- Email: [email protected]
Representing diversity in education: Student identities in contexts of learning and instruction
International Journal of Educational Research 63 (2014) 1–4
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Educational Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures
Representing diversity in education: Student identities in contexts of learning and instruction Eva Hjo¨rne, Roger Sa¨ljo¨ * University of Gothenburg, Sweden
A R T I C L E I N F O
Article history: Received 2 June 2012 Accepted 15 October 2012 Available online 6 January 2013 Keywords: Diversity in education Multicultural schools Learning difficulties Student identities Special education
1. Introduction The purpose of this special issue is to present research that addresses issues of how diversity is represented, understood and accommodated to in educational settings. It also seeks to explore how these representations and categorizations relate to student identities and to expectations of student adaptation and performance in contexts of teaching, learning and psychological testing. Diversity is certainly not a new phenomenon in education. Classrooms, most likely, have always been quite diverse. Even in the highly selective scribal schools in Mesopotamia some 5000 years ago when instruction was institutionalized, there were signs of a ‘‘mismatch’’ (Deschenes, Cuban, & Tyack, 2001) between the ambitions of the educators, on the one hand, and student adaptation to the activities offered, on the other hand. Students, who for some reason could not follow the instruction or live up to the expectations, were subjected to various kinds of disciplinary corrections or even expelled to maintain institutional order (Falkenstein, 1948; Kramer, 1981, p. 8). These kinds of problems seem to have existed in schools in ancient Greece, in Rome (Marrou, 1977), in medieval schools (Orme, 2006) and they have continued to be a part of schooling through the millennia. The identity of being a pupil implies subordination to specific rules and institutional norms that differ from those that apply to being a child. In the 19th century the idea of compulsory education spread in many Western countries. Inspired by the institution of the Volksschule in Prussia in the early 19th century (Ro¨ssler, 1961), ruling elites in Europe and North America adopted ideas that public schooling could play an important role for spreading literacy and other elementary skills, and for disciplining the
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Sa¨ljo¨). 0883-0355/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2012.10.001
2
E. Hjo¨rne, R. Sa¨ljo¨ / International Journal of Educational Research 63 (2014) 1–4
population to accept the worldly and religious authorities that were central to the emerging nation states. In the wake of this massification of education, girls and children of workers, farmers, ethnic and linguistic minorities, immigrants and others, who had previously been excluded from education, began to enter classrooms to be taught. This implied that the diversity of pupils in terms of social and cultural backgrounds in the school systems increased dramatically. Teachers had to handle the difficult problems of organizing instruction in what were often overcrowded classrooms and with students who were more or less prepared for participating in the specific institutional practices that characterize schooling. When schooling expanded to include entire populations, the institutional traditions of how to organize teaching and learning were already in place (Lindensjo¨ & Lundgren, 2000). There were classrooms, seating arrangements, lessons, the specific format of communicating referred to as lecturing, authority patterns and norms of conduct to observe, texts to be copied and memorized and so on. By and large, the established institutional format survived this rather dramatic expansion of the system. The obligations and entitlements of teachers and pupils were clearly defined and remained fairly stable, and the pupils who could not live up to the expectations were corrected through punishments of various kinds, expelled or simply dropped out of school. The expansion of schooling triggered the interest in developing institutional strategies for handling diversity. The issue of how to deal with the ‘‘nonmainstreamers’’ (Deschenes et al., 2001, p. 533), who caused teachers so many problems in classrooms, attracted much attention in the late 19th and early 20th century. Various types of segregation strategies were introduced, and special classes were organized in Europe and the USA to provide instruction for children who did not fit into the normal classroom and who were ‘‘difficult to teach’’ (Mehan, this volume). The weak and the dull, for instance, should not be allowed to’’remain a hindrance to the 90 or more per cent of normal children of the community?’’ as the researcher W.S. Monroe argued in 1894 (quoted in Trent, 1994, p. 147). Today, diversity, in terms of social background, cultural and ethnic origin, language, perceived learning ability and so on, is a prominent feature of most educational settings in many societies. Intra-institutional factors of the educational system, such as the introduction of comprehensive schools, the integration of students with disabilities, and the growth of higher education to include new groups, contribute to making student populations more diverse. More general social transformations following in the footsteps of globalisation, such as migration and a changing labour market, add to the trends of increasing diversity in student populations in terms of their interests and commitments to schooling. 