Essentials of disability studies for special education
Radical approaches to disability and policy making towards educating disabled people
Lecture 3

Moving from interpretivism to radical approaches
Mutual challenges: individuals and mainstream society
Is it possible to improve society?
What is the target: to introduce new norms or assist people to be more resistive to social
oppression?
What is the mission of education:
equalise or provide diversity ?

Revolutionary and reflexive approaches
Common traits
Differencies
Changes are required
Agents of changes, domains of transformation
Mainstream norms are to be limited
in which way
Child as an actor
Within which activity , global or local context
Disability as a challenge to mainstream society
What are reasonable expectations
Education should be transformed
Improved or diminished

Teachers vs. schools ?!
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Up to down staircase (1967): the novel by Bel Kaufman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YJ6_-QD6Who
•Teachers as adherers of rules vs. teachers as violators of rules
•Epistolary genre of the novel: the impact of verbalization
•School and professionals as an institution of segregation
•Interaction student – lecturer as a symbolic and insulting children
•Questions to the fragment:
•What are expectations of the teacher and the student?
•Could you interpret the follow-up given by the teacher in different approaches?
•If you would be a teacher what would be your behaviour?
•

Stand and deliver (1988)
Jaime Escalante, born in Bolivia, taught mathematic, kept at school more than 15 years
He worked out the special strategy to teach mathematic as well as lobbied the opportunity for
students to take the state exam of mathematic.
He considered that he should be in close collaboration with communities and families

Questions to the fragment http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MI6y-uRLSiE

•How does the teacher build boundaries?
•Are these boundaries flexible and sustainable?
•Why is he successful in working out discipline?

Resources of teachers to provide changes
•Identity with students
•Deep interest to the subject of teaching
•Devotion to the profession
•Readiness to share knowledge
•Focus on teaching process not formal outputs
•Acceptance of existing procedures of gatekeeping
•Disobedience to internal rules

Main challenges of disobedient teaching
•The practice of disobedience among teachers is reproduced over generations of pedagogues as in
practice as in mainstream culture.
•How do you explain this phenomena?
•What are outputs of such alternative practices? Generally, is it efficient strategy?
•What are its threats, and who takes risks: students, teacher, community?
•How could you evaluate the position of these pedagogues in terms of approaches: which notion of
norms and changes do they operate?

Politicising educational routine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AR7d5p4PNJ8 1.45
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Melvin Beaunorus Tolson Anybody know who Willie Lynch was? Anybody? Raise your hand. No one? He was
a vicious slave owner in the West Indies. The slave-masters in the colony of Virginia were having
trouble controlling their slaves, so they sent for Mr. Lynch to teach them his methods. The word
"lynching" came from his last name. His methods were very simple, but they were diabolical. Keep
the slave physically strong but psychologically weak and dependent on the slave master. Keep the
body, take the mind.

What has been politicised?
•Aims
•Methods
•The placement of education

Compatible actions/issues
 in disability movements
•Attempts of teachers to overcome the frontiers established by special education
•
•
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWBo886FuQo
Documentary
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuzE6lMQQmo
Fiction

Behind the success of Temple Grandin
•The impact of school (Hampshire Country School and milieu therapy or the impact or the particular
teacher)
•The role of family and space around it
•The increasing power of parents’ movement
•

Compatible actions/issues
 in disability movements
•The choice between integration to mainstream society and belongings to the community of disabled
people
•
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