Social and Dialogic Thinking and Learning in Special Education

Radical Insights from a Post-Critical Ethnography in a Special School

Karen A. Erickson, Charna D'Ardenne, Nitasha M. Clark, David A. Koppenhaver, George W. Noblit

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000514766
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

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

DOI: 10.4324/9781003175285-2

For decades, education for students with significant support needs has been tightly bound by a series of unexamined assumptions that are rooted in the age of institutionalization and custodial care (Jackson et al., 2009). These unexamined assumptions are based upon medical views of disability as impairment resulting from disease, trauma, or other health conditions believed to lead logically to limitations (Wasserman et al., 2016). While there were many efforts in the 1960s and 1970s to identify and remediate deficits, most failed (Kleinert et al., 2009), and in the wake, behaviorist teaching techniques gained traction (Brownell et al., 2010). The resulting focus on teaching observable and measurable behaviors has dominated educational practice for students with significant support needs for the ensuing five decades. In fact, in the United States, students who receive special education services are required to have individualized education programs that feature observable and measurable goals (Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, 2004). The assumptions underlying these behaviorist pedagogies and requirements have remained largely unexamined while simultaneously gaining status as evidence-based practices in textbooks (Brown et al., 2020; Mims, 2020), practice guides (Browder et al., 2014), and systematic reviews (Horn et al., 2020).

In addition to the reliance on behaviorism in educational practice, theory regarding thinking and learning for students with significant support needs suffers from an unfortunate, and in fact disabling, intellectual history. Thinking and learning as concepts are tied to:

• Racism, coupled with the history and current manifestations of intelligence and other psychological testing (Connor, 2014), which were explicitly constructed to stratify humanity and to undergird White privilege.
• Progressivism, whose paragon, John Dewey, organized his ideas in How We Think (Dewey, 1910) around distinguishing the savage from the civilized and creating a hierarchy of thinking that, in the end, tied how we should think to scientism.
• Cognitivism and theories such as Piaget’s stages of cognitive development, which located thinking and learning in the head. Though cognitivism has become much more social and cultural, it continues to have lingering effects that can be devastating for individuals who are unable to externalize the internal workings of thinking and learning.
• Linguicism, which encompasses Chomsky’s claims that humans are predisposed to learn and use formal language as well as Vygotsky’s (1978) claims that language, used with self and others, is required for thinking. These assertions of the dependence on formal language confounds it with thinking and learning.

The history of these pedagogies and theories fails to address students with significant support needs as interactive, engaged human beings, capable of thinking and learning within social contexts (Gilbert, 2004; Ottmann & Crosbie, 2013). They also frame teaching and learning as processes of training students to exhibit desired behaviors in order to mediate impairment and maximize life skills (Anzul et al., 2001; Browder et al., 2020; Thomas & O’Hanlon, 2007). This focus on cognitive processes and behaviors that can be observed and measured grossly oversimplifies thinking and learning, underestimates the learning potential of students with significant support needs because their physical and communication profiles make it difficult for them to demonstrate understanding through conventional behaviors (Bhattacharya, 2019), and unnecessarily limits opportunities for meaningful thinking, learning, and relating with others.

We embarked on the project featured in this book with the belief that developing theory that addresses thinking and learning could serve as a basis for reexamining existing deficit-based assumptions and stereotypical biases regarding students with significant support needs in order to inform an entirely new set of pedagogies that focus beyond mediating impairment to promoting thinking and learning in ways that lead to meaningful gains in language, literacy, communication, and social relationships. We also sought to generate theory that could shift policies and practices that lead to narrowly focused instruction to that which is easily observed and measured and ongoing placement of students with significant support needs in separate classrooms and schools. This book reveals our journey toward generating theory and coming to understand that thinking and learning are a dualism situated in relation. We understand thinking and learning as a dualism because they are inextricably intertwined. We understand thinking and learning as situated in relation because we find that they are dialogic (Wegerif, 2019), integrated, socially constructed, and situated engagements with self, others, and the physical and social environment. Our definition of thinking and learning intentionally avoids a focus on skills, behaviors, and cognitive structures, which have often been used in constructing deficit views of students with significant support needs and are rooted in the troubled histories we describe above.

This journey has been and continues to be informed by numerous theories that informed the overall project (e.g., disability studies in education [DSE]) and helped us understand and explain discrimination and exclusion (e.g., critical disability theory in education [DisCrit]), the different ways that students with significant support needs respond in the face of current practices (e.g., resistance theory), and the ways that students with significant support needs engage in storytelling (e.g., embodied knowing) without the use of formal language. Consistent with Høgsbro (2020), we learned that we needed multiple theories in this postcritical ethnographic engagement with students with significant support needs. We explain the application of these theories, and others, as they relate to our analysis and results throughout the chapters. We also provide references for readers who are interested in learning more about each of them. Here the key theories are described briefly in order to theoretically position our team’s thinking and frame the journey we recount in the chapters that follow.

