ABSTRACT
Teachers seemed to present the greatest challenge to the pupils’ transgressive practices by subjugating their desires beneath professionally expressed ‘needs’. The specialist and mainstream teachers who worked with Raschida, Laura, Susan, Barry and Peter were either unaware of the significance of their strategies or saw them as counter-productive to the support they were offering. Even Raschida and Laura’s mainstream peers commented on their teachers’ insensitivity to the girls’ desire to be ‘treated normally’. Phillip’s teachers and Barry’s auxiliary seemed to be the only people to recognize the value of their transgressions, yet still problematized them as acts which masked their ‘true feelings’ or created negative consequences. This chapter examines the teachers’ readings of the pupils’ practices which, in Chapter 4 were interpreted as transgressive, but for the teachers stood in the way of the support they were trying to offer. Raschida’s practices were read, not as transgressions (successful or otherwise), but as evidence of her failure to accept her impairment and the support they could offer. Laura seemed to receive less criticism because she was more ‘cooperative’ and her teachers also acknowledged her attempts to transgress her disabled identity. Susan’s efforts at cultivating a kind of obligation among her peers were simply indefensible in the eyes of staff, who were seeking to encourage her to be independent. Peter’s claim that he was a ‘spastic’ and his other ‘bizarre’ behaviour were pathologized as arising from low self-esteem and other failings, including those of his parents. The teachers’ readings of the pupils’ transgressive practices, for example, as failures to ‘come to terms’ with or accept what they considered inevitable restrictions imposed by disability, appeared to contradict and threatened to undo some of them. The teachers, however, were responding within a professional discourse which privileged special needs over the desires of individual pupils and these can be understood as part of the multi-layered discourses operating within the classroom.
