Friday, November 22nd 9:00 am Pacific STANDARD time
Guest speakers: Alfredo Artiles, Stanford University
Disparities in the identification of children as disabled in ways that interfere with their ability to learn in school is a longstanding problem in the United States. For example, Students of color are typically overrepresented in special education, with Black students being 40% more likely to be identified as having a disability than their white peers. American Indian students are 70% more likely to be identified with a disability than their white peers.
This Coffeehour addresses the equity issues that arise from the inappropriate assignment of a disability label to students with particular identity markers (e.g., race, social class, gender, language) including academic achievement gaps, higher school dropout, discipline inequities, closer association with the juvenile justice system, reduced access to college, limited participation in the job market, and civic engagement.
We are lucky to have Alfredo Artiles, who has devoted his career to erasing the inequities caused by our collective failure to distinguish differences from deficits associated with special education programs to lead our discussion. His Brown lecture is attached to provide us with an introduction to this important topic.
We hope to see you all on Friday, November 22nd.
—mike
Zoom Link: https://zoom.us/j/98564124237
Meeting ID: 985 6412 4237
Passcode: Vygotsky
Check the Zoom Discussion text here.
Zoom Recording:
Reading:
Hello, people. I apologize for taking a somehow digressive direction to such an important talk on disabilities. What I wrote in the Zoom session was merely a reaction to the remarks on biopolitics, which I copy here:
“Integration is very important… I have nothing written/elaborated, only a feeling that brain reductionism is awful, but reductionism of people to ‘bodies’ as I have seen some Foucaultian scholars doing is not so good either…
Just sharing this general impression about biopolitics, which tends to slide to the ‘objective’ pole – in this particular case, ‘body’. It is not Monist for me.”
Although being a Marxist (with a great sympathy for Spinoza), years ago I chain-read Foucault, who has a truly catching manner of raising problems. My love for him ended when I realized, in the Microphysics of power, as well as in Foucault´s followers in general, a number of limitations that many scholars have addressed so far. “The death of man”, the reductionism of politics to fostering the diversity of discourses, the reduction of people to bodies (Taylor or Ford would hardly disagree…) calls for a ontology that lacks an adequate understanding of the mind-body problem as well as of capitalism itself. That said, I still like appreciate of Foucault´s historical works.
Yesterday I heard Adam Tooze lashing out at Gramsci´s quote on the interregnum between the death of the old, and the birth of the new, saying that marxism is dead because there is nothing after our current polycrisis (climate, fascism etc). In other words, we should fasten the seat belts and appreciate the collapse. It was so biased and narrow-minded for an intellectual of his stature that I hardly believed.
Best regards for all, Gisele