Browsing by Author "Van Rooyen, Brenda"
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- ItemIn/exclusion and (dis)ability : (de)constructions of Education White Paper 6 : special needs education(Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2002-03) Van Rooyen, Brenda; Newmark, Rona; Le Grange, Lesley; Stellenbosch University. Faculty of Education. Dept. of Educational Psychology.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: White Paper 6: Special Needs Education, released in July 2001, is the response ofthe South African government's Department of Education to the inclusion movement. In this (re)search, I (de)construct this text to explore constitutions of (dis)ability and inlexclusion. I do so because I frame (de)construction as 'an aggressive, political mode of critical analysis that strips conventional and assumed truths down to their logically insubstantial bare bones' (Danforth & Rhodes, 1997: 358). I argue that it is necessary to (de)constructively read government policy that proposes a course or policy of action, particularly if, as poststructuralists state, language constitutes reality. In reading White Paper 6, I (de)construct the functionalist grand narrative as hegemonic: discourses constituted by and constituting this metanarrative, including the medical or special needs discourse, the charity discourse, the systems discourse, the business discourse and the pioneering discourse. The radical humanist grand narrative is also read as dominant, formed by and forming the rights discourse and social justice discourse. The social constructionist discourse, constituting and constituted by the intepretivist grand narrative, is (dejconstructed in White Paper 6 as not reflecting upon the social construction of disability itself, but on social constructions related to (dis)ability and inlexclusion. The objects, agents, action and binaries constituted by each of these discourses are also (de)constructed, as are the voices on the margins. The purpose of my (re)search is not to construct conclusions, but rather to (de)construct the polyphony of voices, truths and realities speaking into and out of White Paper 6. In so doing, the 'indecidability' (Silverman, 1989: 4) of the text is (de)constructed. With the indecidable (de)constructed, '... discourses can no longer dominate, judge, decide: between the positive and negative, the good and the bad, the true and the false' (Derrida, 1992: 86). (Dis)ability and inlexclusion tmths are troubled and the text is opened to different readings.