“…. there will always be a group of pupils who – however they are labelled – are likely to have difficulties in accessing the everyday classroom learning experience.” (The Making a Statement project – final report” Webster & Blatchford, Institute of Education February 2013.)
I looked at this report in my previous posting. It is an interesting report, worth, in my view, the time spent in reading it. But …. And it is the “buts” that I keep coming back to.
Take the statement above, which appears in the concluding paragraph of an early introductory section “The policy context”. Is it just me, or is that an odd sort of statement?
One obvious “but” is this: “But, hang on a minute, if ‘there will always be a group of pupils’ who ‘have difficulties in accessing the everyday classroom learning experiences” is it not possible that the ‘everyday classroom’ is not the learning environment they should be in? That, of course, is the basis of the argument for special schools.
Beyond the obvious, there is a bigger “but”. What strikes me as odd is the way the statement appears to ‘blame the pupils’; the pupils, it is said, “are likely to have difficulties”. It’s in the verb, the ‘having’ of difficulties.
Is not the truth of the matter that if any pupils ‘face’ or ‘experience’ difficulties, it is the teacher, the pedagogy, the curriculum, that is the ‘difficulty’?
As with the lack of training provided to teachers of children with statements of special educational need, which the authors acknowledge but which fails to influence the main conclusion of their research, so here in this perspective on the responsibility for the interaction, the ‘elephant in the room’ is missed entirely: it’s the teachers, their lack of training, their limited understanding of specific disabilities, of alternative pedagogies and appropriate curricular arrangements, that should be concerning us.
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Footnote:
The ‘elephant in the room’ is something of a cliché. A more recent, similar expression of the same might be the ‘dancing gorilla’. Take a look and have a smile.
