reinforce the notion of a culturally homogenous nation by providing little space for students to interrogate important issues in their lives. On the other hand, I show through an examination of how students and teachers make sense of racial identity and discrimination that race was a significant factor shaping teaching and learning at the research site and argue that schooling practices are implicated in this process by attempting to submerge racial and cultural differences.     

Corporate practices and ethical tensions: Researching social justice values and neoliberal paradoxes in a ‘no excuses’ charter school

In recent years, there has been growing debate over the corporatisation of schooling, specifically the managerial practices of expanding charter school networks in the USA, often referred to as charter management organisations (CMOs). By definition, CMOs are consistently high-performing, well-financed networks of small schools operating in urban spaces, which adhere to a very specific ‘no excuses’ (NE) model of education in serving primarily students of colour living in poverty. This article is an autoethnographic account of my work as a leader in a CMO, which I theorise as a neoliberal project. We know very little of how neoliberal policies and ideologies are enacted in daily school life. I consider how the ethical responsibility of an educator is positioned within the daily practices and lived experience of leaders and educators working in a CMO. In focusing on my own ethical tensions, the article captures how this corporatised model of schooling influenced my values as an educator, my conflicted sense of social justice and the emotional labour of enacting a model of schooling founded on surveillance and accountability.     

Student Identities and/in Schooling: Subjection and adolescent performativity

This article uses a fictionalized scenario to examine how three students at an “ordinary” suburban high school in Canada negotiate the context-specific conditions, discourses, and practices that make schools important sites of identity formation. It argues that drawing from Foucault's ideas on the “subjection” of individuals, as well as from the field of performance studies, provides a fresh perspective to redress the potential mismatches between official multicultural education discourses and the lived schooling realities of students. In the process, it demonstrates how subjection and adolescent performativity can be useful analytics through which to understand student identities and/in schooling. The article concludes with some implications for shifts in policy, pedagogy, and practice to help schools engage with student diversity.     

Putting working-class mothers in their place: social stratification,the field of education,and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice

This article explores how a small sample of working-class mothers encounters the field of education. In the management of family and their children's schooling, mothers bring to bear and replicate ways of knowing that are embodied, are historical and that offer many-sided insights into profoundly stratified societies. Here I draw on Bourdieu's theory of practice as a heuristic device and focus only on the field while leaving in suspension his other conceptual arsenal. Bourdieu argued that understanding the social space in which interactions occur is pivotal, characterised as it is by ‘permanent relationships of inequality'. This study shows that mothers bring to the field their embodied history, their habituated practice, and their access to capitals. The women I interviewed know the precariousness of how they occupy the field of schooling, negotiated through a matrix of intersected positionings and classifications that are embodied.     

A logic of enumeration: the nature and effects of national literacy and numeracy testing in Australia

This paper reveals the array of practices arising from strong policy pressure for improved student results in national literacy and numeracy tests in Australia: the National Assessment Programme in Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). The paper provides an account of a policy context characterised by significant pressure upon teachers and principals to engage in practices to ensure improved outcomes on standardised literacy and numeracy tests, and of teachers and principals’ responses to these policy pressures. Drawing upon Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article argues that what is described as the ‘field of schooling practices’ has become increasingly dominated by a ‘logic of enumeration’, and that high test results on standardised literacy and numeracy tests are increasingly valued capitals, evident in a strong focus upon teachers meeting, discussing and informing one another about NAPLAN; engaging in curriculum development practices which foreground NAPLAN, and; actively preparing students to sit the test, including, whether intentionally or unintentionally, teaching to the test. Such a focus has important implications for the sorts of practices most valued in schooling settings, as more educative logics are potentially marginalised under such circumstances.     

