In/exclusion and (dis)ability : (de)constructions of Education White Paper 6 : special needs education

[摘要] ENGLISH ABSTRACT:White Paper 6: Special Needs Education, released in July 2001, is the response ofthe South Africangovernment's Department of Education to the inclusion movement. In this (re)search, I(de)construct this text to explore constitutions of (dis)ability and inlexclusion. I do so because Iframe (de)construction as 'an aggressive, political mode of critical analysis that strips conventionaland assumed truths down to their logically insubstantial bare bones' (Danforth & Rhodes, 1997:358). I argue that it is necessary to (de)constructively read government policy that proposes a courseor policy of action, particularly if, as poststructuralists state, language constitutes reality.In reading White Paper 6, I (de)construct the functionalist grand narrative as hegemonic: discoursesconstituted by and constituting this metanarrative, including the medical or special needs discourse,the charity discourse, the systems discourse, the business discourse and the pioneering discourse.The radical humanist grand narrative is also read as dominant, formed by and forming the rightsdiscourse and social justice discourse. The social constructionist discourse, constituting andconstituted by the intepretivist grand narrative, is (dejconstructed in White Paper 6 as not reflectingupon the social construction of disability itself, but on social constructions related to (dis)ability andinlexclusion. The objects, agents, action and binaries constituted by each of these discourses arealso (de)constructed, as are the voices on the margins.The purpose of my (re)search is not to construct conclusions, but rather to (de)construct thepolyphony of voices, truths and realities speaking into and out of White Paper 6. In so doing, the'indecidability' (Silverman, 1989: 4) of the text is (de)constructed. With the indecidable(de)constructed, '... discourses can no longer dominate, judge, decide: between the positive andnegative, the good and the bad, the true and the false' (Derrida, 1992: 86). (Dis)ability andinlexclusion tmths are troubled and the text is opened to different readings.

[发布机构] Stellenbosch University