Transcript Slide 1

Seminar sponsored by the British Educational Research
Association Social Justice Special Interest Group
in collaboration with the Society for Educational Studies
Disadvantaged and Disabled
Learners and Social Justice
WELCOME & INTRODUCTION
Interagency collaboration, social
justice and learners with disabilities
and difficulties
Professor Harry Daniels
University of Bath
DEMOS Paper
Personalisation through participation:
A new script for public services
Charles Leadbeater
The dawn of new ‘capabilities’?
Personalisation
The proposal is that clients become coproducers of
services and take a central part in the design and
formulation of the particular service that is made
available. stark contrast to the services that ‘deliver’ a
standardised offer to all clients whatever their needs
Leadbeater, 2004
CHOICE AND VOICE IN PERSONALISED LEARNING’
SPEECH BY DAVID MILIBAND MP
MINISTER OF STATE FOR SCHOOL STANDARDS
AT A DfES INNOVATION UNIT / DEMOS / OECD CONFERENCE
‘PERSONALISING EDUCATION: THE FUTURE OF PUBLIC SECTOR REFORM’
LONDON, 18 MAY 2004
Aneurin Bevan used to say that the freedom to choose was
worthless without the power to choose. This is the power of
personalised learning. Not a false dichotomy between choice
and voice but an acceptance that if we are to truly revolutionise
public services then people need to have both. Because
students are not merely educational shoppers in the
marketplace; they are creators of their own educational
experience; and their voice can help shape provision. Both as a
means of engaging students in their own learning – the coproducers of education. And as a means of developing their
talents – using their voice to help create choices.
Social Exclusion
• Social exclusion which may be typified as loss of
access to the most important life chances that a
modern society offers, where those chances connect
individuals to the mainstream of life in that society.
• New ‘life chances’ = new patterns of exclusion?
Changes 1 Interagency Work
• Responsive interagency work in these contexts
requires a new way of conceptualising collaboration
which recognises the construction of constantly
changing combinations of people and resources
across services, and their distribution over space
and time.
• Many services are shaped by their histories and
organised for the convenience of the provider not the
client (Cabinet Office, 2001).
• Audit Commission report (2002 p.52) suggests that
there is a general consensus that agencies need to
work more closely together to meet the needs of young
people, but different spending priorities, boundaries and
cultures make this difficult to achieve in practice
• Interagency working of such services tend to 'underlap'
rather than overlap and agencies can ignore the
complexity their clients present
The 2002 Spending Review
• prioritises multiagency support in schools and
announces a multiagency behaviour strategy which
includes the formation of behaviour and education
support teams
The Green Paper, September 2003:
Every Child Matters
• integrated teams of health and education professionals, social
workers and Connexions advisers based in and around
schools and Children's Centres;
• sweeping away legal, technical and cultural barriers to
information sharing so that, for the first time, there can be
effective communication between everyone with a
responsibility for children;
• establish a clear framework of accountability at a national and
local level with the appointment of a Children's Director in
every local authority responsible for bringing all children's
services together as Children's Trusts;
Policy and Inclusion
• Current policy on social inclusion is running ahead of
conceptualisations of inter-professional collaboration and
the learning it requires in a number of fields
• Even Personalisation through Participation
A view of the problem from a study of
Young People Permanently Excluded
from School
• Sample 193 young people aged 13 to 16
• PEX in 1999/2000
• Across ten local education authorities in England
• Sample over representative of females, ethnic
• Minorities and young people in care.
Key Concerns
• Lack of ‘joined up’ working
• Insufficient attention to needs led planning
• Prevalence of service led formulation of need
• Relationship between placement and expectations
and aspirations
• Social capital
• Boundary crossing ‘knotworkers’
Working Together
• Young people require, but typically are not in receipt
of, flexible and responsive interagency service delivery
•Professionals need to learn how to work
collaboratively.
•Collaboration between agencies working for social
inclusion also now emphasises collaboration with
service users.
•Promoting deliberative agency
Development
Craft
Tacit
Knowledge
Mass
Production
Articulated
knowledge
Modularisation
Linking
Mass Customisation
Architectural
knowledge
Process
Enhancement
Practical
Knowledge
Development
Craft
Mass
Production
Articulated
knowledge
Tacit
Knowledge
Renewal
Networking
Co-configuration
Modularisation
Mass Customisation
Architectural
knowledge
Linking
Process
Enhancement
Practical
Knowledge
Development
Craft
Mass
Production
Articulated
knowledge
Tacit
Knowledge
Renewal
Co-configuration
includes interdependency between multiple
producers in a strategic alliance or other pattern
of partnership which collaboratively creates and
maintains a complex package which integrates
products and services and has a long life cycle.
Learning
• For co-configuration
• In co-configuration
• Need to go beyond conventional team work or
networking to the practice of knotworking
Changes 2 Knotworking
• is a rapidly changing, distributed and partially improvised
orchestration of collaborative performance
• takes place between otherwise loosely connected actors and
their work systems to support clients.
• various forms of tying and untying of otherwise separate threads
of activity takes place.
• Co-configuration in responsive and collaborating services
requires flexible knotworking
• no single actor has the sole, fixed responsibility and control
Knotworking
• requires participants to have a disposition to
recognise and engage with the expertise
distributed across rapidly shifting professional
groupings.
