Ability Profiling and School Failure

One Child's Struggle to be Seen as Competent

Kathleen M. Collins

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136627446
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Ability Profiling and School Failure, Second Edition explores the social and contextual forces that shape the appearance of academic ability and disability and how these forces influence the perception of academic underachievement of minority students. At the book's core is the powerful case study of a competent fifth grader named Jay, an African American boy growing up in a predominantly white, rural community, who was excluded from participating in science and literacy discourses within his classroom community.

In this new edition, researcher and teacher-educator Kathleen Collins situates the story of Jay's struggle to be seen as competent within current scholarly conversations about the contextualized nature of dis/ability. In particular, she connects her work to recent research into the overrepresentation of minority students in special education, exploring the roles of situated literacies, classroom interactions, and social stereotypes in determining how some students come to be identified as "disabled." Ability Profiling and School Failure, Second Edition comprises a thorough investigation into the socially constructed nature of ability, identity, and achievement, illustrating the role of educational and social exclusion in positioning students within particular identities.

CHAPTER1

Introduction

Sociocultural Perspectives on Dis/Ability and Positioning

When I met Jay and Laura his teacher and the other children at Axelton Middle School, I brought with me my experiences as a White female high school teacher in a diverse district near Washington, DC. As a teacher, I questioned why my “basic” English Language Arts classes were densely populated with students of color (particularly Black boys and English Language Learners) while the other “advanced” classes appeared to be comprised almost entirely of White students from middle and upper-income homes. Meeting Jay, observing his interactions with Laura, and the ways in which he was immediately profiled as “emotionally impaired or learning disabled,” reignited my passion for understanding and addressing questions of how children are placed in categories and assigned identities of able or deficient.

In this introductory chapter I discuss two analytical lenses that helped me address these questions in the context of my work with Jay. Both sociocultural and positioning theories helped me identify interactional factors that influenced Jay’s identification as “competent” or “disabled” in each activity context. In Chapter 17 and the appendix I extend the analytical lenses introduced here to include consideration of broader institutional, cultural, and historical influences on the identification and location of dis/ability.

Where Is Dis/Ability? The Need for a Sociocultural Perspective

A disability may be a better display board for the weaknesses of a cultural system than it is an account of real persons.

(McDermott & Varenne, 1995, p. 327)

Scholars of teaching and learning have presented differing views regarding what contributes to school success and school failure. One common model has become known as a “deficit” or “medical model” approach to understanding low achievement. This model emerged from special education’s roots in the medical field and the diagnoses of brain injury (Poplin, 1988a; Trent, Artiles, &Englert, 1998). Mary Poplin (1988a) identified deficit approaches (including four models of disability: medical, psychological process, behavioral, and cognitive/learning strategy) as part of a reductionist paradigm, which isolated aspects of teaching and learning from their situated occurrence in social interactions. Reductionism, particularly as manifested by deficit, medical, and mechanistic metaphors for learning, assumed human learning could be broken into component psychological processes and observable behaviors, and that these processes and behaviors could be isolated and treated (Gavelek & Palincsar, 1988; Poplin, 1988a). This assumption led to the most severe limitation of the reductionist paradigm; that is, its failure to consider the contextual and social aspects of human learning as a complex process.

A second perspective on understanding low school achievement is known as the “communication process” or “cultural difference” approach. Scholars explicitly concerned with the educational underachievement of minority children and those from low-income families employed this lens to conduct extensive research into the dynamics of discursive interactions of classrooms (see reviews in Cazden, 1986; Hicks, 1995). Such studies demonstrated that low achievement in school was often linked to culturally based communicative differences (Erickson, 1996; Heath, 1983; Michaels & Collins, 1984; Philips, 1972; see also discussions in Cazden 1988/2001; Hicks, 1995), and that when instructional discourse was made more culturally congruent, achievement improved (Au, 1979, 1980; Au & Jordan, 1981; see also discussions in Erickson, 1987; Gee, 1990).

A third lens, one that broadens deficit and communication process perspectives on understanding the dynamics of low school achievement, is provided by social constructivist and sociocultural theories. Social constructivist theory challenges the assumption of the deficit approach that locates ability, or disability, solely within an individual student or group of students (Vygotsky, 1978, 1987). Further, a sociocultural perspective challenges the communication process approach to move beyond a focus on spoken interactions to consider how these interactions both reflect and are shaped by larger cultural practices, sociopolitical interests, and social positioning.