Caring Teachers and Symbolic Violence: Engaging the Productive Struggle in Practice and Research

Symbolic violence may not be a desirable theory to apply to public schooling—its structuralist limitations render it deterministic, lacking in human agency, and unpalatable to researchers and educators who see schools as viable and productive sites of social transformation. Perhaps for these reasons, it seems little has been written about symbolic violence in schools, and what has been written tends to focus primarily on the symbolic, institutionalized violence imparted by schools and teachers upon students. In this article, I offer a shift in these perspectives. I present symbolic violence as a productive analytical tool in identifying modes of resistance to specific damaging effects of schooling institutions. I also illustrate how symbolic violence victimizes one particularly caring teacher, rendering her compliant in her own victimization, without voice to accurately name her struggles, and—because of her ethic of care—complicit in reproducing damaging institutionalizing practices. Using ethnographic data, I explore symbolic violence via one teacher's reflective, critical narratives. I draw upon the tenets of dialogicality in language to help make more visible the often intangible elements of symbolic violence. And at various points in the article, I discuss the implications of engaging an analytic that ultimately runs counter to my own epistemology, turning to Maxine Greene for insight in the struggle.     

Privatization and Commercialization of Public Education: Consequences for Citizenship and Citizenship Education

My purpose is to examine and evaluate the implementation of market ideology and practices in education through the prism of both modern democratic theory and the discourse of rights. I examine the essence and defining characteristics of public schooling in modern democratic theory, explore the democratic purposes of education, and the unique mission of public schools. I also analyze the vision of public schooling that surfaces from the discourse of human rights and children’s rights, examining relevant UN declarations and conventions. I then proceed to discuss some major manifestations of markets in education, question their congruence with the democratic vision of public schooling, and examine their consequences for both citizenship and citizenship education. My conclusion is that markets in education, and the formulation of education policies and practices through decision-making processes dominated by business and parents, are not necessarily fashioned in the best interest of a democratic society.     

Reciprocal Learning,Pedagogy and High-Performing Education Systems: Learnings from and for Singapore

ABSTRACT

Employing Connelly and Xu’s (this issue) conceptualisation of reciprocal learning, the article explores the potential for reciprocal learning about pedagogy provided by a body of PISA-inspired literature on high-performing education systems. I argue that the opportunities for reciprocal learning provided by that body of literature is rather limited and problematic because of its uncritical acceptance of the OECD’s basic premises about PISA and because of its employment of the ‘best practices’ approach to policy borrowing. Using Singapore as a case, I contend that reciprocal learning needs to be informed by the cultural historical narratives behind the development of an education system and a theory of pedagogy that locates the practice of teaching within a broad social, institutional, and instructional context of schooling. I discuss lessons from and for Singapore concerning the purposes of schooling, institutional norms and arrangements, and pedagogical practice.     

Taking stock of science in the schoolhouse: four ideas to foster effective instruction

In the opening discussion of this special issue, I take stock of science and schooling for students with learning disabilities (LD) before probing four ideas to foster effective instruction in contemporary schools: (a) Turn to science as the best trick we know for solving educational problems; (b) specify clearly what we hope to achieve in our instructional decisions for students with LD; (c) rely on instruction as the best tool we have for improving student performance; and (d) cultivate-and keep-competent and caring personnel. I invite commentary, from the perspectives of researchers, practitioners, and those who prepare teachers and administrators, to assess the status of science in the schoolhouse and to offer practical strategies for how the scientific orientation of schools might be enhanced.     

The comparative ethnography of educational projects: youth and adult literacy programmes in Brazil

This article elaborates the concept of educational projects, a term that signifies consistent constellations of institutions, financial resources, social actors, ideologies, theories of knowledge and attendant pedagogies that shape local cultural practices of schooling. The article demonstrates the utility of the concept of educational projects for comparative and international educational studies by examining competing educational projects in Brazilian literacy programmes for youth and adults. In conclusion, the article argues that the concept of educational projects provides a theoretically rich comparative tool for the field of comparative and international education.     

