Ways to be a person: How schools contribute to ‘making up’ intellectually disabled pupils

How do ‘kinds’ of knowledge and practices existing within schools contribute to ‘making up’ intellectually disabled pupils in relation to perspectives on inclusion? This project departs from a micro-perspective on inclusion where the object of study is the processes that take place within educational institutions and between actors in the classrooms and other contexts at schools. Based on this, the dissertation aims to understand how education contributes to ‘making up’ intellectually disabled pupils. Drawing on the theoretical works of the Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking, this project discusses how produced knowledge, stereotypical assumptions, values, beliefs and so on that are implemented in the category ‘intellectual disability’ affect organisational practices, which in turn interact with the children classified as intellectually disabled and influence how they understand themselves and their surroundings. The dissertation consists of three articles that are based on empirical data gathered from three pupils diagnosed with intellectual disability. The three informants are each devoted their own article. Individually the articles discuss different issues and themes related to different dimensions of inclusion, respectively: participation, fellowship, democracy and benefit. Based on the mentioned perspectives on inclusion, the purpose of the articles is to discuss how intellectual disability as a category affects the surroundings attitudes, practices, assumptions, understandings and so on, which in turn provides certain descriptions from which the classified pupils experience, behave and act. The project argues that the beliefs and practices that pupils classified as intellectually disabled are subjected to in school play a major role in regards to the kind of person it is possible for them to be. When education is organised based on beliefs that intellectual disability refers to pupils that deviate from others, the descriptions available for them to interact with will also be of a deviant kind. On the other hand, if education provides descriptions related to high expectations, ambitions and opportunities for all, the way in which it is possible to be a pupil for children classified as intellectually disabled might thus resemble normalised descriptions similar to those available to their peers. Just as interacting with perspectives that consider intellectually disabled children as different or special might construct barriers relating to normative standards of society, more socially oriented approaches to education might contribute to deconstructing barriers for present and future participation