Argument 1
Social world structures thinking
Any function in the child’s cultural development appears
twice or on two planes… It appears first between people
as an intermental category, and then within the child as
an intramental category
Argument 2
Scientific and spontaneous concepts
Concept
Scientific
concepts
Mature concepts
Spontaneous
Concepts
Object
•Impose on child logically defined concepts
•Scientific concepts move ‘downwards’
towards greater concreteness
•Evolve in highly structured and specialized
activity of classroom instruction
•Concepts emerge from the child’s own
reflections of everyday experience
•Spontaneous concepts move upwards
towards greater abstractness
•Develops in child’s everyday learning
environment
Argument 3
theories of learning
• subject (traditionally an individual, more recently
possibly also an organization)
• acquires some identifiable knowledge or skills in such
a way that a corresponding, relatively lasting change
in the behaviour of the subject may be observed.
• knowledge or skill to be acquired is itself stable and
reasonably well defined.
• There is a competent ‘teacher’ who knows what is to
be learned.
• People and organizations are all the time learning
something that is not stable, not even defined or
understood ahead of time.
• important transformations -- literally learned as they
are being created.
• There is no competent teacher.
Activity Theory
• Theory
• Methodology
1. Prime unit of analysis.
• collective, artefact-mediated and
object-oriented activity system, seen in
its network relations to other activity
systems
Mediating Artefacts:
Tools and Signs
Object
Subject
Sense
Outcome
Meaning
Rules
Community
Division of Labour
The structure of a human activity system Engestrom 1987 p. 78
• Subject: the individual/subgroup
chosen as the point of view in the
analysis.
Tools: physical or psychological.
•
• Community:
•
•
•
individuals/subgroups who share
the same general object.
Division of labor: division of
tasks between members of the
community.
Rules: explicit/implicit regulations,
norms, conventions that constrains
action/interaction
Object: “the ‘raw material’ or
‘problem space’ at which the
activity is directed and which is
molded or transformed into
outcomes”
2. Multi-voiced ness of activity
systems
• division of labour in an activity creates different positions
for the participants, the participants carry their own
diverse histories,
• activity system itself carries multiple layers and strands
of history engraved in its artefacts, rules and
conventions.
• multiplied in networks of interacting activity systems.
• source of innovation,
Two interacting activity systems as minimal
model for third generation of activity theory -Engestrom 1999
Mediating Artefact
Mediating Artefact
Object 2
Object 1
Objeect 2
Object 1
Rules Community Division of
Labour
Object 3
Rules Community Division of
Labour
3. Historicity.
• needs to be studied as local history of the activity and its
objects, and
• as history of the theoretical ideas and tools that have
shaped the activity
4. Contradictions as sources of
change and development.
• historically accumulating structural
tensions within and between activity
systems
Contradictions, tensions, conflicts,
breakdowns
5. Expansive (cycles)
transformations in activity systems
• object and motive of the activity are
reconceptualized to embrace a radically
wider horizon of possibilities than in the
previous mode of the activity
Methodology
In Activity Theory development is not only an object of
study, it is also a general research methodology.
The basic research method in Activity Theory is not
traditional laboratory experiments but the formative
experiment which combines active participation with
monitoring of the developmental changes of the study
participants.
Ethnographic methods that track the history and
development of a practice have also become important in
recent work.
Expansive learning
•capacity to interpret and expand the definition of
the object of activity and respond in increasingly
enriched ways
•produces culturally new patterns of activity
•expands understanding and changes practice.
•such learning is evidenced in enhanced analyses of the
potential of objects and dispositions of subjects to recognise
and engage with distributed expertise in complex work
places.
•object is the constantly reproduced purpose of a collective
activity system that motivates and defines the horizon of
possible goals and actions
•studying the formation of objects and the learning that takes
place in and across complex and rapidly changing activity
systems as professionals learn to expand and co-construct
the objects of their activities.
Change Laboratories
Each lasts about two hours.
Tensions and dilemmas will be
highlighted
Alternative ways of working proposed.
1.
Work in the Change Laboratory typically starts with the mirror
of present problems.
2.
It then moves to trace the roots of current trouble by mirroring
experiences from the past and by modeling the past activity
system.
3.
The work then proceeds to model the current activity and its
inner contradictions, which enables the participants to focus
their transformation efforts on essential sources of trouble.
4.
The next step is the envisioning of the future model of the
activity, including its concretization by means of identifying
'next-step' partial solutions and tools.
5.
Subsequently, the stepwise implementation of the new vision
is planned and monitored in the Change Laboratory.
•participants envision and draft proposals for concrete
changes.
•videotaped for analysis.
•professionals involved will be asked to evaluate the
acceptability of this way of working.
practitioner will be invited to present an overview of the
case -- prepared in a prior meeting.
devices and procedures to support the work of these
preparatory sessions. include templates of
•calendars (to summarise important events in the trajectory),
•maps (to depict the key parties involved), and
•agreements (to summarise the division of labour amongst the
parties).
highlight the temporal aspect, the sociospatial aspect,
and the relational negotiational aspect of the work
the intellectual work and the practical
representational work (writing, drawing, etc.) of the
participants
•move between the spaces of the mirror and the
model,
•stopping occasionally in the middle.
these processes move between three layers of
time.
