- Nascar Kass
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Reflections on my Reading Response
After thinking about our discussion that shot off of Ryan's comments during Thursday's class, I realized that I made the mistake of grouping learning disabled students with new ESL students. Shame on me. Just because they use a different structure for their language and have troubles expressing themselves in English does not make them in any way similar to a learning disabled student. They are disabled in a sense because of their lack of knowledge and experience using the language, but I was just plain wrong in making any form of comparison between the two. Just wanted to throw out that confession. See you all in class.
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This is interesting. Because, in the end, it's a matter of labeling and power. And so we have a structure in place that determines just what counts as disabled (which of course assumes an "abled" opposite somehow) and quite often, in education (where I'm coming from here) ESL and ELL students are placed in LD tracking because of perceived linguistic "deficiency." I think what I'd point to, Kassidy, is not the slip in labeling of ESL students in a learning disabled category, but the macro structural imports that say we need to norm-reference in the first place, thus creating a mythical abled student both in body and english-language capability.
It's one of the troubles with the idea of "special needs" students because, in the end, we all have special needs...but some of us just have our needs normalized while the needs of others are stigmatized as deviant, or problematic.
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