Doctors diagnose,teachers label: the unexpected in pre-service teachers’ talk about labelling children with ADHD

A study in an Australian university investigated 150 pre-service teachers’ responses to and participation in discourses of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Interesting data surfaced around the notion of ‘labelling’ children with ADHD. It seemed that the pre-service teachers did not believe ‘ADHD’ to be a label. Whilst the literature reviewed acknowledged diagnosing a child with ADHD to be tantamount to labelling (that is, ‘ADHD’ is a medical diagnostic label), the pre-service teachers in this study differentiated diagnosis from labelling and cast labelling as occurring in the classroom sometime pre- or post- diagnosis. Speaking of diagnosis and labelling in this way re-defines an object of dominant labelling discourse: ‘doctor as labeller’ is replaced with notions of ‘teacher as labeller’. Using Foucault’s ‘rules of discursive formations’ to frame its analysis, this study pondered the pre-service teachers’ conceptions of labelling and in doing so revealed a ‘teacher as labeller’ discursive formation. This article provides examples of how this discursive formation features in pre-service teachers’ talk and outlines an important implication of the ‘teacher as labeller’ discursive formation, namely that it enables teachers to cement their role in the ADHD medical diagnostic apparatus.     

The power,and dilemma,of honesty: action learning for social entrepreneurs

This is an account of one particular set meeting during a year long programme for social entrepreneurs. It triggered a number of questions and insights for me about the amazing value of honesty, and its power. It released a great deal of energy, ownership and ‘control’. I realized how important it was to highlight, discuss and reflect on this, one of the fundamental values of action learning, with set members. However, it also posed dilemmas for them when returning to the ‘real’ world.     

College Students With ADHD and LD: Effects of Support Services on Academic Performance

Two relatively common disabilities reported by college students are attention‐deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and learning disabilities (LD). Many questions remain regarding how best to support these students and whether services such as advising, coaching, and tutoring lead to significant academic gains. The current study examined the effect of support services on the GPA of students with LD and/or ADHD at a campus that specifically serves this population by tracking students’ support service usage and GPAs over a 5‐year period. Results indicate that although most students who choose to receive coaching support experience academic gains, it is students with ADHD who obtain the greatest gains in GPA as a result of this support. Additionally, although tutoring can be of benefit to all students, significant GPA gains were obtained only for students with an LD diagnosis. Thus, there is a need to provide targeted supports aimed at addressing students’ specific areas of challenge.     

English,literacy, rhetoric: changing the project?

In this paper I begin to trace two movements in the curriculum history and cultural politics of English teaching: on the one hand, a shift from ‘literature’ to ‘literacy’, as organizing principles for the field, and on the other, from ‘language’ to ‘rhetoric’. I do so within a particular understanding of history, as embracing past present and future dimensions. My aim is two‐fold: to open up questions about the subject's historical legacy, and to draw attention to some of the emerging challenges and prospects for English teaching today and tomorrow.     

The Regime of Self-Evaluation: Self-Conception for Teachers and Schools

Self-evaluation in inspection policy has become a global phenomenon. The idea is that it increases levels of teacher and school autonomy, wherein both schools and teachers have more ownership and responsibility over their work. In turn, such a process has allowed for greater accountability, which is then said to provide high quality education and, therefore, greater competitive advantage amongst knowledge-based economies. In both England and Ireland, self-evaluation has become a demanding procedure that is meant to complement external inspections of schools and teachers. In this article, I will argue that self-evaluation, whilst having the potential to become a worthwhile endeavour, does not live up to its name. In the first instance, the criteria used for self-evaluation are not internally generated but externally imposed. Thus, I would like to discuss the extent to which visions of ‘good’ or ‘bad’ education developed by inspecting bodies influence the way in which teachers and schools assess themselves. Furthermore, I will raise questions as to what appropriate criteria for teaching might look like. In doing so, I shall try to show that what is now current is a debased form of self-evaluation that is not only detrimental to the self-perception of teachers, but inadequate to what any coherent notion of the ‘self’ might be. In light of work by the philosopher Charles Taylor in particular, I will argue that the self is not something that can be examined in the way that is imagined in these inspection systems but is rather something dynamic and unfixed, constituted within a wider community of practice and, therefore, not amenable to evaluation in quite the way that is supposed.     

