Discursive Psychology Blog 7.21.13

Performative acts of autism – Lester and Paulus

This piece is one of my favorites that we’ve read this semester.  As I was reading the article, I was thinking about the similarities between the construction of autism and the construction of learning disabilities (specifically reading).  “The prevailing models of research surrounding autism have been situated within deficit and medical models of representation” (Glynne-Owen, 2010) – p. 259.  This is true of learning disabilities too.  There is a great deal of focus on what students with LD in reading CANNOT do and an attribution of difficulties to inappropriate or defective wiring of the brain. In teaching students with reading challenges, I have found neither focus particularly helpful.

The article references Ochs (1979) and Goodwin (1995) which orientated differently (not deficit or medical orientation) by focusing on ‘competence’ and trying to reach understanding.  This is what teachers in Reading Recovery do daily – they try to tune in to what the child CAN do and build from there.   Marie Clay, the creator of RR, wrote a controversial piece titled, Learning to be Learning Disabled, in which she questioned the labeling of students as having “fixed” deficits and instead challenged teachers to notice more, respond better, and focus on student strengths.  This seems far more productive to me than thinking there is nothing that can be done and ‘accommodation’ is necessary to cope with the disability.  We can choose to look at “incompetence” or “competence” and how we view things determines how things are.  Clay says something similar on page 159 of Literacy Lessons Designed for Individuals – “Some teachers will predict quite early in the lesson series that they do not expect these children to complete their programmes.  That lowered expectation immediately produces detrimental effects.  We must keep trying….Do not give up on him.”  This is similar to what the article is expressing when Lacan (1977) is quoted… ‘the world of words’ creates the ‘worlds of things’.  If we think and act like a child cannot succeed, they certainly won’t.  Okay…I digress, but I see so many similarities.

This quote stood out to me – “Historically, disabilities have been constructed as biological truths, with the medicialization of bodies resulting in problems being viewed as discrete diseases that only legitimated agents (e.g. health professionals) are capable of discovering, naming, and treating (Nadesan, 2005).  This made me think of the role of school psychologists in school districts and their designation as being the one who can decide if a student is or is not learning disabled (on the basis of a test demonstrating a discrepancy between achievement and ability).    They discover and name a “learning disability” but have no clue about the treatment.  Teachers know the treatment and that is true whether the kid has a label or doesn’t have a label.  Carol Lyon’s did a study that compared the achievement of kids with the label LD in reading vs. kids without the label and found very similar outcomes.  All dyslexia means is difficulty with reading…and, something can be done about that difficulty. Ok, dismounting soap box…

I thought it was so interesting when the authors talked about autism being performed in “shifting and contradictory ways” depending upon the audience. Sometimes parents talked about how “typical” their child was and even offered pictures of the child as being affectionate, which is a-typical of an autism diagnosis, and at other times the parents pointed to autism as an explanation for behavior.  It seems that the situation determined how closely aligned the parents were with the autism diagnosis. We frame and reframe depending upon what account we want to make for something, as on page 268 when the “meltdown” is framed to explain and justify why it occurred.

I am hyper aware of the “3 part list” – in all that I write, say, and read I see it coming up (even this sentence).  It is interesting how it does provide a sense of completion when it is employed.   

 

The romance quest of education reform: A discourse analysis of the LA Times’ reports on value added measurement teacher effectiveness – Gabriel and Lester

 How cleverly written this piece is…the use of the quest tale to explain the players in this big game of educational reform – just brilliant. 

Value added is such a farce.  There was recently a situation at my former school district where this EXCELLENT teacher (one who really connects with kids, teaches them to be readers, has requests from parents year after year, who takes the really difficult kids – kids with behavior problems, kids with low achievement and changes them) was deemed a “2” by value added measures and another teacher in the same grade at the same school who is TERRIBLE (makes fun of kids, won’t take kids that are troublesome –or pitches a fit about it, is absent a lot, is NOT a team player with her colleagues, sits and reads the paper and assigns instead of teaches) got a “5” on her value added.  I said to the principal over the phone that this example alone should show folks that Value Added is not what it is chalked up to be.  It is like seeing it rain outside, feeling the rain on your face, and denying that it is raining because the weatherman says that it isn’t.  We’ve lost our collective minds where this value added measure as teacher effectiveness measure is concerned!

So interesting that Sanders himself said that VAM shouldn’t be the only measure of effectiveness and that those results shouldn’t be made public…how far off of his recommendations were are now.

Speaking earlier of the 3 part list, I thought Gabriel and Lester came up with a nice one on page 33 – “Though flawed, it is presumably the best we have.  Though flawed, it protects the public from what teachers and principals do not know.  Though flawed, it is good enough to be codified in state and federal requirements.” They are employing discursive devices to get their point across.  

They point to other devices that the LA times uses – binary constructs (good teachers, bad teachers), sequencing, parallel structure, and extreme case formulation.  Like the 3 part list, I see this repeatedly now. 

My former Federal Projects Director, Denise Wilburn and a friend, Jim Horn (who writes in the blog Schools Matter) just published a book taking on the whole Value Added system - it is called The Mismeasure of Education.   I believe it is due out in August and might be something Gabriel and Lester find interesting.  I plan to send their article to Denise.

We’ve talked some about the importance of research for its own sake – for finding things out, for expanding the general knowledge base etc.  But both of these articles really show what can be done with discursive psychology to make a difference.  Both articles help readers see through assumptions we make or “truths” we swallow without reflection.  Really excellent readings that I am looking forward to talking about, and how awesome that the authors will be virtually visiting with us!