the discourse moves between the participants and
their various voices
Collective
imagining
and
projecting
Collective
remembring
Distancing
Modeling
MODEL,
VISION
IDEAS, INTERMEDIATE
TOOLS
Involvement
Intellectual
reflection
MIRROR
Implementation
Negotiation,
debate
PARTIC IPANTS
Imitation,
assistance
Emotional
confrontation
Five Stages of The Project
Stage One
Theoretical Development
January - June 2004
Systematic Review and clarification of conceptual framework
Stage Two
Analysing the National Situation
June - December 2004
Develop Survey Device and Model of Learning
Stage Three
Refine Model Through Intervention in Three Settings
January - September 2005
Development of Knowledge Tools and Preliminary Outcomes
Stage Four
Feasibility Study in Four Local Authorities
October 2005 - June 2007
Testing of Feasibility of Models and Tools
Stage Five
Examining the Outcomes in a Broader Context
July - December 2007
Knowledge Sharing
Travellers and additional support
for learning policy
Gwynedd Lloyd & Gillean McCluskey
University of Edinburgh
Gender, social class and school
exclusions
Jean Kane
University of Glasgow
Why are boys over-represented in
exclusion statistics?
• Nature of the links between certain identities
and exclusion from school
• Relative influence of schools and wider social
factors
• Meaning of social justice in this context
Policy background
Social justice discourse
• Social justice…..a
Scotland where everyone
matters (Scottish
Executive, 1999)
School improvement
discourse
• Better behaviour, better
learning (Scottish
Executive Education
Department, 2002)
Method
• Four secondary schools
• Twenty case studies of pupils who had been excluded
in that session
• Classroom observation, interviews, school and pupil
documentation
• Focus here on three case studies – Andy, Ross and
Davy
Negotiating masculinities – moving
towards exclusion
1.
Public respect:
The teachers do not treat you right. In Primary 7 the
teachers treated you with respect. Here they don’t;
they treat you like you were dirt, nearly every single
teacher ( S1 pupil)
Negotiating masculinities – moving
towards exclusion
2. Power and control
Pupils want to be his friend because I think it is the
power he has outwith the school, or the perceived power
he has outwith school.
(Maths teacher)
Negotiating masculinities – moving
towards exclusion
3. Maturity
Work, girlfriends, social life
He is a very bright boy but he is out till 1.00 or 2.00am
and he cannot get up in the morning for school. He has a
difficult home life but there is a lot of pressure as well
with peers.
(Home/School link worker)
Negotiating masculinities – moving
towards exclusion
4. Abilities and the future
I was one of the brightest in my class at primary
school. I still am really in most of my classes. I can
do the work; but I just don’t do it most of the time.
(Ross)
To summarise……
• Boys are negotiating identities in school for their lives
outside of school
• For some, those negotiations entail behaviour which
leads to their exclusion
• Limits to what schools can do
What is social justice here?
• Continue to exclude?
• Alternative curricula? Alternative location?
• Develop in-school support systems?
• Curriculum flexibility and adaptability?
• Recognise impact of inequality on young people in
school?
Capability Theory and
Disadvantaged and Disabled
Learners
Lorella Terzi
University of London
Educational Equality and Justice
Why does educational equality matter?
Primarily educational equality matters because
it is a fundamental value of justice.
This statement subsumes three important considerations:
1. Reasons for supporting egalitarianism:
Intrinsic value of equality
Instrumental value of equality
‘Equality is the sovereign virtue of political communities’ (Dworkin, 2000: 1).
2. Important normative role of equality at two interconnected
levels in education:
The theoretical level, concerned with conceptualisations of values and aims;
The level of provision, related to the enactment of these ideals into policies
and practice.
3. The importance of conceptualising educational equality in
relation to disabled learners.
Conceptualising Educational Equality
for Disabled Learners:
Equality in Capabilities
I maintain that the capability approach helps in conceptualising
educational equality by focussing on the fundamental educational
capabilities that are essential prerequisites for functioning as an
independent person in society.
My argument has two interrelated parts.
1. First, I maintain that, in so far as we can, we should educate
people in order to develop those educational capabilities that, once
secured, will ensure that individuals are not at a disadvantage in
society.
2. Second, I argue that seeking equality in the space of
fundamental educational capabilities helps substantially in
considering the demands of educational equality for disabled
learners.
More specifically, it allows a conceptualisation of educational
equality as equal effective opportunities for educational
capabilities, at a level necessary and sufficient for participating
as equals in society. The specification of a level of equal
participation, as we shall see, entails the distribution of
additional resources to disabled learners as a matter of justice.
What is the Capability Approach?
The capability approach, developed by Amartya Sen and
further articulated by Martha Nussbaum, is a normative
framework for the assessment of poverty and inequalities.
Sen’s Capability Approach:
key concepts
The evaluative space for the assessment of inequality,
and conversely, for determining what equality we should
seek, is the space of the freedoms to achieve valuable
objectives that people have, that is the space of
capabilities.
Within this space, Sen distinguishes functionings and capabilities.
Functionings are ‘beings and doings constitutive of a person’s being’
(1992: 39). Walking is a functioning, so are reading, being well
nourished, being happy or having self-respect.
Capabilities are capabilities to function, and represent a person’s
substantive freedoms to achieve valuable functionings, or functionings
that a person has reasons to value (1992: 40). Capabilities represent
‘various combinations of functionings (beings and doings) that the
person can achieve. Capability is, thus, a set of vectors of
functionings, reflecting the person’s freedom to lead one type of life or
another’ (1992: 40).