Social constructivist and sociocultural theories ask us to consider how we define ability and competence in our classrooms and our research, and how our own teaching, assessment, and interactional practices may shape the interpretations we reach about a student’s learning, about their competence and incompetence. Rather than looking for a deficit or impairment within learners, a sociocultural perspective suggests examining the intersection of environment and individual to understand how they mutually construct each other.

Ability and disability are thus not constant or perceived as solely located within individuals. Rather, they are constructed in the relation between individuals and the opportunities provided by the activity setting in which they are engaged. School success and school failure are cocreated in situated activity.¹

Jay articulated one of the central tenets of a sociocultural theoretical framework when I asked him to describe his own learning process:

When somebody else say something, I just like take what they’re saying and … remember what I, what I had learned from the year, and combine that. And when I think about it real hard it just comes out. It’s like a burst, a burst of fire.

(Jay, interview, January 9, 1998)

Jay’s reflection captures the notion social and individual cognitive processes are mutually constitutive and interdependent. The interdependent nature of individual and social development was posited in the work of Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky, whose scholarship provided the foundation for many of the constructs of social constructivist/sociocultural theory. Vygotsky (1978, 1981b, 1987) described learning as a process of change, a complex dialectic between an individual and her social/cultural contexts in which they mutually construct and transform each other.

James Wertsch (1991) proposes consideration of three themes in Vygotsky’s work which each explicate different aspects of the mutually constitutive relationship between individuals and their social and cultural contexts (see also discussion in Palincsar, 1998). These themes include: (a) individual development stems from social resources; (b) semiotic tools, both physical and conceptual, shape and define (mediate) action; and (c) human development is best understood through genetic analysis. While foregrounding each theme separately is somewhat artificial because of their interdependent nature, it is also a useful analytic approach in that it allows me to illuminate some of the complexities and implications of sociocultural theory. Therefore, in the rest of this section I discuss each of these themes and the ways in which they informed my research with Jay.²

Individual Development Stems From Social Resources

The assertion that individual development stems from social resources is a key tenet of Vygotsky’s work. In Vygotsky’s model, individuals take up the conceptual or physical tools and signs (the social resources) that are available to them within their cultural contexts. In the process of taking up and employing these tools, an individual transforms both her own understanding and the shared understandings of the community. The process of employing a cultural tool thus changes or transforms the forms of thought possible at the institutional, social/cultural, and individual planes of development. Vygotsky describes this process as the general genetic (developmental or historical) law of cultural development:

We could formulate the general genetic law of cultural development as follows: Any function in the child’s cultural development appears twice, or on two planes. First it appears on the social [intermental] plane, and then on the psychological [intramental] plane. First it appears between people as an interpsychological category, and then within the child as an intrapsychological category. This is equally true with regard to voluntary attention, logical memory, the formation of concepts, and the development of volition. We may consider this position as a law in the full sense of the word, but it goes without saying that internalization transforms the process itself and changes its structures and functions. Social relations or relations among people genetically underlie all higher functions and their relationships.

(Vygotsky, 1981b, p. 163)

Thus a sociocultural perspective posits that cognition is mediated by the social interactions that occur within the cultural context of development. Even when an individual is engaged in activity that appears to be solely intramental, such as thinking or writing alone, she is engaged in a social process because her action is mediated by interactions and tools first experienced intermentally. Vygotsky’s concept of mind thus extends “beyond the skin” (Wertsch, 1991, p. 14) to include the ways in which thought and action are mediated by tools, signs, and other agents (see also Wertsch, 1998 regarding socially shared cognition).

One implication of this concept of mind for classroom research is that measures of individual conceptual change are insufficient for reflecting the process of dialectical transformation and development posited by sociocultural theory. The mediational means and habits of mind of the learning community, the opportunities they afford, the constraints they impose, and the transformations that they undergo, must all be considered. For example, from a sociocultural perspective it is not enough to examine only Jay’s pre- and posttest scores on the conceptual assessment of floating and sinking, or even to examine his scores in relation to those of the rest of his class. To more fully appreciate these measures of Jay’s understanding of density, one must examine the sociohistorical aspects of their construction. Among these aspects are the contextual elements that supported Jay’s construction and expression of understanding, such as his participation in the instructional conversations during public sharing time, the responses of his classmates and his teacher to his participation, and the physical and conceptual tools that mediated these interactions.

