Individualised support, labeling and difference

 

What is ‘the dilemma of difference’?

 

Corbett has written of how persons with impairments are disadvantaged when others do not recognise their additional needs:

 

If the curriculum and teaching approaches are to be investigated in detail to see how they can accommodate a diverse range of learning styles, this may necessitate an assessment of how different children learn best and what strategies can support their learning.  This means recognizing that they have specific problems and confronting these as their individual needs. (Corbett, 2000, 164)

 

In other words, without an understanding of what the sufferer is going through, without the label which points to and illuminates the nature of their condition, there is misunderstanding and a the risk of stigma. 

 

However, others argue that labelling and individualised support can led a reductive education and stigma.

 

‘Those who are labelled as deficient, fixed in that category as firmly as flies in amber,’ Greene (1995, 39) writes, ‘have little chance to feel they can be yet otherwise than what they have become’.  

 

Slee (2001, 117) echoes Greene when he suggests that the consequence of applying generalisations to a child, of ‘reducing the person to the textbook accounts of defectiveness’, is to ‘deny possibilities for learning and active citizenship lying within their complexity’. 

 

Here is a classic case of what Minow (1985; 1990) calls ‘the dilemma of difference’. 

 

‘The dilemma of difference is the risk of reiterating the stigma associated with assigned difference either by focusing on it or by ignoring it’ (Minow, 1985: 202).

 

In relation to specialized and individualized support in school the dilemma of difference arises and two questions present themselves: ‘when does treating people differently emphazie their differences and stigmize or hinder them on that basis?  and when does treating people the same become insensitive to their difference and likely to stigmatize or hinder them on that basis?’ (Minow, 1990: 20).

 

What assumptions inform the dilemma of difference?

 

There is, for Minow, the dilemma of difference is inseparable from the assumption of a norm. 

 

If to be equal you must be the same, then to be different is to be unequal… In view of the risk that difference will mean deviance or inequality, stigmatization from identified difference is not surprising. (Minow, 1985: 203)

 

Where difference exists as deficiency or deviancy there exists, also, ‘a certain idea or model of humanity’ that is ‘normative, self-evident, and is supposed to be universal’ (Foucault, 1988: 15).

 

Consider the following definition of ‘special educational needs’ in the Special

Educational Needs Code of Practice (original emphasis, DfES, 2001: 6):

 

Children have special educational needs if they have a learning difficulty which calls for special educational provision to be made for them.  Children have a learning difficulty if they:

 

a) have a significantly greater difficulty in learning than the majority of children of the same age; or

(b) have a disability which prevents or hinders them from making use of educational facilities of a kind generally provided for children of the same age in schools within the area of the local education authority

(c) are under compulsory school age and fall within the definition at (a) or (b) above or would so do if special educational provision was not made for them.

 

Difference is relational not inherent

 

It is Minow’s view that difference is not a Norm to be met or to be measured against; instead, difference is a construction of relationships. 

 

for there to be an assignment of deviancy, it must be from the vantage point of some claimed normality; for there to be a position of inequality, there must be a contrasting position, not of equality, but of superiority. In short, the idea of difference depends on the establishment of a relationship between the one assigned the label of “different” and the one used as the counter example. Once noted as a concept forged in relationship, difference no longer belongs to the one child who is called “different,” but instead to the relationship between the two children under comparison.  They are both different from each other, whatever the proficiencies or deficiencies used to characterize each. (Minow, 1985: 204)

 

‘Indeed, the “normal” child depends on the existence of the “different” child for the label of normal; it is the relationship, again, that constructs the difference’ (Minow, 1985: 205)

 

The difference dilemma, then, depends on the relationship constructed to define "different" and "normal," and on the association of equality with sameness and of deviance with difference. (Minow, 1985: 205)

 

However, both the assumption of a norm and ‘the point of comparison’ are ‘often unstated’ (Minow, 1990: 22).

 

Beyond the dilemma of difference: ‘the social-relations approach’ (Minow,                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     1990)

 

Minow points us to a critique of what Ainscow (1998) names the ‘individualised’ and ‘interactive’ views of inclusion and exclusion in education.  She observes:

 

Mainstreaming the disabled child means producing expectations that this child will adjust to the existing educational structure, with modifications focused on her through individualized instruction at limited times.  It preserves the unstated norm of the nonhandicapped student and continues to make difference seem the handicapped student’s problem. (Minow, 1990: 86)

 

Minow calls for a turning of our attention away from the person or group of persons defined as different and onto the ways in which categorizing process occur.  So, instead of asking how or in what ways is one person different to another we should, she suggests, ask the broader, social and ethical question concerning how it is that some persons come to be valued and others devalued.  