Example: ‘Fasting as a functioning is not just starving: it is choosing to
starve when one does have other options’ (1992: 52).
Sen’s capability approach:
key concepts
The concept of human diversity
The capability approach theorises a space where considerations of
personal heterogeneities are relevant for the assessment of equality.
Sen maintains that ‘the empirical fact of human diversity’ is crucial in
assessing the demands of equality’ (1992: xi).
Human diversity is no secondary complication (to be ignored, or to
be introduced later on); it is a fundamental aspect of our interest in
equality’ (1992: xi).
Human diversity is addressed as the interrelation of personal and
circumstantial factors. According to this view, human beings are diverse in
three fundamental ways:
1. Firstly, they are different with respect to their personal, internal
characteristics, such as gender, age, physical and mental abilities, talents,
proneness to illness and so forth.
2. Secondly, different individuals are different with respect to external
circumstances, like inherited wealth and assets, environmental factors,
including climatic differences and social and cultural arrangements (1992:
1, 20, 27-28).
3. Thirdly, a further and important diversity relates to differences in the
conversion of resources into freedoms, that is it relates to different
individual abilities to convert commodities and resources into valuable
ends (1992: 85).
Elements of a fundamental
educational entitlement
The Capability approach allows a conceptualisation of a fundamental educational
entitlement in terms of the equal effective opportunities to levels of educational
capabilities necessary and sufficient to function and to participate effectively in
society.
The fundamental educational capabilities form the necessary and sufficient
enabling conditions that, once achieved, allow individuals to function effectively in
their dominant social framework.
In so far as we can, we should provide people with equal effective opportunities
for fundamental educational capabilities and the relative achieved functionings,
which constitute the transformational resources necessary to functioning and
participating effectively in society.
Elements of a Fundamental Educational
Entitlement for Disabled Learners
Two components: a level of definitions and conceptualisations of disability
and special educational needs, and a level of provision.
1. A capability perspective on impairment, disability and special educational
needs
•Disability and special educational needs as
inherently relational, or, more specifically, as
emerging from the interlocking of individual
characteristics with social and circumstantial
elements.
•They are conceptualised as functionings and capabilities
limitations and hence evaluated in terms of vertical
inequalities.
Example: dyslexia
Dyslexia is considered a difference, which, in affecting
functionings, constitutes an identifiable disadvantage. It is
relational to both impairment and the design of educational
institutions. The capability approach evaluates dyslexia as a
vertical inequality and highlights how additional and
appropriate provision in any case of restriction of functioning
and capability becomes a matter of justice.
Elements of a Fundamental Educational
Entitlement for Disabled Learners
2. A fundamental educational entitlement, an educational minimum for
disabled learners consists in levels of opportunities and resources
required to allow learners to achieve those basic educational
functionings that are prerequisites for en effective participation in the
dominant framework. In this sense, therefore, a dyslexic child is
entitled to additional opportunities and resources that will allow her to
achieve reading and writing functionings appropriate to participate
effectively in her social framework.
Problems and Limits
1. Possible element of ‘reductionism’.
Why should we propose an educational minimum based on certain
capabilities necessary to an effective functioning in society, when
certain impairments restrict functionings in such substantial ways
that the actual well-being of the individual is better promoted through
fostering other, non-basic capabilities?
2. The possible discriminatory use of a threshold level.
Why not proposing the promotion of capabilities and functionings
achievements and abandon any idea of threshold level?
Conclusions
The Capability approach helps in answering one of the hardest
normative questions related to educational equality:
What and how much educational resources should be devoted to
disabled learners?
It suggest an understanding of educational equality in terms of equal
opportunities to fundamental educational capabilities at levels necessary
to function and participate effectively in society.
This leads to the requirement, as a matter of justice, of additional
opportunities and resources for disabled learners.
This view does not represent a theory of educational equality, rather, it
presents an exploration of its complexities and a possible answer within
the capability approach.
Questions
The Social Construction of
Dyslexia in Higher Education
Shelia Riddell & Elisabet Weedon
University of Edinburgh
Focus of Paper
Construction of dyslexia in higher education and
negotiations between students, lecturers and
academic institutions over diagnosis and support.
Draws on social constructionist thinking to highlight
ways in which individuals use category of disability to
make sense of experience.
Parallels approaches used to make
sense of other ‘new’ disabilities e.g.
AD(H)D
ADHD as a category has established itself within schooling, and in
this sense is both a social fact and a resource that is actively used for
dealing with problems. It has implications for the manner in which
teaching is organised and for the use of limited resources. It will also
have consequences for the student’s educational career, and
obviously, a neuropsychiatric diagnosis, indicative of a brain injury,
will play a critical role identity formation of young people.
(Hjorne and Saljo, 2004: 7)
Structure of Paper
• Construction of dyslexia in scientific literature
• Incidence of dyslexia in higher education.
• Case studies of dyslexic students to illustrate
a) understandings of students and university staff
b) institutional responses with regard to curricular and pedagogical
approaches
c) resource allocation issues
The research project
Data drawn from ESRC funded study: Disabled Students
and Multiple Policy Innovations in Higher Education
Conducted jointly by researchers at the Universities of
Edinburgh and Glasgow between 2000 and 2003.
Range of methods:
•analysis of HESA data
•questionnaire survey of institutional practices
•in-depth case studies of forty eight students in eight HEIs in
England and Scotland.
