AD/HD i skolans praktik: En studie om normativitet och motstånd i en särskild undervisningsgrupp

The purpose of this thesis is to study some of the everyday interactional processes that take place in a special teaching group of children diagnosed with AD/HD. This group operates in an elementary school in a Swedish multicultural neighborhood. The starting point of the study is that AD/HD is much more than a neuropsychiatric diagnosis in the school’s pedagogical practice. The diagnosis contributes to shape many of the complex processes related to identity, socialization and learning that take a central place in the group’s daily interaction.
The thesis combines an ethnomethodological and intersectional approach to analyze the everyday interactional and conversational practices, as well as various institutional and social categorization processes, of importance to the group. The study is based on a one-year ethno-graphic fieldwork and focus mainly on field notes and video recordings collected during different teaching activities. The thesis explores how the teachers accomplish different arrangements and practices to meet the pupils’ special educational needs. By analyzing these arrangements and practices the study shows how teachers and pupils establish meaning and understanding of “the problematic pupil with AD/HD” in everyday interaction and in conversation. The focus is upon the role that practices like descriptions, categorizations, and identity attributions, play in the interaction between members of the group when they negotiate positions in terms of normativity and resistance. Also important is how the institutional ordering between teachers and the pupils is related to social orderings along the lines of disability, ethnicity, class and gender.
The analysis shows how the everyday arrangements and practices applied in the group, in combination with the daily production of meaning, generate different selection and stigmatization processes that school and special teaching ideologies were trying to prevent. The study stress the need for new pedagogical approaches to increase the understanding of those processes, as well as the articulation of new pedagogical alternatives that better respond to pupils with special educational needs.