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Learning Disabilities, Social Categories, and Educational Practices

Sociocultural perspectives on learning disabilities (LD) frame these labels as a product of the culture of U.S. educational institutions. Rather than focusing on what is wrong with individual students, this theoretical approach to LD addresses the cultural conditions and arrangements that make LD labels relevant. This perspective is applicable to research on diversity in education, in that it challenges deficit views of individual children and youth in schools and classrooms. This entry describes LD as a social and cultural category, its relevance to educational practice, the interdisciplinary nature and future directions of this work, and implications for research and practice. From a cultural point of view, LD is not something children are, but something their schools do to them—not something they acquire, but something that acquires them.

Learning Disability as a Social Category

In general, theory and research on learning disabilities has aimed to examine the causes of LD, develop ways to teach students with LD, remedy learning problems, and improve methods for identifying students with LD. In contrast, authors who represent the cultural approach to LD assume that learning problems are produced through cultural practices and do not reside solely in the heads of individual students. Starting perhaps most powerfully with the work of Jules Henry 50 years ago, social scientists have analyzed the unproductive competitive dramas of American schools that organize hierarchies based on any social differences that might be thought relevant. The school system produces social categories—LD among them—that blame perceived weaknesses on individual students and draw attention from the real weaknesses in school systems that invite and reinforce the need for LD labels.

The cultural approach to LD points to both macrolevel problems with educational institutions and their implications for students in classrooms dominated by narrow ideas of what it means to be successful in school. Regardless of whether students are aware of specific disability labels, they often position one another in academic hierarchies of assumed—and consumed—traits: for example, smart and dumb, hard working and lazy, enabled and disabled. Ethnographic accounts of students labeled with disabilities have revealed that being positioned in this way can have long-term implications for student access to opportunities and identities around academic learning. A focus on the isolated student continues to be reproduced by adults and children alike and leads to questions about how to fix what is wrong with the student without a careful look at the system to determine why it cannot tolerate a wider range of student differences. A more cultural approach to LD asks more comprehensive questions about why students must be sorted and evaluated, and with what consequences.

Cultural Work of Learning Disabilities in Educational Practice

Research in this area outlines how learning disabilities are both produced and revealed in educational practice, where they continuously impact the lives of children and youth. To understand these social categories, it is necessary to understand them in the context of the institution that created them. What an institution defines and values as “learning” is particularly important because these values determine what is viewed as a deficit or worthy of an LD label. These values form the basis for the cultural arrangements that reward students for learning better or faster than others, which are then compounded by equally ambiguous racial and ethnic labels. Curt Dudley-Marling explains how LD identities are not only produced in a social context, but also constructed through complex interactions between people that assign meaning to certain behaviors. Research on positioning theory examines how everything people say and do falls into patterns of behavior that can then be used to judge what the people are capable of doing, how they measure up to others around them, and whether their participation is valued by others. These culturally defined story lines of success and ability are continuously reproduced in educational practice and can perpetuate stereotypes about what kinds of students can achieve.

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