Case studies:
•Interviews with students, lecturers and support staff
•Observations of individualised and anticipatory adjustments
Anti-discrimination legislation and the
construction of ‘reasonable
adjustments’
•Over two decades, higher education transformed from
elite to mass system
•Growth of new public management (RAE, TQA)
•Also increase in equalities legislation
•DDA Part 4 : requires individualised & anticipatory
adjustments
•Adjustment to curriculum, pedagogy & assessment
contentious – raises issue of standards
Disability, categorisation
and identity
Early writing in disability studies – drew distinction between
impairment & disability.
Disability seen as socially relative
But writers like Abberley saw impairment as an undeniable
‘bedrock’
Post-modern writing – emphasises mutability & contingency
Disability shifting category – tensions with fixed
administrative categories
Categories like AD(H)D and dyslexia reveal live struggles
between different interest groups
Constructions of dyslexia
Recent reviews criticise fundamental research informing
practitioner action
Findings seen as ‘tentative, speculative and
controversial’
Standard diagnostic criteria cast much too wide a net
Differences between bodies over
definition
British Dyslexia Association & Dyslexia Institute promote definitions
based on physiological/neurological/genetic differences
British Psychological Society adopts more inclusive definition:
Dyslexia is evident when accurate and fluent word reading and/or spelling
develops incompletely or with great difficulty. (BPS, 1999)
Voluntary organisations & parents claim dyslexia is discrete category
Educationists see it as part of continuum of learning difficulties
The incidence of dyslexia in higher
education
Advantages of label for individual:
•Access to the Disabled Students Allowance (DSA)
•Reasonable adjustments, including alternative ways of
demonstrating learning outcomes and extra time in exams.
•Possible lower entry requirements
Advantages of label for institution:
•Premium funding
•Boost to numbers reported to HESA
But level of resourcing supports standardised, rather than
specialised, adjustments
Table 1. Students in higher education with a known
disability (first degree programmes)
Number of
students
Total known to
have disability
Percentage
1994 - 95
323011
11162
3.5%
2002 - 03
351805
21285
6%
Year
Table 2. Categories of disability used by HESA and
percentages of undergraduates in each category in
1994/95 and 2002/3
1994/95
2002/03
Dyslexia
15%
49%
Blind/partially sighted
4%
3%
Deaf/hard of hearing
6%
4%
Wheelchair/mobility
difficulties
6%
3%
Personal care support
0.1%
0.1%
Mental health difficulties
2%
3%
An unseen disability
53%
23%
Multiple disabilities
5%
4%
Other disability
10%
11%
Type of disability
Table 3. Male and female students self-identifying as
dyslexic (first degree entrants 2002-2003, full-time)
Total
number
male
students*
146240
(9905)
Total number
of male
students
with dyslexia
5535
%
Total
number of
female
students
3.8
(56)
169910
(9705)
Total number
of female
students
with dyslexia
%
4390
2.6
(45)
• Incidence of dyslexia has increased in both male
and female students
•Dyslexic students socially advantaged group
•Significantly more likely to be male and middle
class.
Negotiating the meaning of dyslexia:
three case studies
Liam
Assessment : likelihood of positive diagnosis:
I think you have to pay £200, but the disability officer said
“You can get that back if you are dyslexic and we haven’t had
anyone yet who has been tested who hasn’t been and I’m
pretty confident you will get it back so I never ever had to pay
the £200. (Liam, ancient Scottish university)
But not necessarily a guarantee of adjustments:
You know I went to one guy, in fact the first guy I saw, and
said, “Look, I’ve been diagnosed as having dyslexia’ and I
was about to say, ‘Who can I go to discuss essays with?”
and he said, “Oh, you know in my experience dyslexics
don’t spell any worse than the other students”. Afterwards,
when I left, and this says everything about the guy, he just
said, “Don’t hassle me”. I thought, this guy, he’s supposed
to be teaching English Literature and doesn’t even have a
basic grasp of what dyslexia is. (Liam)
Idiosyncratic institutional responses:
You know if there was an essay from a dyslexic student
I tend to try and ignore the kind of structural difficulties
and try and see what they are saying and so I tend to
mark them on the ideas rather than the actual
presentation. But that’s totally improvised, that’s not
because of anything. (Lecturer, ancient Scottish
university)
But reservations on grounds of equality:
I felt that in a sense Liam was disadvantaged by his
dyslexia but also he was getting all this kind of special
attention which I was happy to give. I don’t think it was
proportional to the attention I had given to other
students with dyslexia. So I feel quite uneasy about
that as well.
(Lecturer, ancient Scottish university)
Student discontent with institutional treatment:
I applied for funding from the Students Awards
Agency for Scotland for a PhD and they said “Sorry,
you don’t get funding because you didn’t get a first”.
And I’m thinking, “If I was black, this would be racism,
blatant racism, but I’ve possibly missed out on
£20,000 worth of funding which everyone says I’m
capable of because the system was weighted against
me and I was misinformed at the time. (Liam)
Maurice
Early educational experience
I went through school – everything was never fine – I was always slow.
Always from the start of primary school, my mother and father would
have been brought in because my reading wasn’t very good, my
reading was always very slow. Both my parents were teachers, so I
think what really happened was that they sort of worked with me a bit.
