SPECIFIC LEARNING DIFFICULTIES

Children with Specific Learning Difficulties

Abstract

The study used a post-structuralist adaptation of positioning theory and social constructionism and a discourse analytic method to analyse relevant policy documents and participants' semi-structured interview transcripts to interrogate what models Will be being used to explain a student's inability to access the curriculum. Despite the existence of alternative explanatory frameworks that functioned as relatively undeveloped resistant counternarratives, the study demonstrated the medical model's overwhelming dominance in both Education Queensland policy statements and the participants' subject positions. This dominance shapes and informs the adult stakeholders' subjectivities and renders the child docile and potentially irrational.

Table of Contents

Table of Contents3

CHAPTER I4

Introduction4

Significance of the research8

Research questions9

CHAPTER II10

Introduction10

CHAPTER III18

Research Methods18

The methodological underpinnings of the research19

A qualitative research orientation19

References21

CHAPTER I: Research Proposal

Introduction

Just under a decade ago, it will be estimated that 10% of the Australian population Will be experiencing learning difficulties (Prior, 1996). Since that time ther e have been numerous educational changes regarding learning difficulties in areas including, but not exclusive to, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment. However, the major problem remains that the term 'learning difficulties' is ambiguous and applied inconsistently within Australia, as is demonstrated in Volume One of the three-volume Mapping the Territory- Primary Students with Learning Difficulties: Literacy and Numeracy:

'Learning difficulties', 'learning disabilities', 'at educational risk' 'special needs' [and] ' needing support.' All these terms and others are used in Australian schools to describe children who have difficulties with literacy and numeracy learning.

What the terms mean, which children they ar e applied to, and what consequences these labels have for children varies from State to State and from school to school. (Louden in Louden, Chan, Elkins, Greaves, House, Milton, Nichols, Rohl, Rivalland & Van Kraayenoord, 2000, vol. 1, p. 3) This situation regarding the ambiguity of different terms, the application of those terms and the consequences of the labels for children poses a specific problem given that the former Queensland School Curriculum Council (2001) asserted that 20% of the Queensland school population Will be experiencing learning difficulties. What exactly are learning diff iculties? How does one tell the dif ference between a child exper iencing a learning difficulty and a 'lazy' student or a student exhibiting maladaptive behaviour? What is the impact of the label 'learning difficulties' on the child to whom it is assigned? These questions, amongst others, guided my enquiry for this study regarding adult stakeholder constructions of the term 'learning difficulties'.

Broadly, this thesis is about the phenomenon known as 'learning difficulties' as it is constructed by adult stakeholders involved with children identified as experiencing such difficulties in a Queensland regional primary school. I have focused specifically on adult stakeholders in one school because I view those individuals as the key stakeholder s in the academic and social lives of a particular group of childr en at that school identified as experiencing learning difficulties. Learning difficulties are both a politicised construction and a social practice in any school; the study's focus on a single school enables that construction and that ...