Educating a Syndrome?: Seeking a Balance Between Identifying a Learning Profile and Delivering Inclusive Education

Abstract

Education and health frequently operate within different paradigms. In the education system the delivery of service is generally to groups of individuals, whereas in the health system it is generally to the individual. The shift to the other's paradigm only occurs when something is going wrong. We look for wider social solutions (such as banning smoking) when we can't cope with the number of individuals with a health problem, and we look at identified learners when they disrupt our ability to teach the group. I am, of course, oversimplifying a complex series of relationships; but recognising this potential clash of worldview is important when we consider a child with a medical label within the education system.

Exploring barriers to reflection and learning – developing a perspective lens

“…Difficulty getting message across to teaching staff and peers. different for pupils identified as having any particular learning difficulty (Lewis and Norwich, 2001;Rix, 2009a).…”

“…For example, Ellen Brantlinger (2005) found that the majority of US teacher‐training text books that she analysed were organised by category of disability, while the first author reviewed a series of books published by Continuum ‘with tips and techniques for managing and teaching students in a mainstream setting’ which were divided into categories of need and largely looked at children in isolation (Rix, 2005). This focus encourages teachers in their belief that they lack the necessary specialist skills (Carrington, 1999), and that there is a ‘specialist and different’ pedagogy for teaching children with special education needs (Ring and Travers, 2005), even though it has been effectively shown that for all pupils there is a continua of teaching or pedagogic approaches and that teaching is not qualitatively different for pupils identified as having any particular learning difficulty (Lewis and Norwich, 2001; Rix, 2009a).…”

“…The literature we have drawn upon goes some way to represent the lens which frames our thinking. The ideas originated in the reflections of the first author on five studies he has been involved in since 2003 (Paige‐Smith and Rix, 2009; Rix, Paige‐Smith and Jones, 2008; Rix, 2009a; Rix, Hall and Nind et al., 2009; Rix, Lowe and The Heritage Forum, 2010) when invited to present at the JORSEN Research Seminar on Professional Development For Inclusion in 2009. These ideas were developed alongside discussions with the second author as part of the research project outlined in the methods section below.…”