2. Representing diversity An interesting element of the issue of diversity and schooling is how diversity is represented in language inside and outside institutional settings (Hjo¨rne & Sa¨ljo¨, 2012). What do we mean by diversity and how do we communicate about it? Human reasoning and social action rely on categories and categorizing practices (Bowker & Star, 2000). Linguistic categories serve as mediating resources for organizing the world, for establishing similarities and differences, for ‘seeing’ in institutionally relevant manners. Hospitals, banks, insurance companies, welfare agencies and many other institutions cannot do their job unless they can make distinctions between who is sick and who is not, who is a creditworthy client and who is not, and who is entitled to specific benefits and who is not. They have to develop reasonably stable categories when engaging in practices of ‘‘people processing’’ (Prottas, 1979) in a diverse and ambiguous reality. These categories also form the backbone of the documentation and memory practices of institutions. Forms, patient records, client reports, data bases and so on are organized through the use of categories that reflect institutional traditions and priorities (Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002). In schooling, categories referring to intellectual ability have played an important role for deciding who is normal and who is deviant (cf. Mercer, 1973). Terms such as retarded, feebleminded, slow, dull, handicapped, word blind, learning disabled and many more have appeared and have been perceived as relevant categorizations, each in their own time. In the wake of the development of the first intelligence tests, a range of categories connected to the idea of human abilities following the normal curve emerged. Terms such as idiot, half-idiot, quarter-idiot, imbecile, moron, mentally deficient, retarded, gifted and others were used to categorize children (and adults) at different levels of the intelligence scale (Forssman & Olow, 1961). During the past decades, neuroscience has produced a large number of categories which are used for categorizing learning difficulties and explaining school failure: ADHD, HKD, DCD, EBD, dyslexia, dyscalculia and several others. In this context it is important to keep in mind that categories are not merely etiquettes. They are intimately tied to the use of resources in schools, preschools and other institutional settings. In many countries, a child who is diagnosed with a neuropsychiatric disorder will be entitled to various kinds of support, such as access to special education teachers and smallgroup teaching (Graham, 2007). At university level, a student who is diagnosed as dyslectic may be entitled to special arrangements when it comes to taking entrance tests or writing essays for exams. Thus, categories do concrete work when it comes to using institutional resources, and they provide arguments for treating persons in particular manners. In this sense, they intervene in the very fabric of power in society and form part of decisions that may be consequential for individuals and collectives. And, as is illustrated in the articles in this volume, one concrete consequence of prominent categorizing practices is that they individualize the problems and place them inside children (Mehan, 1993, this volume). In addition, categories serve as social representations (Moscovici, 2000) that are used for communicating about social issues and identities. They are part of the public production and reproduction of knowledge and political opinion, and, in the famous words of Foucault (1972, p. 54), they ‘‘systematically form the objects of which they speak.’’ Children with neuropsychiatric diagnoses, for instance, did not exist until a few decades ago, but now they are well-known elements of
E. Hjo¨rne, R. Sa¨ljo¨ / International Journal of Educational Research 63 (2014) 1–4
3
media debates and expert deliberations about problems of schooling and pedagogy in modern society. School boards, head masters, teachers and politicians are held accountable for the resources and learning conditions they make available to groups with such diagnoses. Parents organize themselves and begin to exercise political pressure to increase public attention, and they formulate demands for more research, smaller classes, specially trained teachers and other resources. Special needs teachers, psychologists and other professions eventually will gain status as specialists when it comes to teaching or testing pupils with specific disorders, and their claims to professional authority are tied to specific kinds of institutionally relevant categorizing practices. Thus, categories that gain prominence in media will be important on many levels, all the way from how a teacher or a preschool teacher perceives a child to political debates in parliaments on the use of public resources. In this sense, it matters how diversity is represented. From a psychological and interactive perspective, which is the focus of the articles in this volume, categories are constitutive of