Linear Dichotomy Essay

While we may except that disability is a personal characteristic it is important to consider that it is not a unitary concept like race and gender (Shakespeare, 1993). There are many different types of disability and with these come different experiences of disability, oppression and the psycho-emotional dimensions of disability (Reeve, 2002). Also the concept of disability is not linear (Reeve, 2002). People can be disabled when completing one task yet not disabled when completing another (). For example a deaf student may be disabled when asked to listen to a cd and write down how it makes them feel but not if they are required to look at a picture and write down how that makes them feel. So treating disability as a linear dichotomy is to
over simplify it. Classifying people as unitarily disabled or non-disabled not only ignores the ways in which all people are more or less able at different tasks but also constructs the concepts of the archetypally normal person and those who are other than normal (Humphrey, 2000).
The manner in which educational diagnostic labels are applied is linear and dichotomistic.
Even for those disabilities that are considered as a spectrum, such as Autism Spectrum disorder, students are still labelled as Autistic or not. By requiring schools to classify a group of children as having additional needs to the rest, SEN policy requires schools to act as if there is a point somewhere along the spectrums of abilities and behaviours that there students’ display that separates those who are normal from those who are not ( 1981 Education Act? – might be a later one). A child considered to have SEN could have far more traits in common with many children the education system considers ‘normal’ than the other children labelled with SEN. Yet they are labelled as diametrically opposed to these ‘normal’ students and their school experience is affected far more by their label of SEN than by all the characteristics they share with the rest of the school populous. They are entitled to different levels of support () their behaviours and underlying intentions are interpreted differently () they may have far higher levels of adult supervision and surveillance () and they are considered by staff and students to be ‘different’ to majority of the ‘normal’ students (). Hence diagnostic labels may serve to reinforce this idea that disability is a unitary dichotomy and construct ideas of normalcy and otherness (Humphrey, 2000).
This unitary view of disability has led to debates within the
disabled community about what entitles someone to the label ‘disabled’ (Humphrey, 2000) with people feeling excluded from groups set up to support disabled people because they are perceived as not disabled enough, often because their disability is invisible. () This may hinder the power of the disabled community to incite political and social change as it reduces the perception of common interests and the threat of mass mobilisation (Scott – add to bib).
The effect of invisible disabilities is very visible with schools where students, both those labelled SEN and those not, complain it isn’t fair that people who don’t appear disabled are getting extra help/resources. This coupled with treatment of disabilities as a dichotomy seems to prevent students from uniting in a quest to provide them all with a fairer system but instead argue about who should be entitled to redress within the current system.