Disabling language practices: discursive constructions of children in individual education plan resource documents
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: The Individual Education Plan (IEP) and related resource documents shape the lived realities of children in special education programs. Although these documents aim to assist children in achieving their educational goals, a point of disjuncture can exist between the documents’ intentions and the actual experiences of children. Addressing this issue is crucial in order to prevent inequality and to foster educational development and social well being for children. Purpose: This study explores the discursive construction of children in IEP resource documents in order to illuminate the underlying implications of the language comprising these texts. Method: Data was collected by gathering IEP resource documents from the Ontario Ministry of Education website. Discourse analysis was then employed to examine the presence of the equative and attributive models, the passive voice, and the possessive construction. Lastly, disability theory was used to explore how these language practices conceptualize children. Results: The data set included zero instances of the equative model, an infrequent use of the attributive model, and a strong presence of both the passive voice and the possessive construction. These findings contributed to representations of children as exceptional, passive, and subordinate despite an explicit attempt to resist such conceptions. Conclusion: This study serves as a model through which the language practices of other special education documents can be critically evaluated, and offers potential avenues for creating documents that avoid disabling children further.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".