Conference Agenda

In this paper, I think through three Intensive Interactions from my doctoral research-creation study to neuroqueer what passes as ‘literacies’ in the special education classroom. Using Nathan Snaza’s (2019) concept of ‘animate literacies’ as“marks that circulate in various media with affective agency,” and the scholar-activist concept neurological queerness, I consider how an attention to opacity, the more-than-human, and relationality might contest the notion of ‘competence’ in special educational literacy. This has particular implications in the after-lives of the coronavirus pandemic, where ‘catching-up’ or regaining lost time has become a powerful narrative in policy and practice.

In this paper, I contest the hierarchical neuro-normativity of literacy ‘competence.’ I do so using the scholar-activist concept of ‘neuroqueerness,’ as what queer theorist Muñoz (1999) might term a ‘dis-identification’ of neurodivergence that “work[s] on and against dominant ideology” (Muñoz, 1999, loc. 458). In this way, I understand the term ‘neuroqueer’ as a verb that does something to neurotypical hierarchies of cognition rather than an adjective that describes a type of practice. The concept of neuroqueerness has been used to bring new insights to the study of curriculum and classroom practice (Roscigno, 2020). While literacy scholars have problematised state-sanctioned notions of literacy for their raciality (Cushing, 2021; Wynter-Hoyte & Boutte, 2018), their separation of mind from both body and place (Flewitt, 2005; Hackett, 2021), and their separation of literacy skills from the ‘literacy event’ (Burnett & Merchant, 2020), the idea of neuroqueerness has received only a little attention in the field of literacy, and what little there is reinforces neuro-normative conceptualisations of literacy.

For instance, Kleecamp (2020) draws from Biklen’s notion of ‘presuming competence’ to explore how young people’s stimming, disrupting, and refusing when engaging with texts demonstrates a kind of what she terms ‘neuroqueer literacy.’ However, presuming competence is really quite different from how I think about ‘neuroqueerness.’ Presuming competence is a way of ‘including,’ or recognising neurodivergent practices through the lens of an existing set of neuronormative capacities—here what it means to be literate. Biklen tries to map neurodivergent practices onto these capacities, re-emphasizing neurotypical literacy skills. By way of a contrast, Kim (2015), in contesting corporeal hierarchies. encourages us to reject the whole idea of humanist capacities, including ‘competence,’ and thus making them irrelevant in “recognising the ontology of an object.” In other words, presuming competence retains the humanist measures of capacity against which divergent body(mind)s fail to measure up. Likewise, presuming competence in the special education literacy classroom retains the deficit-centric perspective of a set of ‘literacy’ capacities, the failure to achieve which defines neurodivergence. By way of a contrast, truly neuroqueering ‘literacies’ should contest the whole notion of competence.

These questions are of particular concern in the after-lives of the coronavirus pandemic, where the urgency of catching children up with pre-pandemic competencies has become a powerful narrative in international policy and practice. This has typically emphasised state-sanctioned disciplinary expectations of children’s progress in ‘literacy’ and ‘numeracy.’ Yet, this discussion fails to account for the ways in which these disciplines are grounded in homonormative and white supremacist notions of competence that (in the UK) nearly 50% of children were failing to meet anyway. A neuroqueering of ‘competence’ might pave the way to question what

My thinking in this paper leads me to address the following two research questions:

1. How might an attention to embodiment and the more-than-human neuroqueer humanist notions of ‘literacies’?
2. How might neuroqueering ‘literacies’ complicate the notion of competencies in the special education classroom?

Students with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD) have overall fewer educational opportunities and are more at risk of developing impairments in health and functioning than their peers (Durlak et al., 2011). For students with EBD it is difficult to meet school requirements and teachers’ expectations for social and learning behaviour in class (Bethell et al., 2012). They report a lower social integration in class, less acceptance by their teachers and less well-being than their peers (Blumenthal & Blumenthal, 2021). Furthermore, children and adolescents with special educational needs in this area are perceived as more aggressive and are more likely to be rejected by their peers (Gest et al., 2014; Hendrickx et al., 2016). In addition, teachers find these students’ disruptive behaviour in class challenging (Øen & Johan Krumsvik, 2021). Difficulties in meeting requirements and expectations in class are associated with EBD students’ shortcomings in social emotional skills (Durlak et al., 2011).

