The problem is that current pedagogical practices often preclude and deny children’s agency. This leads to misconceptions where research often views limited interaction as an "inevitability" of the disability rather than a result of teaching practices. Addressing this problem starts with the need to "denaturalize" these pedagogical practices (stop viewing them as natural/neutral).

State University of New York at Binghamton

- The Core Constraint (Structure vs. Impairment)
- The Critique (Agency & Practice)
- The Mechanism of "Communication" (The Outcome)

Context A: Special Education (Response to D’Ardenne et al., Chapter 5)

Bottema-Beutel argues that the possibilities for interaction available to disabled students are not entirely inherent to their specific abilities or disabilities. Instead, these interactions are shaped by the constraints educators place on students, which serve to limit their possibilities for participation and choice-making. Through this lens, Discursive Psychology provides the insight that such activities are shaped by institutional norms and interactional practices rather than fixed biological traits.

Context A: Special Education - The Core Constraint (Structure vs. Impairment)

Lester, J. N. (Ed.). (2021). Discursive Psychology and Disability. Palgrave Studies in Discursive Psychology. Springer Nature Switzerland AG.

Reference For: Discursive Psychology and Disability

Context A: Special Education - The Critique (Agency & Practice)

In special education contexts, communication is often operationally defined purely as a vehicle for students to express a "correct response," a standard that fails to meet even the minimal definition of communication as a means to express wants and needs. Within these interactions, the teacher constructs both the prompt and the response in advance, effectively acting as a gatekeeper who controls both sides of the exchange. Because the interaction is exclusively determined by the teacher alone, the result is an overly constrained dynamic that is unrecognizable as a genuine communicative event.

Context A: Special Education - The Mechanism of "Communication" (The Outcome)

Often students with Severe Intellectual Disabilities are taught communication in the context of ABA (Applied Behavioral Analysis. This type of therapy is focused on getting children to produce predetermined behavioral responses to certain stimuli in an attempt to correct "undesirable behaviors" that may be natural responses to the situation. This paradigm undermines the child's agency in the pursuit of performing normativity.

Learn Before

Related