A key argument in this dissertation is to emphasize time and temporalities as a structure that contributes to educational exclusion. That is, time is an important aspect of the social construction of dis/ability. In this section, I provide an overview of the literature on the social construction of dis/ability.
Schools categorize dis/ability and this categorization is associated with the focus on measurement, competition, and performance. Dis/ability categorization is carried out in classroom discourses, teacher conversations, and reflects broader cultural and ideological arrangements such as individualism, whiteness, and neoliberalism. Overall, culture plays a crucial role in categorization. Deficit, difference, or dis/ability is not the property of individuals or resides within children, but is acquired through relationships, interactions, and institutions.
Thus, the culture as disability approach argues that disability is a consequence of certain
institutional arrangements such that “without schools, no learning disabilities” (McDermott and Varenne 1995, p. 338) This dissertation rests on these arguments, furthering our understanding of how temporal regimes function as crucial institutional arrangements underlying inclusion and exclusion. The scholarship on the social construction of dis/ability includes several implicit references to temporality. Examining the construction of learning disabilities, Dudley-Marling (2004) references age-grade synchronization and the pace of learning,
26
Such practices as tracking and ability grouping, age-graded instruction, changing teachers every year in elementary schools, and the evaluation of student performance based
largely on assessing differential rates of learning—with the underlying assumption that school achievement distributes more or less normally—are neither natural nor normal. (p.
484)
Further, McDermott (1993) asserts how competition and measurement are central to the
categorization of student success and failure, “to the point that the rate of learning rather than the learning is the total measure of the learner” (McDermott, 1993, p. 272). Across these studies, time and the temporal structure of schooling are invoked – age-grade instruction, annual teacher changes, and rates of learning – all underlie a notion of the temporal life of schooling that is taken for granted. Making the operations of time in school explicit, Adam (2003) writes, “we know that not all children learn at the same pace. Yet, age-based classes, educational attainment targets and assessments apply the invariable norm as measure.” (p. 63)
There is extensive research that examines the ways in which children acquire
smartness/not-so-smartness in schools and classrooms. The work of Varenne and McDermott (2006; 1993; 1995; 1999) is considered a landmark in developing a new “science of people” that challenges individual or within-child explanations of learning and ability and emphasizes how children acquire certain labels within institutions and interactions (Lundqvist, 2019; Sengupta- Irving, 2021). Schools are sites of contestation around smartness and ability. Lundqvist (2019) through long-term ethnographic research offers how positions of success and failure are acquired in comparison with or in relation to peers within institutional notions of smartness. Drawing on positioning theory, Sengupta-Irving (2021) examines how children come to occupy success and failure within discourses of race, class, and gender outside the classroom. In particular, she
27
argues that students are constructed as deficient or undesirable by demonstrating the operations of neoliberal logics in schools and classrooms. By neoliberal logics, she refers to the impetus on individuals to maximize their value– a focus on productivity and future value in developing oneself for the labor market.
Schools ascribe smartness to some and position other students as inferior (Leonardo &
Broderick, 2011). That is, the construction of smartness in school “requires its dialectical
opposite and cannot exist without the cursed population of so-called low intellect” (p. 2222). As Lundqvist (2019) demonstrates, when teachers categorize or position one child in the classroom, they position everyone else. Positions assigned to individual children are dynamic and shifting while the categories are interdependent. That is, the dialectics of smart/not-so-smart,
ability/disability, educable/ineducable, or desirable/undesirable must be discussed and
understood together. Understanding and exposing these dialectics is crucial to enacting inclusive education, which seeks to disentangle the “myth of the normal child” (Baglieri et al., 2011) that underlies these categorizations and labels of ability in schools and classrooms.
Work linking disability studies, critical race theory, and whiteness studies (Annamma et al., 2013; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011), examines the ideological underpinnings of smartness as cultural capital or a form of property, constructed to uphold white supremacy. As Leonardo and Broderick (2011) argue, smartness is an ideology that supports the construction of normativity in schools. Smartness is not rooted in biology or cognition but is an identity position that has
“material consequences” for access to support and cultural capital in schools. Similarly, a key tenet of DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013) emphasizes the “social constructions of race and ability”
(p. 57) emphasizing how acquiring the label “sets one outside of the western cultural norms” (p.
57). The association between race and disability is tied to the history of the creation of learning
28
disabilities as a special education category in the United States in the 1960s. A common thread across this research is that such categorizations are not facts of individual differences or biologically determined, but sociocultural and political constructions.
Varenne and McDermott (1995; 1999) describe learning disabilities as a cultural problem. That is, there is “there is no such thing as learning disability, only a social practice of displaying, noticing, documenting, remediating, and explaining it” (p. 272). Disability as a cultural fact or disability as culture asks, “when does a physical difference count, under what conditions and in what ways, and for what reasons?” (p. 138) That is, body/mind differences do not inherently constitute “problems” but are constructed to be problems within certain
institutional and interactional arrangements. These arrangements could be at the level of the classroom, where success or failure might be acquired based on children’s exchange of the
“cultural currency” (39) of the classroom, and as a consequence of testing, competition, and measurement regimes aiming to ascertain causes of school failure. The culture as disability approach focuses on the contexts within which impairments acquire relevance. This is distinguished from prevailing approaches to school failure, such as the culture as poverty
argument (some cultures are deficient) or culture as difference models (cultures are different, and schools are tasked with helping children acquire dominant cultures).