Social emotional learning can be seen as the process of acquiring competences to recognise and manage one’s own and other’s emotions, to establish positive relationships or to manage conflicts, in sum, to gain social emotional skills (Durlak et al., 2015). Indeed, promoting social emotional learning needs to be a prominent aspect in teaching students with EBD (e.g. Demol et al., 2020). There are several schoolwide programs and planned interventions for promoting social emotional learning (Durlak et al., 2011; Reicher & Matischeck-Jauk, 2012). Meta-analyses show that these programs are effective in enhancing students’ self-perception or reducing aggression both at post-test (Durlak et al., 2011) and at follow up (Taylor et al., 2017). These programs mostly implement strategies to enhance students’ skills through systematic instructions for teaching, modelling, practicing and applying social emotional skills in different situations, sometimes complemented by the development of safe and caring environments (Durlak et al., 2011; Taylor et al., 2017). These programs have shown to be more effective if delivered by the teacher and not a person from outside the classroom (Durlak et al., 2011). This points to the important role of the teacher and the teacher-student relation for social emotional learning (Farmer et al., 2011). It also raises the question of teachers’ competences and the approaches that they take for promoting students’ social emotional learning in everyday class. For example, teachers might support social emotional learning by scaffolding peer interactions or functioning as a role model in how to shape relationships (Gest et al., 2014; Hendrickx et al., 2016). Yet regular teachers feel especially challenged by EBD students‘ behaviour and report on a lack of approaches to promote social emotional learning (Øen & Johan Krumsvik, 2021).

This paper explores dilemmas in the enactment of inclusive education, based on the findings from an interview study with Swedish subject teachers and special educators.

Inclusive education is an educational ideal that emphasizes access, participation and achievement in education for all students, as well as a general acceptance for diversity. Although inclusive education has been a global policy goal since the signing of the Salamanca Statement in 1994, it has shown to be difficult to implement in practice. In this regard, researchers have pointed towards some tensions within the concept. For example, such tensions concern whether or not inclusive education presupposes identification of certain students that should be excluded, and to what degree and how teaching should be differentiated in order to meet the needs of all students.

Several researchers have attempted to account for such complexities by studying dilemmas that schools and teachers face in their everyday work. Dilemmas are generally understood as challenges that cannot be completely conquered due to their inherent conflicts of principles, values or goals. Thus, they can only be temporarily resolved, which require prioritizations where all available options carry negative consequences. Moreover, responses to dilemmas are always made in relation to contextual constraints, policy demands and pressure from other local actors. Thus, national or local policies and prioritizations can constrain school actors’ room for action. In this way, dilemmas that have been resolved on higher levels might remain implicit to practitioners.

While much conceptual and empirical research have studied dilemmas in schools, it has been argued that resolutions to dilemmas need to be further understood in relation to constraints imposed by neoliberal standards policies that has increasingly come to characterize education policy and school practices. For example, researchers have argued that the focus on meeting academic performance targets classifies failing students as deviant and in need of special educational support, and that standards policies transform inclusive education into a matter of access to mainstream classrooms and provision of support for reaching standardized performance targets. However, more research is needed on how this conflict take shape in practice, and how it frames dilemmas and their resolutions in schools.

In this paper, this is pursued through an interview study with Swedish subject teachers and special educators. Sweden has traditionally been regarded as an inclusive educational system, but has lost ground in international comparisons of equity in school systems, which can be seen in the light of a rapid movement towards marketization and a focus on educational standards in the last decades. Thus, Sweden is an interesting case for studying the confrontation between inclusive and neoliberal ideals.

In the paper, the theory on policy enactment by Stephen Ball with colleagues is used to analyze resolutions to dilemmas as taking place on an arena where local school actors interpret, negotiate and translate conflicting policy demands. In particular, the analysis of the interviews makes use of the concepts interpretations and translations, which highlight differences between actors' capabilities and inclinations to enact different policies, and thus resolve dilemmas, in different ways. Moreover, the notions of imperative and exhortative policies are used to illustrate how different kinds of policy entail different conditions for resolving dilemmas. By relating theoretical notions of policy enactment and dilemmas to each other in the analysis, the paper aims to provide further insights into how different school actors perceive dilemmas, and how they engage in the work of resolving them. In particular, the paper has the ambition to contribute with knowledge on how school professionals’ perceptions and resolutions can be shaped by conflicting policy demands, their school contexts, and their positions in the local school organization.