identities; they are tools for ‘‘making up people’’ as the philosopher Hacking (1986) puts it. In Hacking’s historical analyses, categories and people have a tendency to emerge hand in hand; there are ‘‘looping effects’’ (Hacking, 1995), where the categories available for classifying people in specific manners will be used as resources for understanding what we encounter. In other words, categories are suggestive and instructive, and there is a tendency that we will find what we have been told to look for. Such processes are of course also central for how we perceive ourselves as individuals, our perceptions of who we are. To be categorized as deviant – whether learning disabled, gifted or as a child with ADHD – will contribute to identity formation and to the expectations we have of our own position, capacities and prospects. In this context, the categories that are adopted and sanctioned by representatives of institutions that play a central role in the socialization of children in modern societies – schools, preschools, health providers, welfare agencies – are important to scrutinize. It is inevitable that the identity of a child will be shaped in response to the categorizing practices that are endorsed by institutions in which she or he spends so much time during the formative years. In the present special issue, the research presented analyses some of the contingencies between institutional practices and representations of diversity. In the article by Eva Hjo¨rne and Roger Sa¨ljo¨, the issue addressed concerns how problems of children to adapt to life in school are discussed at pupil health meetings. Such meetings are typical examples of contexts where representations of children and their activities play a decisive role, since decisions are taken on the basis of reports and accounts of what takes place in classrooms and elsewhere. The idea behind the meetings analyzed is to have multiprofessional teams where experts with different backgrounds collaborate in the process of defining and solving school problems. The results show that that there is no evidence that the presence of expertise from various fields has any direct consequences for how school problems are understood or remedied. The analyses made by the participants are based on the assumption that the problems can be placed within the child. Very little attention is given to scrutinizing the circumstances of the problems, or to understanding when and how they appear. The authors argue point to the different factors that contribute to maintaining this grammar of the meetings. Miche`le Grossen, Douchka Florez and Ste´phanie Lauvergeon analyze what they refer to as client categorizations in psychological testing. Their basic point of departure is that psychologists testing children and their capacities are always caught up in a dilemma between, on the one hand, following standardized professional practices, and, on the other hand, taking diversity and situated factors into account: they have to follow standardized practices when testing children and adolescents, since this is a precondition for the validity and reliability of the tests. But, simultaneously, their professional training and work experience tell them that people are different. The analysis shows how psychologists accommodate to the diversity they perceive in their clients in a number of ways. One of the conflicts they perceive, and try to handle, concerns scientific objectivity and reliability of their practice, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what the authors refer to as the situated reliability of the testing situation. To satisfy the latter goal, the psychologists adapt part of their practices and decisions in manners which they sense will give a more informative and relevant picture of the client and her/his capacities. Grossen and her colleagues also discuss the moral dilemma of following standard scientific practices, while attempting to act in a manner that is fair to their clients. Guida Abreu and Hannah Hale report an empirical study from the UK of teachers’ accounts of students and their capacities for learning. More specifically, the issues addressed concern how the performance and adaptation of immigrant children and adolescents with a Portuguese background are represented by teachers in British schools. The results show that when children are successful in their role as pupils, their background is not considered relevant. When they have problems in school, on the other hand, the story is quite different. In this case, their background, and the characteristics which are held to be associated with it, is assumed to be decisive. Using the concept of ‘‘contact zones’’, Abreu and Lambert illustrate that British teachers and teachers of Portuguese backgrounds (working in the UK) represent the strengths and weaknesses of immigrant children differently. The latter construe the development of the immigrant children in terms of their attempts to develop a bilingual and bicultural identity, which is a perspective less relevant for representing the development of a British student in a British school. In recent decades higher education has expanded and attracted new groups of students. Sheila Riddell and Elisabet Weedon analyze the situation of students with a disability background at Scottish universities. One of the issues explored is how students construe their identity as a ‘student with a disability’, and how they negotiate their position at university. One of the consequences of recent administrative and legislative changes is that disability is understood as a political category, and extensive anti-discrimination measures have been taken to facilitate participation by students with learning impairments. In an illuminating case study of a student with a hidden impairment, Riddell and Weedon illustrate the contradictory consequences for students of these reforms, where there are obvious gains and losses by revealing your