Political depression,cruel optimism and pedagogies of reparation: questions of criticality and affect in human rights education

This article argues that there is an urgent need to engage with a deeper analysis of the contemporary culture of ‘political depression’ and its affective implications in human rights education (HRE). In particular, the article focuses on the following questions: How might a theorization of political depression be relevant to efforts that aim to renew criticality in HRE? In which ways can a ‘critical’ HRE turn our attention to important ethical, political and affective questions on human rights? Can the negativity of political depression become a site for HRE pedagogies that are ‘reparative’? The article makes an attempt to articulate some of the content and strategies of pedagogies of reparation and their significance in what is currently being formulated in the literature as ‘critical human rights education’. Reparative pedagogies invite in the classroom the challenge of how students can learn from unimaginable traumatic histories, while acknowledging the affective politics of histories of violence, oppression and social injustice, without falling into the trap of sentimentality, but rather engaging in social justice-oriented action and activism.     

Doing Good and Feeling Bad: the work of women university teachers

Drawing on in‐depth interviews with 27 women academics in faculties of education in Canada, this article explores some of the consequences of the gendered division of labour in universities. Jean Baker Miller's phrase, ‘doing good and feeling bad’, characterised the women in the study. They reported working excessively hard, taking responsibility for supporting others, including colleagues and students, and being ‘good department citizens’. Yet they seemed disappointed by the results. Their ‘feeling bad’ is related to the reward system in academic life; a sense that there is an unequal division of labour, with women ‘working harder'; and an expectation that women will take greater responsibility for the nurturing and housekeeping side of academic life. The article explores ‘individual’ and ‘structural’ explanations for the findings and raises further questions about caring in university teaching, the situation of tokens and outsiders in university departments and the prospects for altering university priorities in these times of cutbacks and retrenchment.     

Drugs,labels and (p)ill-fitting boxes: ADHD and children who are hard to teach

In offering a critical review of the problem we call ‘ADHD’ (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder), this paper progresses in three stages. The first two parts feature the dominant voices emanating from the literature in medicine and psychology which, when juxtaposed, highlight an interdependency between these otherwise competing interest groups. In Part 3, the nature of the relationship between these groups and the institution of the school is considered, as is the role that the school may play in the psycho-pathologisation of fidgety, distractible, active children who prove hard to teach. In so doing, the author provides an insight as to why the problem we call ‘ADHD’ has achieved celebrity status in Australia and what the effects of that may be for children who come to be described in these ways.     

The inadequacy of ADHD: a philosophical contribution

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a widely spread diagnosis. The dominant paradigm of ADHD is biomedical where ADHD is defined as a brain disorder. At the same time, the legitimacy of the diagnosis is being questioned since it is unclear whether or not ADHD can be deemed a medical disorder in itself. The aim of this article is to critically assess the merits of understanding the diagnosis of ADHD as a medical condition defined as a brain disorder. This is being done using the seventeenth century philosopher Benedict Spinoza’s (1632–1677) notions of adequate and inadequate knowledge and his counterintuitive theory of mental health. Doing so it becomes clear that ADHD, however adequate it may seem, is founded on inadequate knowledge and that the legitimacy of the individual diagnosis should therefore be questioned on the grounds that on a long term scale it is passivizing and stigmatizing rather that liberating.     

Self-Deception in the Classroom: Educational manifestations of Sartre’s concept of bad faith

This article explores an important section of Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous early work, Being and Nothingness. In that section Sartre proposes that part of the human condition is to actively engage in a particular kind of self-deception he calls bad faith. Bad faith is recognized by the obvious inconsistency between the purported self-knowledge of an individual and ways of acting and being in the world that are demonstrably in defiance of that stated position. This article begins by exploring examples of this self-deception in education along with a short query into the role pain avoidance might play in the development of this particular skill. The article then goes on to offer a series of manifestations of bad faith that Sartre identified along with possible examples of how each example, perhaps ‘excuse’, of bad faith might appear in education.     