Vygotsky’s description of the dialectical relationship between individuals and their social and cultural contexts is often described as internalization, with an emphasis on “the internal reconstruction of an external operation” (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 56). However, Vygotsky also emphasizes the ways in which internalization involves both the taking up of a tool or participation in an activity, and transformation. In Vygotsky’s view, the very process of participating in social/cultural activity transforms an agent intramentally, and the participation of that agent in the community then transforms the tools and constructs available for appropriation. Depicting Vygotsky’s thinking about internalization as involving only the taking up of mediational means misses the dynamic nature of the relation Vygotsky describes, and contributes to claims that sociocultural theory is concerned primarily with transmission or transference (cf. Cobb, 1994). As Vera John-Steiner and Herbert Mahn (1996) note, this portrayal of sociocultural theory overlooks the notion of learning as mutual transformation that characterizes Vygotsky’s work.

James Wertsch (1998) explicates the concept of internalization further, claiming that the use of the term perpetuates the very mind/body, individual/society dualism that Vygotsky, through the development of sociocultural theory, seeks to overcome. To avoid this dualism, Wertsch introduces alternative terminology to describe the dialectical relationship between individuals and their social/cultural contexts. He identifies two different forms of internalization: internalization as mastery and internalization as appropriation.

Wertsch’s (1998) consideration of internalization as mastery emphasizes “knowing how” to use a cultural tool. In this case, the operation involving the tool may never “move inside” as is implied by the term internalization, but rather remains visible. Wertsch discusses examples which include the use of physical tools, such as pole vaulting, conceptual tools, such as mathematical operations, as well as relationships with other agents, as in studies of socially shared cognition.

In my work with Jay, several striking examples of internalization as mastery took place in the context of our entomology inquiry. For example, “knowing how” to engage in the various field-based practices of entomology, from preparing a “kill jar,” catching insects and transferring them to the jar, removing them, mounting them, and recording our field notes, was critical to our inquiry. Although we both mastered this range of practices, they never “moved inside” in the sense that they were always performed externally, with physical tools. Further, there were many instances of distributed cognition in this context as we were joined first by Jay’s cousin and then by a university entomologist, who each brought her or his own understandings and skills to the inquiry and took up different roles. At one point in our field collection, for example, Jay assigned his cousin the task of recording our entries in our field guide because he thought she could write better (more neatly) than he could. In this context, knowing how to complete different tasks, individually and collectively, demonstrated internalization as mastery of insect collecting.

Wertsch (1998) draws on the work of Soviet scholar M. M. Bakhtin to explore the notion of internalization as appropriation. Like Vygotsky, Bakhtin emphasizes the dialectical nature of communication and cognition, although Bakhtin focuses more exclusively on language. Bakhtin’s concept of dialogicality posits that a speaker appropriates her words from interactions with others, and that the process of appropriation involves one of transformation:

Language, for the individual consciousness, lies on the borderline between oneself and another. The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes “one’s own” only when the speaker populates it with his own intention, his own accent, when he appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral and impersonal language (it is not, after all, out of a dictionary that a speaker gets his words!) but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, in other people’s contexts, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own. And not all words for just anyone submit equally easily to this appropriation, to this seizure and transformation into private property: many words stubbornly resist, others remain alien, sound foreign in the mouth of the one who appropriated them and who now speaks them; they cannot be assimilated into his context and fall out of it; ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Bio
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction: Sociocultural Perspectives on Dis/Ability and Positioning
• Chapter 2. The Boy Who Had Something to Say
• Chapter 3. “He’s What I Would Call ‘Out There’”
• Chapter 4. “He Was Immediate. He Was Like Immediate”
• Chapter 5. “Where’s the Evidence?”
• Chapter 6. “Jay Just Amazes Me During This, He Really Does”
• Chapter 7. “It Will Be Very, Very Difficult For Him to Learn How to Function in the Class”
• Chapter 8. “It’s Like a Burst, a Burst of Fire”
• Chapter 9. “You Got to Hear This!”
• Chapter 10. “So Who Wrote It?”
• Chapter 11. “Jay, We Gotta Find You a Group”
• Chapter 12. “I’m the Boy Who Likes Bugs.”
• Chapter 13. “Do You Think I’m Proper?”
• Chapter 14. “This Ain’t Easy!”
• Chapter 15. “Church Is Not a Game!”
• Chapter 16. “I Think That’s Why We Became Very Good Friends”
• Chapter 17. “If You Stick Out, You Get Squashed”: Ability Profiling as Response to Difference
• Epilogue
• Appendix Approaches to Inquiry, Analysis, and Representation
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index