4
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identity as a student with an impairment. In the final article, Peter Renshaw, Juliet Choo and elke emerald report a study of how disability identities are accomplished for students. The basic assumption of this study, thus, is that the identity as disabled is not given, even though medically informed diagnostic practices have led us to assume that this is the case. Such identities are produced and confirmed through everyday practices in seemingly unremarkable activities. The study builds on analyses of recordings in communication books used as means of communication between teachers and parents. The results show how the disability identity of the children analyzed is presumed in many of the contacts between the parents and the teachers. Still, this category is not considered relevant for everything the children do, and they were sometimes considered as accountable for their activities and sometimes not. In a particularly interesting part of their analysis, Renshaw and his colleagues illustrate how transgressions and rule-breaking at school by one of the children provide opportunities for parents to engage in meaningful conversations with their child about her behaviour. That is, when discussing instances of unacceptable behaviour, the child is construed as agentic, and this leads adults to engage in joint probing into the motives for her actions. In the commentary, one of the leading scholars in the field of sociology of education during recent decades, Hugh Mehan from the University of California San Diego, comments on the contributions of the articles and the importance of analysing how diversity is represented and understood in educational settings. References Bowker, G., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, CA: The MIT Press. Deschenes, S., Cuban, L., & Tyack, D. (2001). Mismatch: Historical perspectives on schools and students who don’t fit them. Teachers College Record, 103(4), 525– 547. Falkenstein, A. (1948). Der Sohn des Tafelhauses [[The son of the tablet house]. Die Welt des Orients, 2, 172–186. Forssman, H., & Olow, I. (1961). De psykiskt utvecklingssto¨rda, deras utbildning och va˚rd. [The mentally retarded, their education and care]. Stockholm: Svenska bokfo¨rlaget. Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock. Graham, L. (2007). Out of sight, out of mind/out of mind, out of site: Schooling and attention, deficit, hyperactivity, disorder. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(5), 585–602. Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people. In T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, & D. Wellbery (Eds.), Reconstructing individualism. Autonomy, individuality, and the self in western thought (pp. 222–236). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In D. Sperber, P. Premack, & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition. A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 351–394). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. Hjo¨rne, E., & Sa¨ljo¨, R. (2012). Institutional labeling and pupil careers: Negotiating identities of children who do not fit in. In T. Cole, H. Daniels, & J. Visser (Eds.), Routledge international companion to emotional and behavioural difficulties. London: Routledge. pp. 40–47. Kramer, S. N. (1981). History begins at Sumer. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Lindensjo¨, B., & Lundgren, U. P. (2000). Utbildningsreformer och politisk styrning. [Educational reforms and political steering]. Stockholm: HLS Fo¨rlag. Ma¨kitalo, A˚. , & Sa¨ljo¨, R. (2002). Invisible people. Institutional reasoning and reflexivity in the production of services and ‘social facts’ in public employment agencies. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 9(3), 160–178. Marrou, H. I. (1977). A history of education in antiquity (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Mentor. Mehan, H. (1993). Beneath the skin and between the ears: A case study in the politics of representation. In J. Lave & S. Chaiklin (Eds.), Understanding practice. Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 241–268). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Mercer, J. (1973). Labelling the mentally retarded. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations. Oxford, England: Polity Press. Orme, N. (2006). Medieval schools: From Roman Britain to renaissance England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Prottas, J. M. (1979). People-processing. The street-level bureaucrat in public service bureaucracies. Lexington: Lexington Books. Ro¨ssler, W. (1961). Die Entstehung des modernen Erziehungswesens in Deutschland. [The creation of the modern educational system in Germany]. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Trent, J. W. (1994). Inventing the feeble mind. A history of mental retardation in the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Educational Research journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijedures
Representing diversity in education: Student identities in contexts of learning and instruction Eva Hjo¨rne, Roger Sa¨ljo¨ * University of Gothenburg, Sweden
A R T I C L E I N F O
Article history: Received 2 June 2012 Accepted 15 October 2012 Available online 6 January 2013 Keywords: Diversity in education Multicultural schools Learning difficulties Student identities Special education
1. Introduction The purpose of this special issue is to present research that addresses issues of how diversity is represented, understood and accommodated to in educational settings. It also seeks to explore how these representations and categorizations relate to student identities and to expectations of student adaptation and performance in contexts of teaching, learning and psychological testing. Diversity is certainly not a new phenomenon in education. Classrooms, most likely, have always been quite diverse. Even in the highly selective scribal schools in Mesopotamia some 5000 years ago when instruction was institutionalized, there were signs of a ‘‘mismatch’’ (Deschenes, Cuban, & Tyack, 2001) between the ambitions of the educators, on the one hand, and student adaptation to the activities offered, on the other hand. Students, who for some reason could not follow the instruction or live up to the expectations, were subjected to various kinds of disciplinary corrections or even expelled to maintain institutional order (Falkenstein, 1948; Kramer, 1981, p. 8). These kinds of problems seem to have existed in schools in ancient Greece, in Rome (Marrou, 1977), in medieval schools (Orme, 2006) and they have continued to be a part of schooling through the millennia. The identity of being a pupil implies subordination to specific rules and institutional norms that differ from those that apply to being a child. In the 19th century the idea of compulsory education spread in many Western countries. Inspired by the institution of the Volksschule in Prussia in the early 19th century (Ro¨ssler, 1961), ruling elites in Europe and North America adopted ideas that public schooling could play an important role for spreading literacy and other elementary skills, and for disciplining the
* Corresponding author. E-mail address: [email protected] (R. Sa¨ljo¨). 0883-0355/$ – see front matter ß 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijer.2012.10.001
2
E. Hjo¨rne, R. Sa¨ljo¨ / International Journal of Educational Research 63 (2014) 1–4
population to accept the worldly and religious authorities that were central to the emerging nation states. In the wake of this massification of education, girls and children of workers, farmers, ethnic and linguistic minorities, immigrants and others, who had previously been excluded from education, began to enter classrooms to be taught. This implied that the diversity of pupils in terms of social and cultural backgrounds in the school systems increased dramatically. Teachers had to handle the difficult problems of organizing instruction in what were often overcrowded classrooms and with students who were more or less prepared for participating in the specific institutional practices that characterize schooling. When schooling expanded to include entire populations, the institutional traditions of how to organize teaching and learning were already in place (Lindensjo¨ & Lundgren, 2000). There were classrooms, seating arrangements, lessons, the specific format of communicating referred to as lecturing, authority patterns and norms of conduct to observe, texts to be copied and memorized and so on. By and large, the established institutional format survived this rather dramatic expansion of the system. The obligations and entitlements of teachers and pupils were clearly defined and remained fairly stable, and the pupils who could not live up to the expectations were corrected through punishments of various kinds, expelled or simply dropped out of school. The expansion of schooling triggered the interest in developing institutional strategies for handling diversity. The issue of how to deal with the ‘‘nonmainstreamers’’ (Deschenes et al., 2001, p. 533), who caused teachers so many problems in classrooms, attracted much attention in the late 19th and early 20th century. Various types of segregation strategies were introduced, and special classes were organized in Europe and the USA to provide instruction for children who did not fit into the normal classroom and who were ‘‘difficult to teach’’ (Mehan, this volume). The weak and the dull, for instance, should not be allowed to’’remain a hindrance to the 90 or more per cent of normal children of the community?’’ as the researcher W.S. Monroe argued in 1894 (quoted in Trent, 1994, p. 147). Today, diversity, in terms of social background, cultural and ethnic origin, language, perceived learning ability and so on, is a prominent feature of most educational settings in many societies. Intra-institutional factors of the educational system, such as the introduction of comprehensive schools, the integration of students with disabilities, and the growth of higher education to include new groups, contribute to making student populations more diverse. More general social transformations following in the footsteps of globalisation, such as migration and a changing labour market, add to the trends of increasing diversity in student populations in terms of their interests and commitments to schooling. 