Misunderstanding duty: Vices of culture, ‘aggravated’ vice,and the role of casuistical questions in moral education

Abstract

This paper considers the role of ‘vices of culture’ in Immanuel Kant’s account of radical evil and education. I argue that Kant was keenly aware of a uniquely human tendency to allow a self-centered concern for status to misunderstand or co-opt the language of dignity and equal worth for its own purposes. This tendency lies at the root of the ‘vices of culture’ and ‘aggravated vices’ that Kant describes in the Religion and Doctrine of Virtue, respectively. When it comes to moral education, then, it will be crucial that the developing agent have a clear understanding of the shared dignity of rational agents and the particular duties (e.g. gratitude and beneficence) that are defined, in part, by their tendency to alter (a different kind of) status among agents. I argue that the casuistical questions that Kant attaches to these discussions in the Doctrine of Virtue are an example of a pedagogical device that might help pupils to overcome this tendency so closely associated with radical evil.     

Doing being Boys with ADHD: category memberships and differences in SEN classroom practices

This paper builds on sociological assumptions that teachers, schools and schooling may play an important role in the recognition and psychopathologization of particular boys as ‘difficult, disordered and disturbed’. The data draw on ethnographic work combined with video recordings of everyday classroom practices in a special educational needs unit with boys diagnosed with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Drawing on ethnomethodological work on members’ understanding of social categories (MCA) combined with the related methodology of ‘doing difference’, the focus is on the local social process through which boys’ unruly behaviors are made sense of and treated as the grounds for shifting categorization practices. It is found that both teachers and boys orient to the institutional categories Teacher and Student in teacher–student interactions for the ordering of the classroom . The boys’ conduct is in these instances far from pathological but is meaningful in the sense that it provides local resources to resist teacher authorithy and display agency. Overall, the analysis highlights the complexity of locally accomplished identity practices – in terms of how institutional-, gender- and age-appropriate conduct meshes with diagnostic criteria – in the social identification of boys diagnosed with ADHD.     

How to Improve your Impact Factor: Questioning the Quantification of Academic Quality

A broad‐scale quantification of the measure of quality for scholarship is under way. This trend has fundamental implications for the future of academic publishing and employment. In this essay we want to raise questions about these burgeoning practices, particularly how they affect philosophy of education and similar sub‐disciplines. First, details are given of how an ‘impact factor’ is calculated. The various meanings that can be attached to it are scrutinised. Second, we examine how impact factors are used to make various ‘high stakes’ academic decisions, such as hiring and promotion, funding of research projects and how much money is to be awarded to a particular area. By focusing on a particular practice, problems with the application of the metric generally are outlined. Finally, we offer some general observations about the unintended consequences and other problems arising from the widespread use of this metric, including attempts to ‘game the system’. We argue that the use of impact factors increasingly shapes the kind of topics and issues scholars write on, their choices of methodology, and their choice of publication venues for their work. Technical measures and mechanisms tend to ‘colonise’ the qualitative and professional judgments that must also be part of the process of evaluation, and for which bibliometrics alone cannot offer a substitute.     

Enhancing the effectiveness of concept inventories using textual analysis: investigations in an electrical engineering subject

ABSTRACT

Concept inventories (CIs) are assessment instruments designed to measure students’ conceptual understanding of fundamental concepts in particular fields. CIs utilise multiple-choice questions (MCQs), and specifically designed response selections, to help identify misconceptions. One shortcoming of this assessment instrument is that it fails to provide evidence of the causes of the misconceptions, or the nature of students’ conceptual understanding. In this article, we present the results of conducting textual analysis on students’ written explanations in order to provide better judgements into their conceptual understanding. We compared students’ MCQ scores in Signals and Systems Concept Inventory questions, with the textual analysis utilising vector analysis approaches. Our analysis of the textual data provided the ability to detect answers that students identified as a ‘guessed’ response. However, the analysis was unable to detect if conceptually correct ideas existed within the ‘guessed’ responses. The presented approach can be used as a framework to analyse assessment instruments that utilise textual, short-answer responses. This analysis framework is best suited for the restricted conditions imposed by the short-answer structure.     

