Abnormal-Becoming-Normal: Conceptualizations of Childhood Disability in Children’s Rehabilitation Textbooks
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Despite advancements to theory and practice, children’s rehabilitation is dominated by taken-for-granted assumptions about disability and childhood. In order to address a pressing need for scholarship in this area, this paper draws on post-structuralism, critical disability studies, and disabled children’s childhood studies to interrogate the underlying logics and central assumptions of eight North American children’s rehabilitation textbooks. Using discourse analysis, we highlight how the discourse of normal/abnormal is pervasive and underpins the understandings and logics deployed throughout the texts. We argue that the texts construct disabled children as abnormal-becoming-normal, and thus reinforce a moral imperative whereby disabled children are understood as requiring motivation and self-efficacy to lead a ‘good’/normal life. In drawing on these reductive understandings, children’s rehabilitation relies on a disempowering conception of disabled children as lacking, and thus fails to acknowledge and appreciate the many ways in which disabled children can be and become.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.044 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".