Nothing was ever diagnosed except that ‘Maurice’s a bit slow’, do you
know what I mean, and I must have just muddled through school to be
honest. English was never a strong point and I don’t know if that was
why I went down the science route, because it wasn’t structured
essays, factual learning. It was understanding, and I was always better
with diagrams and thing like that. (Maurice)
Response to diagnosis at university:
Initially my diagnosis was “You are dyslexic” and at that
time that was a relief to me. I didn’t take it to heart, I
didn’t think I was retarded or something like that. I think
some people do take it to heart. I thought, “Well, that’s
quite a relief” and I was quite happy with the position that
the university was going to give me some extra time in
exams and I thought, “Oh that’s good, it will take a bit of
the pressure off me a bit more in writing essays”.
Institutional scepticism:
I came to enquire about it and they were a bit standoffish
about the whole dyslexic thing. …Their point of view is that
they see it as an excuse and they say, “Why do you want
extra time in an exam? You wouldn’t get extra time during a
surgery or extra time in rescuss”.
I know it is better being dyslexic, I can feel my medical friends
saying “And how did you fail that test Maurice?”. There are a
few people think that.
Concealed identity:
There’s about three other people in my year who are
dyslexic in medicine and I’ve bumped into them as we’ve
arrived at the exam hall 25 minutes early, you can work it
out, but that’s the only way. Sometimes it comes up in the
conversation, “Where were you?” “Seeing the special
needs adviser”. “Oh, what’s that about?” It never gets
brought up in conversation with any academic members of
staff.
Reluctance to self-categorise as disabled:
I don’t like thinking of myself as disabled, I don’t even like,
when you started talking, I don’t even like that you almost
put me in the category with someone in a wheelchair. I
almost find that offensive. No. I mean, God, I’m glad I’m
not and it’s almost a relief that I don’t have to deal with a
physical or other disability. I really don’t like holding it up
or shouting about it at all. I like that it’s been identified and
I’m not stupid, I rather look on it like that. (Maurice)
Pragmatic use of category in job application:
I wouldn’t, I would not tick the disabled box – I think maybe I did
actually reign in my pride and tick the disability box and I rang
them and said, “I’m dyslexic and if I’m coming to your centre then I
need access to a word processor”. So yeah, I think in that
instance I made it work for me and then I thought, well, damn it,
why should I handicap myself?. In other instances I haven’t
because I’m very suspicious, despite the fact that the Disability
Discrimination Act exists. I’m very very suspicious of people
making a judgement about who you are depending on whether you
tick a box or you don’t. Because I think people don’t understand
that you can have dyslexia and be completely, perfectly affable,
perfectly bright person who just has a few problems in these areas
over here. (Sheena)
Lecturers’ accounts of dyslexia
Concerns about ‘dumbing down’
I think the issues [of academic standards] will come to the fore when we
have a lot more students who fall into the disabled group and what we
will get is the student who is disabled and a bad student. A student who
is disabled and is a bit lazy, and I think people are not quite sure what to
do because of the PC nature of it. These are the cases that will be
difficult because the question arises, is the student using their disability
as an excuse for being lazy? But most of the people we have had so far
are here because it isn't yet mainstream and they have struggled so hard
to get here and they are willing. As I say in the past it’s been a case of
asking the lecturer, ‘Can I have this extra thing, can I tape the lecture
and go away and re-write it?’. So they are going through all this extra
work so they tend to be the students who are motivated. (lecturer,
ancient university)
Conclusion
•Social constructionist thinking provides insight into
struggles over categorisation of disability over time
•Rapid expansion in number of students with diagnosis
of dyslexia
•Expansion of disabled students largely explained by
increase in the number of dyslexic students.
•Relatively socially advantaged group.
•Students describe struggle to have dyslexia formally
recognised (although negative assessments rare).
•Identification of dyslexia welcomed - but institutional
response often slow
•Dyslexia is not without stigma – but preferred to category
of disability
•Resistance at institutional level linked to struggle
over resources
•Individual academics express scepticism about
validity of category
•Seen as ‘dumbing down’ & linked to pathologising
of normal experience.
Reforming Teaching:
is there such a thing as a special
pedagogy?
Lani Florian
University of Cambridge
Pedagogy
“the broad cluster of decisions and actions taken in
classroom settings that aim to promote school learning”
Lewis and Norwich, 2005 p.7
What is special education?
• USA
Specially designed instruction...to meet the unique needs of a child
with a disability
• England
Special education provision means...educational provision which is
additional to, or otherwise different from, the educational provision
made generally for children of their age in schools maintained by the
LEA, other than special schools, in the area
• Scotland
A child or young person has additional support needs (ASN) where,
for whatever reason, the child or young person is, or is likely to be,
unable without the provision of additional support to benefit from
school education provided or to be provided for the child or young
person
Previous work on specialist pedagogy
Lewis and Norwich (1999)
interested in whether differences between learners (by
particular SEN group) could be identified and
systematically linked with learners' needs for differential
teaching
general differences - "needs which are specific or
distinctive to a group that shares distinctive
characteristics”
unique differences - "are informed only by common and
individual needs, general specific needs are not
recognised"
Previous work on specialist
pedagogy
Two central findings
• the available evidence does not support the general
difference position and
• while it does not fully endorse the unique differences
position there was some support for the argument that
what works for most pupils works for all pupils, though
there might be differences in application for various
types of difficulties.
'continua of teaching or pedagogic approaches'
Meta-analyses of special education
practices
• Considered useful answering questions about what
works in special education – Kavale review.
• Attempts to define what is special about special
education have failed to show anything distinctive.