Feminism and ‘the schooling scandal’

In this paper I outline an approach towards policy analysis that takes governmentality as its point of theoretical orientation and begin to apply this approach to my research into the recently raised compulsory school‐leaving age in Western Australia. I aim to demonstrate the methodological potentials of this approach by giving examples of the thinking and practices that shape and condition the policy. I commence by situating the school‐leaving age policy within a broader field of reforms occurring under the general banner of neoliberalism and argue that the policy is primarily concerned with the conduct of students classified at ‘educational risk’, and with transforming these students to become more visible, participative and engaged in their schooling. By focusing on the policy rationalities and technologies, and drawing on Foucault’s notion of governmentality, I explore the forms of knowledge and practical strategies that are deployed in this policy field. I contend that this particular deployment narrowly constructs young people’s experiences of schooling in ways that do not allow for a broader debate about their declining school attendance and what should be done to address it     

The ‘doublethink’ of data: educational performativity and the field of schooling practices

This article provides insights into teachers’ and school administrators’ responses to the current ‘fetishisation’ of school performance data in Australian schooling. Specifically, the research investigates the accountability practices that emerged in a Queensland metropolitan primary school in response to this broader focus upon performance data. Drawing upon interviews with teachers and school administrators, literature and theorising on educational performativity and data, and Bourdieu’s theory of practice, the article reveals how performative, data-driven practices play out at the level of the school. This process reveals a ‘field of schooling practices’ characterised by contradictory and contested logics of deifying, delivering and denying data. We describe this as the ‘doublethink of data’, involving teachers engaging with performative processes for purposes of compliance but without any real sense of the value of doing so. The research reveals the extraordinary energy involved in this work, and cautions against these performative practices and associated technologies.     

What definitions of learning disability say and don't say: a critical analysis

In this article, we analyze critically available definitions of learning disability (LD). The general problem of definition is discussed first followed by a discussion of individual LD definitions from the earliest to the latest. We conclude that LD definitions fail to provide substantive insight into the nature of the condition. The reasons for this failure are discussed in relation to the nature of definition and the difficulties in providing operational definitions of LD that are meaningful and significant. Finally, means for resolving the problem of definition are discussed.     

Revealing the hidden world of research

Bringing the science of schooling into standard practice for students with learning disabilities (LD) is a threefold process that requires understanding the nature and features of high-quality instruction, encouraging their use, and developing and maintaining systems that can sustain them. Examples are drawn from the LD research base to illustrate each of these areas, with a focus on research in reading acquisition with young children at risk of LD and with older students with LD. These examples suggest a continued push for special education reading instruction through and past the elementary years. I conclude with recommendations for preparing teachers that take advantage of the knowledge gained from research-to-practice endeavors across the country.     

Between a rock and a hard place in the primary grades: The challenge of providing developmentally appropriate early childhood education in an Elementary School Setting

Primary grade teachers attempting to implement developmentally appropriate practice (DAP) in their classrooms must contend with the competing professional paradigms of early childhood education and elementary schooling. In this article I describe the practices of one primary grade teacher to give a picture of how these tensions play out in one public elementary school setting. Though the practices of the teacher studied here embody some aspects of developmentally appropriate practice, they are also marked by problems with personal interpretation, partial adoption, and inconsistency in implementation of DAP principles. Analysis of this teacher's experience provides insight into the general challenge of implementing DAP as well as into the specific challenges facing primary grade teachers committed to developmentally appropriate teaching.     

Reforming the Racial Curriculum: curriculum change in desegregated schools in South Africa

This article analyses curriculum changes that have accompanied the reform movement to desegregate private and religious schools in South Africa. In a context of racially segregated State schooling, the 'open' schools have admitted students of all races to what were previously white schools. An examination of the curriculum practices of these schools reveals different patterns in terms of the extent to which schools have modified their practices to acknowledge their black enrolments, and their different approaches to the political crisis in South Africa. The article suggests that the assimilationist practices of most of the open schools illustrate their limits as a reform movement; but it suggests also that they are the only schooling venture during this period that has engaged with issues of desegregation in South Africa in a sustained way.     

Understanding Statistical Power in Cluster Randomized Trials: Challenges Posed by Differences in Notation and Terminology

Abstract

In this article I review the use of randomized field trials to evaluate school voucher interventions. I argue that although estimates of the effect of the voucher offer on achievement are unbiased in these trials, more specific interpretations such as the effect of attending private school may be difficult to obtain. I discuss several evaluation parameters in the context of voucher experiments, with particular attention to the theoretical assumptions needed to identify private school impacts. I argue that if there are direct effects of the voucher offer on student achievement, and compliance with voucher assignment is imperfect, instrumental variable estimates are likely to overstate the extent to which achievement gains may be attributable to private schooling.