‘Culture as disability’ distinguishes between the physicality of impairment and the exclusion that results from institutional and political arrangements that exclude and isolate to create disability. In this way, learning disabilities are not an anomaly of development, but a category in a culture that acquires children because of the organization of schools. The construction of learning disabilities is ascribed to a cultural explanation of school failure that focuses on the child (Varenne & McDermott, 1999). Dudley-Marling (2004) argues that this
29
constitutes an “ideology of individualism” prevalent in American societies, “an institution that typically equates learning with the mastery of skills, learning disability will be defined in terms of skill deficits. In an institution that valorizes the individual, we can also expect that learning disability will be situated in the heads of individual students” (p. 484). Dudley-Marling (2004) provides a social constructivist lens that does not view problems within individuals, either the teacher or the student. Instead, individuals are in relationship with problems, encouraging teachers to examine contexts and structures that lead to challenges in learning.
Sleeter (1986, 2010) demonstrates how learning disabilities came to be a category during Cold War education reform efforts, focused on establishing international dominance of the United States economy. Five categories of school failure were constructed – slow learners, mentally retarded, emotionally disturbed, culturally deprived, and learning disabled. The first two categories were determined based on IQ levels. The categories of emotionally disturbed and culturally deprived largely included poor, Black, and Brown families, considered to provide deficient environments for their children. Sleeter (1986, 2010) argues that the category of learning disability was produced to protect white middle-class families from “the stigma of failure” (Sleeter, 1986, p. 46) – this category was developed through the advocacy of parents – their children did not fit in definitions of intellectual disability yet required a special education category to access services to help with school failure. School categorizations of students have ideological underpinnings of the purpose of schooling in society, and what constitutes normal (Sleeter 2010). The “political purpose” for learning disabilities as a category to exist is to protect whiteness: “white middle-class students should not be failing…or suffer consequences of school failure” (p. 22)
30
Similarly, in the context of the United Kingdom, Tomlinson (2015) addresses how class and race interact with access to special education services and labels. Although learning
disability labels have expanded beyond white middle-class groups since the 1980s, middle-class parents are more likely to demand their children have access to special education services.
Further, she argues that neoliberal conditions that promote competition between schools and individuals bolster the special educational needs (SEN) industry as a means to manage the population of students labeled as low achieving. This is particularly true for schools serving working class and poor communities.
A crucial question is how these categorizations influence teacher actions in the classroom. Examining teacher conversations across two schools in the United States, Horn (2007) argues that teacher categorization of students relates to their understanding of their discipline and their teaching practices. She examines these conversational category systems in the context of the mismatch problem, a dilemma described as whether teachers teach to the rigor of the curriculum or the level of the student. Horn (2007) argues that these category systems play a role in addressing everyday problems of enacting the curriculum. If teachers understand
success and failure based on variations in innate ability, it restricts teacher action. On the other hand, if teachers understand the discipline and their role in different ways, teachers can transform classroom discourses around ability and status to allow for those perceived as having low status to contribute to the classroom. Horn (2007) argues that these category systems, of fast kids, slow kids, lazy kids, and so forth become embedded within the school through the curriculum and classroom practices.
Most of the literature discussed so far is located in the United States, examining how classroom-level discourses, teacher conversational category systems, and ideological systems
31
contribute to the categorization of ability in schools and classrooms. Beyond the United States, Raveaud (2005) demonstrates how the construction of students and responses to individual differences varies across national contexts. National contexts imply both historical conditions within nation-states as well as cultural contexts associated with those historical conditions. The comparison of the social construction of students between France and England indicates how historical, cultural, and political differences can lead teachers to exhibit different constructions of and responses to ability differences in the classroom.
Teachers in England focus on the learning of individual children and the uniqueness of each child’s characteristics and needs. Thus, the teachers seek to develop each child’s learning potential, varying tasks by ability grouping as learning is considered a task to be accomplished by individuals. This is perhaps not different from Dudley-Marling's (2004) observation of the
“ideology of individualism”, supporting comparisons Tomlinson (2015) draws between the United States and the United Kingdom in the construction of learning disabilities as a category in highly individualized, competitive education systems. On the other hand, Raveaud (2005)
observes that teachers in France view learning as a social activity, such that their goals were to ensure that all children had equal access to the same classroom experiences. Thus, teachers did not differentiate tasks – all children were expected to participate, but varied the means of learning, including providing extra time and support. Unlike English teachers, who practiced ability grouping and streaming to protect the self-esteem needs of each child, teachers in France did not want to engage in labeling or stigmatizing students by assigning categories of difference.
This is not to suggest that one system is superior to the other. Through children’s testimonies and classroom observations, Raveaud (2005) highlights the shortcomings of both approaches: the English approach reinforces inequalities while the French system disregards
32
individual needs. However, this provides support to the ‘culture as disability’ argument -
different institutional arrangements enable or disable individuals in particular ways (McDermott
& Varenne, 1995). Below, I highlight the limitations of this approach to understanding the social construction of dis/ability.