1st Edition

Social and Dialogic Thinking and Learning in Special Education Radical Insights from a Post-Critical Ethnography in a Special School

    214 Pages
    by Routledge

    214 Pages
    by Routledge

    Drawing on a three-year post-critical ethnography, this volume counters deficit-based notions of disability to present a new social and dialogic theory of thinking and learning for students with significant support needs.

    Dismantling ideas around ableism/disableism, Social and Dialogic Thinking and Learning offers a uniquely theoretical and conceptual contribution to special education and capability research. Illustrating how students exhibit varied practical, social, and creative abilities, possess agency and perform identity, chapters present a challenge to the restrictive ways in which disability is constructed through prescriptive forms of teacher-student interaction and instruction. The text ultimately offers a powerful re-imagining of how educators and researchers can perceive, observe, and respond to students beyond current institutional and cultural norms.

    This text will benefit researchers, academics, and educators with an interest in inclusion and special educational needs, disability studies, and the theories of learning more broadly. Those specifically interested in educational psychology and the study of severe, profound, and multiple learning difficulties will also benefit from this book.

    Part 1: Challenges in Studying Thinking and Learning in Students with Significant Support Needs

    1: On Teaching versus Learning: An Introduction

    2: Productive Mistakes

    Part 2: Restrictive Contexts for Thinking and Learning

    3: The Discursive Construction of Dis/Ability

    4: Praise and Patterns of Instructional Practice (with Sofia Benson-Goldberg, PhD, CCC/SLP)

    5: The Intersection of Race and Severe Disability

    6: Enacting Imprisonment on Students with Significant Support Needs

    Part 3: Students with Significant Support Needs Demonstrate Thinking and Learning

    7: Students Asserting Themselves and Resisting the Hidden Curriculum

    8: Students Demonstrating Smartness Outside the Constraints of Schooling

    9: Agency Through Relation and Relation Through Agency

    10: The Intersection of Structure and Sanction with Initiation and Persistence

    Part 4: Relations at the Core of Teaching and Learning

    11: Being with to Achieve Shared Perceptual and Emotional Awareness

    12: Engaging in Dialogue without Conventional Language

    13: Embodiment and Its Role in Extended Dialogue and Narrative

    14: Radical Possibilities Beyond the Horizon

    Biography

    Karen A. Erickson is the David E. & Dolores J. Yoder Distinguished Professor and Director of the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

    Charna D’Ardenne is Assistant Professor at the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

    Nitasha M. Clark is Research Affiliate with the Center for Literacy and Disability Studies, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA

    David A. Koppenhaver is Professor in the Reading Education and Special Education Department at Appalachian State University, USA

    George W. Noblit is Joseph R. Neikirk Distinguished Professor of Sociology of Education Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA