among and even within the different provinces, and between teachers in rural and urban areas. Teachers in mainstream schools in KwaZulu-Natal who were interviewed by undergraduate students in the discipline of speech-language pathology at the University of KwaZulu-Natal expressed confusion over both the identification and management of learners with LD (Hlela, 1997, Khubeka, 2003). Khubeka (2003) found just over half of the teachers interviewed were, at best, “vaguely familiar” with the term LD. The majority identified family problems and brain damage as causes and suggested it could be identified in a child who looks malnourished or dull. None of the teachers interviewed suggested that a child who has problems expressing him/ herself may have LD and less than half of the teachers suggested that a child with LD may have difficulty following instructions. Education White Paper 6 (DOE, 2001) refers in broad terms to learners with organic, medical disability having access to special education. As remedial schools existed in South Africa at the time, one can conclude that the implication is that learners accessing remedial schools had “organic, medical disability.”
I return to this issue of how to define LD in Chapter Two. Perhaps if we seek a definition at all it should come from those who know the problem best – the insiders. Oliver (1996:10) cites Wallach Ballagh (1991:38) thus: “[s]ocial theory, coming to terms with social life, means defining, describing, or naming our experience, our historical reality for ourselves rather than living with definitions imposed upon us” (emphasis mine). Gerber and Reiff (1991), in their interviews with adults with LD, ask them to define LD themselves. Dane (1990:12) supports the view that children with LD define it for themselves.
This is a question put to my own research participants which is discussed further in Chapter Six.
To re-iterate, for the purposes of this study, particularly at the outset, I use the term ‘leaning disability’ or ‘LD’ to imply all that is described by the DSM-IV classification or categorization. However I intend to challenge this definition
after analyzing the data presented in this report. At this point however I ask the reader’s indulgence as I accept the DSM IV definition for pragmatic reasons only, and not because I believe it to be right, good or comprehensive. I intend through the data analysis to show that the children who ‘wear’ this label define their learning difference themselves.
Life history:
It is also necessary at this point to define the life history methodology, and to describe the way I use this term. It serves as both a methodological strategy (for data collection) and an analytical framework. This refers to how I analyze the ways in which children with LD narrativise their lives. Typically the life history methodology is used with adult participants, and to reflect back over a life lived. One could argue whether children in fact have ‘histories.’ I have used the methodology to generate a story of a ‘life so far’ for each of my informants. The context is the education system in which their experiences occur and the central theme of each of their stories is their learning disability. I therefore refer to the learner’s history of his/her LD.
Experience:
I am using a Laingian approach to looking at experience. R.D. Laing was steeped in the anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s. He attempted to illustrate how madness- which in his work refers mainly to schizophrenia- “did not only arise within the individual, but arose as part of a social mechanism”
(Jenner, 2001:17). His “existential-phenomenological” view of mental illness is an attempt to see mental illness beyond a disease model (Potter, 2001). Both LD and ADHD are classified in the DSM-IV and by implication are psychological “diseases” or “disorders,” and the core of my argument for this research is an attempt to understand LD beyond a disease or pathology model.
Laing (1967) claims “experience is the only evidence”. This is resonant with
is the primary reality” (Bruner, 1986:50). However according to Laing (1967) I can never know another’s experience; I can observe his/her behaviour and that becomes my experience in the same way that my behaviour becomes his/her experience. In fact Laing goes as far as to suggest that there is no such thing as an “I”- no man is an island –we all impact on one another’s experience and behaviour in a reciprocal fashion (Barbetti, 2001). For me the point being made here is this: the way children with LD experience their LD is always in relation to the reactions, behaviour and expectations of others. In other words no experience occurs in a void. As Laing argues: “…behaviour is a function of experience, and both experience and behaviour are always in relation to someone or something other than self” (Laing, 1967:21-22). He goes on to quote Goffman who says: “There seems to be no agent more effective than another person in bringing a world for oneself alive, or, by a glance, a gesture, or a remark, shriveling up the reality in which one is lodged” (Goffman cited in Laing, 1967:28).
Finally, despite my aim to present the lived experience of children with learning disability, I acknowledge that I can never know another’s experience (Denzin & Lincoln, 2003:51). The best I can hope for are their representations of that experience, which are evident in the stories they tell about themselves.