2. Representing diversity An interesting element of the issue of diversity and schooling is how diversity is represented in language inside and outside institutional settings (Hjo¨rne & Sa¨ljo¨, 2012). What do we mean by diversity and how do we communicate about it? Human reasoning and social action rely on categories and categorizing practices (Bowker & Star, 2000). Linguistic categories serve as mediating resources for organizing the world, for establishing similarities and differences, for ‘seeing’ in institutionally relevant manners. Hospitals, banks, insurance companies, welfare agencies and many other institutions cannot do their job unless they can make distinctions between who is sick and who is not, who is a creditworthy client and who is not, and who is entitled to specific benefits and who is not. They have to develop reasonably stable categories when engaging in practices of ‘‘people processing’’ (Prottas, 1979) in a diverse and ambiguous reality. These categories also form the backbone of the documentation and memory practices of institutions. Forms, patient records, client reports, data bases and so on are organized through the use of categories that reflect institutional traditions and priorities (Ma¨kitalo & Sa¨ljo¨, 2002). In schooling, categories referring to intellectual ability have played an important role for deciding who is normal and who is deviant (cf. Mercer, 1973). Terms such as retarded, feebleminded, slow, dull, handicapped, word blind, learning disabled and many more have appeared and have been perceived as relevant categorizations, each in their own time. In the wake of the development of the first intelligence tests, a range of categories connected to the idea of human abilities following the normal curve emerged. Terms such as idiot, half-idiot, quarter-idiot, imbecile, moron, mentally deficient, retarded, gifted and others were used to categorize children (and adults) at different levels of the intelligence scale (Forssman & Olow, 1961). During the past decades, neuroscience has produced a large number of categories which are used for categorizing learning difficulties and explaining school failure: ADHD, HKD, DCD, EBD, dyslexia, dyscalculia and several others. In this context it is important to keep in mind that categories are not merely etiquettes. They are intimately tied to the use of resources in schools, preschools and other institutional settings. In many countries, a child who is diagnosed with a neuropsychiatric disorder will be entitled to various kinds of support, such as access to special education teachers and smallgroup teaching (Graham, 2007). At university level, a student who is diagnosed as dyslectic may be entitled to special arrangements when it comes to taking entrance tests or writing essays for exams. Thus, categories do concrete work when it comes to using institutional resources, and they provide arguments for treating persons in particular manners. In this sense, they intervene in the very fabric of power in society and form part of decisions that may be consequential for individuals and collectives. And, as is illustrated in the articles in this volume, one concrete consequence of prominent categorizing practices is that they individualize the problems and place them inside children (Mehan, 1993, this volume). In addition, categories serve as social representations (Moscovici, 2000) that are used for communicating about social issues and identities. They are part of the public production and reproduction of knowledge and political opinion, and, in the famous words of Foucault (1972, p. 54), they ‘‘systematically form the objects of which they speak.’’ Children with neuropsychiatric diagnoses, for instance, did not exist until a few decades ago, but now they are well-known elements of
E. Hjo¨rne, R. Sa¨ljo¨ / International Journal of Educational Research 63 (2014) 1–4
3
media debates and expert deliberations about problems of schooling and pedagogy in modern society. School boards, head masters, teachers and politicians are held accountable for the resources and learning conditions they make available to groups with such diagnoses. Parents organize themselves and begin to exercise political pressure to increase public attention, and they formulate demands for more research, smaller classes, specially trained teachers and other resources. Special needs teachers, psychologists and other professions eventually will gain status as specialists when it comes to teaching or testing pupils with specific disorders, and their claims to professional authority are tied to specific kinds of institutionally relevant categorizing practices. Thus, categories that gain prominence in media will be important on many levels, all the way from how a teacher or a preschool teacher perceives a child to political debates in parliaments on the use of public resources. In this sense, it matters how diversity is represented. From a psychological and interactive perspective, which is the focus of the articles in this volume, categories are constitutive of identities; they are tools for ‘‘making up people’’ as the philosopher Hacking (1986) puts it. In