• It is when research which investigates the teachinglearning process in general is 'interpreted' for special
education that significant effect sizes are obtained.
• SPECIAL education
• special EDUCATION
Teaching strategies and approaches
for pupils with special educational
needs: a scoping study.
AIM: to map out and assess the effectiveness of the
different approaches and strategies used to teach
pupils with the full range of special educational
needs
•
•
•
•
language and communication
cognition and learning
physical and sensory
emotional and behavioural difficulties
Findings
•
Certain teaching strategies and approaches are associated with, but not
necessarily related directly to specific categories of SEN.
•
These were not sufficiently differentiated from those which are used to
teach all children to justify a distinctive SEN pedagogy.
•
Sound practices in teaching and learning in both mainstream and
special education literatures were often informed by the same basic
research.
•
Some teaching strategies developed for one purpose can be used with
particular groups of children for other purposes (e.g. co-operative
learning).
•
There is a growing need to move away from the belief that one model of
learning informs and justifies one model of teaching. Thus, the findings
of the scoping study led to focus more broadly on the question of
pedagogy.
Pedagogy
what one needs to know, and the skills one needs to command, in
order to make and justify the many different kinds of decisions of
which teaching is constituted...[including]
• children: their characteristics, development and upbringing
• learning: how it can best be motivated, achieved, identified,
assessed and built upon
• teaching: its planning, execution and evaluation, and
• curriculum: “the various ways of knowing, understanding, doing,
creating, investigating and making sense which it is desirable for
children to encounter, and how these are most appropriately
translated and structured for teaching” ( Alexander, 2004).
Pedagogy
• It is not the differences among children, their characteristics or
upbringing that is problematic but when the magnitude of these
differences exceeds what schools can accommodate that children
are considered to have special educational needs.
• this process of making accommodations does not constitute
pedagogy but is an element of it.
• questions about a separate special education pedagogy are
unhelpful.
• the more important agenda is about how to develop a pedagogy that
is inclusive of all learners.
• SEN Code of Practice areas of need are important elements of
human development for all learners.
Pedagogy
Moreover these elements interact in ways that produce
individual differences which make it difficult to prescribe a
course of action to remedy a particular problem.
Special education knowledge - an essential component of
pedagogy.
Necessary but not sufficient conditions:
•
•
•
•
•
an opportunity for pupil participation in decision-making processes
a positive attitude about the learning abilities of all pupils
teacher knowledge about learning difficulties and other special
educational needs
skilled use of specific teaching methods
parent and teacher support
Transitions for Young People with
Special Educational Needs
Alan Dyson
University of Manchester
The Issues
• Model of social inclusion dependent on
•
•
•
•
Progression to EET
Employability in a globalised labour market
‘One way of being’
Support structures & interventions for those at risk of
exclusion
• Young people with difficulties which make this model
problematic
The Study
• Longitudinal study of YPs identified at school as having
SEN
• Wave 2 captures YPs at age 17
• Main survey supplemented by 16 case studies
• Cases weighted towards those where interventions
might have most effect
• Interviews with YPs, parents/carers, providers
Themes
• Deferred transitions for some
• preordained tracks
• waiting for maturation
• Disrupted transitions
• churning & lack of progression
• Variable support 7 planning at school & beyond
• Dependence on parental intervention
• an under-utilised resource
Themes II
• Variable outcomes
• Social difficulties
• Lack of independent living
• Lack of rational planning
Some implications
• All may yet be well, but…
• The linear transition model appears not to apply here
• Personal limitations and inadequate support send
young people ‘off-track’
• No obvious entitlement
• Maybe stronger support is needed…or a different
paradigm
Adult Basic Education and
Social Inclusion
Lyn Tett
University of Edinburgh
Social Inclusion
• The excluded do not constitute a defined group in the population:
there is no single clear-cut definition of ‘social exclusion’.
Categories such as the ‘unskilled’ ‘ethnic minorities’ ‘the
unemployed’ cover a range of circumstances. …. So ‘exclusion’
does not bring a precise target into view but a range of
associated issues (OECD, 1999: 15-16).
• The goal of policy is now to change behaviour in civil society
(individuals and organisations) rather than simply provide a
service.
• The new language of exclusion implies that government’s task is
to promote “inclusion” into the existing social order’ (Field, 2000:
108).
Literacy and numeracy
• Being literate and numerate is generally equated with success in
life, with notions of a person being ‘educated’, obtaining a job
and having access to the ‘goods’ and trappings of well being
that are valued highly in society.
• An earlier discourse of economic egalitarianism has given way
to a new emphasis on individual responsibility. Extremes of
income and wealth are no longer presented as undesirable in
themselves. The only undesirable element is that they may lock
certain members of society into an inability to take care of
themselves. The state then has a responsibility to ensure that
opportunities for self-advancement are made equally available
to every citizen, an obvious responsibility in relation to education
and training (Phillips,1999: 13).
Employment and ‘basic skills’
• A number of quantitative studies have shown that literacy and
numeracy skills are significant both in gaining employment and also
in retaining and progressing in it.
• The findings of the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) are
based on a particular discourse that assumes that literacy and
numeracy skills are neutral that takes no account of the ways in
which literacy and numeracy are used in specific communities. In
this discourse literacy skills are viewed as a set of technical skills
which, once acquired, usually lead to positive employment
outcomes.
