Appendix C: The reflective practitioner
The American classroom is well organized for the
production of display of failure, one child at a time if
possible, but group by group if necessary...Even if the
teacher manages to treat every child as capable, the
children can hammer each other into negative status;
and even if both...resist dropping everyone into
predefined categories, the children’s parents can take
over, demanding more and more boxes with which to
specify kinds of kids doing better than other kinds of
kids. In such a classroom, if there were no LD
categories, someone would have to invent them.When Kelvin read this conclusion, he did not really
disagree, but he did feel that it was beside the point for
most teachers. Maybe children do get classified too
easily, he thought, but a teacher’s job is not just to
lament this possibility, as the authors seemed to be
doing. Instead their job is to help the real, live children
for whom they have daily responsibility. What teachers
need are therefore suggestions to avoid misclassifying
students by overlooking key information about them.
Kelvin wished, at the end, that the authors had made
some of these suggestions.Relevance: a critical framework
In this study the authors offered a sort of backhanded framework of thinking about categories of disability; or
more precisely they offered a framework for understanding what the categories are not. In essence they said that
disability categories describe qualities “in” students only in the sense that educators and others happen to think of
disability categories in this way. An equally reasonable way to think about disabilities, they argued, is that modern
society is organized so that its citizens have to be classified for many different reasons. Educators are simply
helping to implement this society-wide expectation. A frequent result in classrooms is that teachers classify
students too easily and that key evidence of students’ capacity is overlooked.
In making this argument, the authors implied an indirect recommendation about how to teach, though the
recommendation actually focused on what teachers should not do. Instead of (mis)identifying children with
learning difficulties, the authors implied, teachers and other educators should stop concerning themselves with
classifying children, and seek to reorganize classrooms and schools so that classification is less important. “Change
the school”, they wrote, “and LD becomes less relevant”. This conclusion may be an important reminder, but it is
not especially helpful as a recommendation to practicing teachers, who usually need to know about more than what
to avoid.
The readers’ role: concerned advocate for social justice
It is not surprising that the article lacked concrete recommendations for teaching, given that the authors seemed
to speak to readers not as classroom teachers, but as general critics of society who are concerned about fairness or
social justice. Their comments made two assumptions: first, that readers will want to minimize unfair stereotypes of
students, and second, that readers will seek greater fairness in how teachers treat students. For readers who happen
to be teachers themselves, the first of these assumptions is a reasonable one; most of us would indeed like to
minimize unfair stereotyping of students. The second is also reasonable, but perhaps not in a way that the authors
intended. Teachers probably do try their best to treat students fairly and respectfully. Their responsibilities usually
mean, however, that they can only do this conveniently with their own students; the time available to work toward