Hacking’s historical analyses, categories and people have a tendency to emerge hand in hand; there are ‘‘looping effects’’ (Hacking, 1995), where the categories available for classifying people in specific manners will be used as resources for understanding what we encounter. In other words, categories are suggestive and instructive, and there is a tendency that we will find what we have been told to look for. Such processes are of course also central for how we perceive ourselves as individuals, our perceptions of who we are. To be categorized as deviant – whether learning disabled, gifted or as a child with ADHD – will contribute to identity formation and to the expectations we have of our own position, capacities and prospects. In this context, the categories that are adopted and sanctioned by representatives of institutions that play a central role in the socialization of children in modern societies – schools, preschools, health providers, welfare agencies – are important to scrutinize. It is inevitable that the identity of a child will be shaped in response to the categorizing practices that are endorsed by institutions in which she or he spends so much time during the formative years. In the present special issue, the research presented analyses some of the contingencies between institutional practices and representations of diversity. In the article by Eva Hjo¨rne and Roger Sa¨ljo¨, the issue addressed concerns how problems of children to adapt to life in school are discussed at pupil health meetings. Such meetings are typical examples of contexts where representations of children and their activities play a decisive role, since decisions are taken on the basis of reports and accounts of what takes place in classrooms and elsewhere. The idea behind the meetings analyzed is to have multiprofessional teams where experts with different backgrounds collaborate in the process of defining and solving school problems. The results show that that there is no evidence that the presence of expertise from various fields has any direct consequences for how school problems are understood or remedied. The analyses made by the participants are based on the assumption that the problems can be placed within the child. Very little attention is given to scrutinizing the circumstances of the problems, or to understanding when and how they appear. The authors argue point to the different factors that contribute to maintaining this grammar of the meetings. Miche`le Grossen, Douchka Florez and Ste´phanie Lauvergeon analyze what they refer to as client categorizations in psychological testing. Their basic point of departure is that psychologists testing children and their capacities are always caught up in a dilemma between, on the one hand, following standardized professional practices, and, on the other hand, taking diversity and situated factors into account: they have to follow standardized practices when testing children and adolescents, since this is a precondition for the validity and reliability of the tests. But, simultaneously, their professional training and work experience tell them that people are different. The analysis shows how psychologists accommodate to the diversity they perceive in their clients in a number of ways. One of the conflicts they perceive, and try to handle, concerns scientific objectivity and reliability of their practice, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, what the authors refer to as the situated reliability of the testing situation. To satisfy the latter goal, the psychologists adapt part of their practices and decisions in manners which they sense will give a more informative and relevant picture of the client and her/his capacities. Grossen and her colleagues also discuss the moral dilemma of following standard scientific practices, while attempting to act in a manner that is fair to their clients. Guida Abreu and Hannah Hale report an empirical study from the UK of teachers’ accounts of students and their capacities for learning. More specifically, the issues addressed concern how the performance and adaptation of immigrant children and adolescents with a Portuguese background are represented by teachers in British schools. The results show that when children are successful in their role as pupils, their background is not considered relevant. When they have problems in school, on the other hand, the story is quite different. In this case, their background, and the characteristics which are held to be associated with it, is assumed to be decisive. Using the concept of ‘‘contact zones’’, Abreu and Lambert illustrate that British teachers and teachers of Portuguese backgrounds (working in the UK) represent the strengths and weaknesses of immigrant children differently. The latter construe the development of the immigrant children in terms of their attempts to develop a bilingual and bicultural identity, which is a perspective less relevant for representing the development of a British student in a British school. In recent decades higher education has expanded and attracted new groups of students. Sheila Riddell and Elisabet Weedon analyze the situation of students with a disability background at Scottish universities. One of the issues explored is how students construe their identity as a ‘student with a disability’, and how they negotiate their position at university. One of the consequences of recent administrative and legislative changes is that disability is understood as a political category, and extensive anti-discrimination measures have been taken to facilitate participation by students with learning impairments. In an illuminating case study of a student with a hidden impairment, Riddell and Weedon illustrate the contradictory consequences for students of these reforms, where there are obvious gains and losses by revealing your