School English,literature and the knowledge-base question

This article takes up questions about knowledge and the school curriculum with respect to literary studies within subject English. Its intention is to focus on literary studies in English from the context of current waves of curriculum reform, rather than as part of the conversations primarily within the field of English, to raise questions about the knowledge agenda, and the knowledge-base agenda for teaching and teacher education. The selection of texts and form of study of literature within the English curriculum has long been an area of controversy. Without assuming a particular position on knowledge in this area, this article shows that important questions of what knowledge-base teachers are expected to bring to their work are elided both in current regulations and debates, and in research on ‘good teaching’ in this area. If ‘literary studies’ (as a discipline or university major) is itself an unstable and changing field, what kind of knowledge does a good English teacher bring to their work? This paper takes up these questions in the context of the Australian Curriculum and standards for teacher registration, but it also points to the way these issues about knowledge are of broader relevance for researchers and teacher education.     

The post-human I: encountering ‘data’ in new materialism

The editors of a recent special edition of Qualitative Studies in Education map a new field of post-qualitative research and raise fundamental questions about core concepts such as ‘method’ and ‘data.’ They ask whether qualitative inquiry as we know it is any longer possible if we understand language, the human and the material as completely imbricated. In taking up the relation between language and representation as core to what is proposed as the ‘new new,’ the paper examines these questions in relation to data generated in a project called ‘Love Your Lagoons’ conducted with 10 schools and 300 children in Sydney’s water catchment. In particular, the paper focuses on data from one secondary school that offered ‘Regeneration’ as a sport option in which the students walked to their local Redbank Creek every week and spent time there. By closely attending to the circumstances of the collection of data and analyzing it through approaches offered within the ‘new new,’ insights into the relationship between language, materiality, and the human are offered. Summary comments are made about the politico/ethical project of the post-human I and the relevance of data and method to such post-qualitative inquiry.     

How a Deweyan science education further enables ethics education

This paper questions the perceived divide between ‘science’ subject matter and ‘moral’ or ‘ethical’ subject matter. A difficulty that this assumed divide produces is that science teachers often feel that there needs to be ‘special treatment’ given to certain issues which are of an ethical or moral nature and which are ‘brought into’ the science class. The case is made in this article that dealing with ethical issues in the science class should not call for a sensitivity that is beyond the expertise of the science teacher. Indeed it is argued here that science teachers in particular have a great deal to offer in enabling ethics education. To overcome this perceived divide between science and values it needs to be recognised that the educative development of learners is both scientific and moral. I shall be using a Deweyan perspective to make the case that we as science teachers can overcome this apparent divide and significantly contribute to an ethics education of our students.     

Computer Aided Design in Industrial Design Education

In general, Industrial Design BA courses have been slow to formulate a coherent strategy for the inclusion, implementation and integration of computers into their teaching. CAD hardware and software has appeared in many institutions as a result of the enthusiasm of one or two individuals who have used a particular CAD system themselves or been bowled over by an impressive demonstration. The possession of the equipment then to a large extent determines what kind of use can be made of it, and this is also subject to the vagaries of staff time and expertise, both of which are often in short supply. Basic questions, such as ‘What is the purpose of CAD education in this course?’ or ‘What kind of computing do the students really need?’ are often by-passed until it is too late. Over the last three years at Sheffield Hallam University a conscious attempt has been made to evolve an approach which begins with questions such as these and results in a coherent teaching and learning strategy for our students.     

A systematic review and synthesis of qualitative research: the influence of school context on symptoms of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder

This systematic review and synthesis of qualitative research explored contextual factors relevant to non-pharmacological interventions for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in schools. We conducted meta-ethnography to synthesise 34 studies, using theories of stigma to further develop the synthesis. Studies suggested that the classroom context requiring pupils to sit still, be quiet and concentrate could trigger symptoms of ADHD, and that symptoms could then be exacerbated through informal/formal labelling and stigma, damaged self-perceptions and resulting poor relationships with staff and pupils. Influences of the school context on symptoms of ADHD were often invisible to teachers and pupils, with most attributions made to the individual pupil and/or the pupil’s family. We theorise that this ‘invisibility’ is at least partly an artefact of stigma, and that the potential for stigma for ADHD to seem ‘natural and right’ in the context of schools needs to be taken into account when planning any intervention.