• In contrast ethnographic studies of literacy and numeracy practices
reveal the role of social networks where people act as ‘mediators’ or
‘brokers’ in assisting others.
A social practice approach to
learning
• Rather than seeing literacy and numeracy as the
decontextualised, mechanical, manipulation of letters,
words and figures instead literacies are located within
the social, emotional and linguistic contexts that give
them meaning.
• Thus reading and writing are complex cognitive activities
that integrate feelings, values, routines, skills,
understandings, and activities and depend on a great
deal of contextual (i.e. social) knowledge and intention
A social practice approach to learning
community
learning as
belonging
learning as doing
Learning
identity
practice
learning as
becoming
meaning
learning as
experience
From Etienne Wenger (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity, Cambridge University Press
Learners’ Views from the workplace
• ‘I’ve got the practical skills to work out how much paint it’s going to take
to cover a room from doing it over the years so I don’t really need to
measure it all out. The young guys in my firm know how to do all that
and we work together because they can learn from me but they also
know things that I don’t’.
• ‘I speak up a lot more now. When they tried to change our schedules
at work I said it wasn’t right and we got together and they changed it
back. Before I came to the programme I would never have done that
because I didn’t want to make trouble’.
• ‘I basically know what I’m talking about now. I’m confident and capable
and know I can achieve things’.
Learners’ Views continued
• ‘It’s making me realise that I’m not stupid’.
• ‘It made a whole lot of difference to how I feel about myself
since I learned to read better. You feel better when you
learn to do a lot of things for yourself you know’.
• ‘I’m not afraid to voice my opinion now, even if I’m wrong’.
• ‘I’m being taken more seriously at work now. I’m not just a
woman who left school and then had lots of kids’.
Education and Learning
• ‘Even a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. It
causes a smouldering discontent that may flame into
active rebellion against a low level of life, and
produces a demand, however stammering, for more
interests and chances. Where we see ferment there
has been some of the yeast of education’ (Margaret
Davies, 1913).
Social Practices approach and
Social Inclusion 1
• Literacy and numeracy being organised within specific social,
emotional and linguistic contexts that integrate feelings,
values, routines, skills, understandings, and activities.
• Purposeful learning that builds on learners’ prior knowledge
and experience to shape and construct new knowledge but
also challenges them to take risks;
• Developing a curriculum that helps students to recognise that
they have the capacity to learn and to generate new
knowledge that will be really useful to them;
Social Practices approach and Social
Inclusion 2
• Working on both increasing skills and developing people’s
critical awareness of why they might not have these skills
in the first place;
• Developing the awareness of employers, policy makers
and other decision-makers about the value of using a
social practices, rather than a deficit, approach to literacy
and numeracy
• Maximising the strengths of people’s spiky profiles of skills,
knowledge and understanding through working
collaboratively in their communities of practice.
Disabled Learners and Social Justice:
A Swedish Comparative Perspective
Eva Hjorne & Lisa Asp-Onsjo
Goteborg University
”A school for all”
• The idea is 200 years old
• Political goal and ambition
• Not everyone fits in
• A dilemma solved by differentiating/segregating
strategies
The arguments have changed…
• Protect the ”normal” child
• For the child’s own best
• Beneficial for everyone – implies differentiating pupils
into homogeneous special classes
• Meet the individual pupil’s needs – implies entitlement
or right to special support
Categories used have changed…
• Poor, unintelligent – short period of schooling
• Moron, imbecile – remedial class
• Intellectually retarded, maladjusted, immature, CP – 8
different classes in the curriculum
• Neuropsychiatric impairments (diagnosises) – special
teaching groups i.e. ADHD-group
For example in 1962
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Remedial class
Special class for maladjusted children
Class for children with impaired hearing
Class for children with visual impairments
Remedial reading class
Open-air and health class
School readiness class
Class for children with cerebral palsy (CP)
Goal- and result oriented school
• Local school regulates the details and distributes
resources
• Categorization – a sensitive issue
• Equal access to school
• Entitled to special support if needed
• Medicalisation and the use of neuropsychiatric
categories -10% - ADHD and 21% NPF
Swedish Compulsory School
• 1.1 million pupils (65.000 pupils in independent schools)
• 1,5 % classical impairments: visual - hearing
impairments (0.1%) and mental retardation (1.4%)
• Increasing number (50%) pupils in special school for
mentally retarded: 10.000 (1999) → 15.000 (2004)
• ~21% in need of special support
• Trend: increasing number of special teaching groups;
groups for reading, maths, disciplinary problems, ADHD,
Aspergers
How the political goal of having ”a
school for all” turn out in praxis
Pupil Welfare Team – the
institutional mechanism
•
•
•
•
•
Local responsibility – focus on the professionals
Define pupils in need of special support
Gender balance 3:1
Consensus in the multiprofessional team
Children’s difficulties seen as a consequence of pupil
characteristics - diagnosises
• Normalising school practices
• No pupil’s perspectives
• Attempts of joining-up thinking
IEP – an institutional tool
• IEP - a legal obligation for the school and an entitlement
for pupils and parents
• Designed by school staff in negotiation with parents and
pupils
The case of Angie
• ”Desired situation” - special school for mentally
retarded
• IEP as a force of pressure on the parents
• Resulted in placing Angie in the category ”mentally
retarded”
• Solution seems unaviodable
Diagnosises solve the dilemma
but a diagnostic culture
undermines ”a school for all”
Questions & Discussion
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