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identity as a student with an impairment. In the final article, Peter Renshaw, Juliet Choo and elke emerald report a study of how disability identities are accomplished for students. The basic assumption of this study, thus, is that the identity as disabled is not given, even though medically informed diagnostic practices have led us to assume that this is the case. Such identities are produced and confirmed through everyday practices in seemingly unremarkable activities. The study builds on analyses of recordings in communication books used as means of communication between teachers and parents. The results show how the disability identity of the children analyzed is presumed in many of the contacts between the parents and the teachers. Still, this category is not considered relevant for everything the children do, and they were sometimes considered as accountable for their activities and sometimes not. In a particularly interesting part of their analysis, Renshaw and his colleagues illustrate how transgressions and rule-breaking at school by one of the children provide opportunities for parents to engage in meaningful conversations with their child about her behaviour. That is, when discussing instances of unacceptable behaviour, the child is construed as agentic, and this leads adults to engage in joint probing into the motives for her actions. In the commentary, one of the leading scholars in the field of sociology of education during recent decades, Hugh Mehan from the University of California San Diego, comments on the contributions of the articles and the importance of analysing how diversity is represented and understood in educational settings. References Bowker, G., & Star, S. L. (2000). Sorting Things Out. Classification and its Consequences. Cambridge, CA: The MIT Press. Deschenes, S., Cuban, L., & Tyack, D. (2001). Mismatch: Historical perspectives on schools and students who don’t fit them. Teachers College Record, 103(4), 525– 547. Falkenstein, A. (1948). Der Sohn des Tafelhauses [[The son of the tablet house]. Die Welt des Orients, 2, 172–186. Forssman, H., & Olow, I. (1961). De psykiskt utvecklingssto¨rda, deras utbildning och va˚rd. [The mentally retarded, their education and care]. Stockholm: Svenska bokfo¨rlaget. Foucault, M. (1972). The archeology of knowledge. London: Tavistock. Graham, L. (2007). Out of sight, out of mind/out of mind, out of site: Schooling and attention, deficit, hyperactivity, disorder. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 20(5), 585–602. Hacking, I. (1986). Making up people. In T. C. Heller, M. Sosna, & D. Wellbery (Eds.), Reconstructing individualism. Autonomy, individuality, and the self in western thought (pp. 222–236). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In D. Sperber, P. Premack, & A. J. Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition. A multidisciplinary debate (pp. 351–394). Oxford, England: Clarendon Press. Hjo¨rne, E., & Sa¨ljo¨, R. (2012). Institutional labeling and pupil careers: Negotiating identities of children who do not fit in. In T. Cole, H. Daniels, & J. Visser (Eds.), Routledge international companion to emotional and behavioural difficulties. London: Routledge. pp. 40–47. Kramer, S. N. (1981). History begins at Sumer. Philadelphia, PA: The University of Pennsylvania Press. Lindensjo¨, B., & Lundgren, U. P. (2000). Utbildningsreformer och politisk styrning. [Educational reforms and political steering]. Stockholm: HLS Fo¨rlag. Ma¨kitalo, A˚. , & Sa¨ljo¨, R. (2002). Invisible people. Institutional reasoning and reflexivity in the production of services and ‘social facts’ in public employment agencies. Mind, Culture, and Activity, 9(3), 160–178. Marrou, H. I. (1977). A history of education in antiquity (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Mentor. Mehan, H. (1993). Beneath the skin and between the ears: A case study in the politics of representation. In J. Lave & S. Chaiklin (Eds.), Understanding practice. Perspectives on activity and context (pp. 241–268). Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Mercer, J. (1973). Labelling the mentally retarded. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Moscovici, S. (2000). Social representations. Oxford, England: Polity Press. Orme, N. (2006). Medieval schools: From Roman Britain to renaissance England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Prottas, J. M. (1979). People-processing. The street-level bureaucrat in public service bureaucracies. Lexington: Lexington Books. Ro¨ssler, W. (1961). Die Entstehung des modernen Erziehungswesens in Deutschland. [The creation of the modern educational system in Germany]. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Trent, J. W. (1994). Inventing the feeble mind. A history of mental retardation in the United States. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.