 

Locating difference in the relationship rather than in the person or group called "different" may permit a new stance toward the problem of stigma. Focusing on the relationship or matrix in which difference is created may offer people the chance to acknowledge difference and not locate it in another who then is unequal, but instead in the relationship used to define that “difference.”  (Minow, 1985: 206)

 

From us and them, normal and abnormal, to ‘the shared problem of difference’ (Minow, 1985: 12).

 

Here the focus is no longer on the ‘different child’ and how best to respond to him or her in terms of their difference but an examination of the ways in which difference is created in the classroom, the school and in society as a whole. 

 

It is to begin, not with a view of this or that person as different, but ‘with analysis of the ways in which institutions construct and utilize differences to justify and enforce exclusions – and the ways in which such institutional practices can be changed’ (Minow, 1990: 86).

 

If difference can be a whole-school concern, then ‘the students themselves are involved’ and it becomes possible to consider ways in which we may ‘locate all the students on the same side of the problem, as part of the solution’ (Minow, 1985: 207).

 

‘Once located, the problem of difference in this shared context could alleviate the risk of stigma, while deepening each child's sense of what it means to live in a social world’ (208).

 

Minow points to a concrete example.  We might perceive a dilemma of difference in including a student with a hearing impairment, existing between, on the one hand, the stigma that may arise from addressing that student’s special needs through one-to-one support and specialist resources and, on the other hand, the stigma that may follow from the student not learning at the same level as the rest of the students in the class.  However, locating difference, not in the individual student, but in the life of the school and classroom may alter practice: ‘Teaching all the students sign language … would involve every member of the class in altering the classroom structure that has disabled one student’s participation’ (Minow, 1990: 86).

 

Here is a move away from the conception of special education for children with special needs to a view of all children and all education as special.

 

Beyond the dilemma of difference: Difference and dialogue

 

The hope of relational approaches is that if we talk about these things, the people behind the labels will become more vivid to those who would exclude them.  The community is negative attitude toward those they call different will be itself conceived as part of the problem, rather than an immutable given.  (Minow, 1990: 213)

 

Taking our partiality as our starting point there is a shift in approach and attitude from the dilemma of difference to a struggle with difference:

 

There is no ultimate resting place but instead an opportunity for dialogue, conversation, continuing processes of mutual boundary setting, and efforts to manage colliding perspectives on reality. (Minow, 1990: 383)

 

What is the relation between the dilemma of difference and individualized support?

 

‘Planning for an individual, by its very focus on the particular child, tends to ignore the child’s relationships with others and the construction of difference in those relationships …’ (Minow, 1990: 86).

 

What is the relation between the dilemma of difference and labeling?

 

Concerns with difference, in Minow’s view, should focus on not who is different and how but on what we consider to be different and why.  The problem with labeling is, for Minow, that it brings dialogues and the disputes about difference to a halt.  Dialogues about difference become limited when the label applied to a person or group of persons determines for us who is ‘different’ and who is ‘normal’.  Minow writes:

 

Anglo-American law has historically used categories to assign people to different statuses.  The price of these legal categories has been borne disproportionately by the most marginal and vulnerable members of the society.  Labeling them will only hide human responsibility for their treatment, not solve the problems of organizing perceptions and responsibilities, naming differences to distinguish people isolates those who do the naming as well, and naming differences may deny the humanity of those who seem different. (Minow, 1990: 10)

 

Before we have an opportunity to reflect on and discuss difference, the label may present us with readymade solutions, with prescribed ways of thinking about and approaching difference.  As such, the label may present us with the myth that differences we confront are fixed differences, which indelibly separate us.  This, for Minow, is the power of the label or category to alienate us from the relation between our language and our responsibility:

 

Categories are humanly made, and mutable.  The differences we identify and emphasize are expressions of ourselves and our values.  What we do with difference, and whether we acknowledge our participation in the meanings of the differences we assign others, are choices that remain.  (Minow, 1990: 390)

 

To attend not to ‘different children’ as problems but to the creation of difference is, Minow suggests, a turn to responsibility, to examine how and why we act on and name the persons in our midst.  

 

Summery

 

This different stance locates the problem of difference in the relationships that define it, and the problem of stigma in the association of sameness with equality and of difference with inequality. (Minow, 1985: 210)

 

References

 

Ainscow, M. (1998) Would it work in theory? Arguments for practitioner researcher and theorising in the special needs field, in: C. Clark, A. Dyson & A. Millward (Eds.) Theorising special education (London, Routledge).

Department for Education and Skills (2001) Special educational needs code of practice. London, DfES Publications. Available:

http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/_doc/3724/SENCodeofPractice.pdf

Foucault, M. (1988) Technologies of the Self, in: L. Martin, H. Gutman & P. Hutton (Eds.) Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press)

Minow, M. (1985) Learning to Live with the Dilemma of Difference: Bilingual and Special Education, Law and Contemporary Problems, 48, 2, 157-211

Minow, M. (1990) Making all the difference: Inclusion, exclusion and American law (London, Cornell University Press)