Dialogic Theories: Relational versus Individualized Views of Thinking and Learning

Since the enactment of the Education for Handicapped Children Act (PL 94-142) in the mid-1970s, there have been efforts to apply cognitive theories of development to students with significant support needs. For example, Piaget’s sensorimotor model of cognitive development has been applied in various ways to students with a range of significant support needs, with varying levels of success (Bruce et al., 2009; Hupp et al., 1984; Woodyatt & Ozanne, 1992, 1993); however, when students’ profiles feature complex sensory and physical needs, it is challenging, at best, to consider how a model that centers on sensory- and motor-based learning can meaningfully reflect their thinking and learning. Vygotsky’s socially situated view of development has its roots in his work with students with a range of disabilities (see Vygodskaya, 1999 for more on this history); however, it is heavily dependent on formal language and its role in thinking (Maldonado, 2008). Given the complex communication needs that often preclude the use of formal language among students with significant support needs (Erickson & Geist, 2016), Vygotsky’s theory does little to inform our understanding of the development of their thinking and learning. As a result of these challenges applying dominant theories of cognitive development and the “history and power of behavior analysis in shaping the foundations of the field of special education, professionals have not given a great deal of thought to how students with [significant] disabilities think” (Kleinert et al., 2009, p. 205) and learn.

Dialogic versus Monologic Theories

Wegerif’s (2011) dialogic theory was central to our critique of the application of traditional cognitive and behavioral theories of learning to students with significant support needs. He classifies these as monologic theories because they assert that the development of thinking can be described in terms of individually situated “mathematical or logical structures and procedures” (p. 179). Whether the development occurs individually (à la Piaget) or in social interactions (à la Vygotsky), such monologic theories of cognitive development serve to support the construction of disability that we find at the forefront of challenges to education for students with significant support needs by locating all thinking and learning within the student.

Wegerif (2011) contrasts monologic interaction with dialogic interaction. In everyday use, dialogue refers to the formal use of language in a conversation with one or more others, but Wegerif uses the term to point to the relation and interaction between two or more people—not just the use of formal language. This dialogic view suggests that learning to think occurs in the context of relationships and interactions that cannot be abstracted from them or described as separate structures (Gallagher, 2012). This focus on relationship is a repeated theme throughout this book. For example, relationships and meaningful interactions are central to the second part (Students with Significant Support Needs Demonstrate Thinking and Learning), with the descriptions of resistance in Chapter 7, the demonstrations of smartness and agency described in Chapters 8 and 9, and the initiation and persistence described in Chapter 10. In part four (Relations at the Core of Teaching and Learning), we assert that attention to relation was central to our ability to understand students and their efforts to be with (Chapter 11) one another and the adults around them. It also was the basis for our exploration of the ways that the students engaged in dialogue without language (Chapter 12) and the embodied knowing (Chapter 13) that allowed them to engage in thinking and learning “through direct engagement in bodily experiences… connectedness and interdependence” (Freiler, 2008, p. 40). In the closing chapter of the book, we assert that this dialogic view of thinking and learning is essential to moving beyond the current limited horizons of students with significant support needs to a future that includes a more complete view of the radical possibilities we see.

Wegerif’s (2011) dialogic theory has exciting implications for students with significant support needs. It has allowed our research team to imagine thinking and learning in ways that are not focused on building cognitive structures to support mastery and independence, but instead are focused on relationships and meaningful interactions with self and others that maximize and are inextricably linked with thinking and learning. It holds promise as the basis for forward momentum in a field that has been at an atheoretical standstill for far too long, and it provides the overarching frame we use to bring in the other theories that have informed our work.

Disability Studies in Education: Challenging the Medical Model of Disability

Our grounding in DSE resulted from our need to look beyond disability in our understandings of students with significant support needs. In Part 1 of this book (Challenges in Studying Thinking and Learning in Students with Significant Support Needs), we highlight a mistake we made in focusing on the teachers and the restrictive context in which the students were learning. Our early critique of the restrictive context of the site was not surprising given the postcritical stance we embraced. In fact, “Postcritical ethnography demands we address systemic inequity” (Lester & Anders, 2018, p. 14). As a result, we found ourselves focused on the oppressive nature of the system of special education, the school, the classrooms, and the roles various adults played in constructing ...