Special Education as Ethical Practice

Abstract

This four decade account documents the experiences of 15 mothers, representing diverse generations, social classes, and races/cultures, within the institution of special education. The narratives collected for this project illustrate how special education discourse—rules, structures, language— influences and shapes parent/professional relationships. In particular, these narratives consistently feature school professionals, operating from within an authoritarian discourse, who privilege objective ways of knowing (scientific, legal, bureaucratic) and dismiss subjective, contextualized knowledges that mothers bring about their own children. It appears, then, that these mothers of children labeled learning disabled (LD) (not unlike mothers of children with other disabilities) clearly represent the kind of “subjugated knowledges” that Michel Foucault (1980) defines as “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naïve knowledges located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity” (p. 82).