The “Slow Learner” as a Mediated Construct

Abstract

Seeking to make a contribution to Disability Studies in Education research, this paper opens up for conversation, via descriptive illustrations, how and why our societal, cultural and educational conceptions and perceptions of human capacities and abilities need to attempt to be firmly rooted in everyday relations, in the realm of possibility (Gadamer, 2004),  subject to constant critical inquiry and revision. From an educator perspective, the term/concept “slow learner” is, potentially, one such relation. Establishing the general, ubiquitous nature of the term/concept as it is historically and culturally evident, as it is currently framed by educational psychology via psychometric categorization, and as it is complexly lived within the school system, the authors offer a critical examination of the cacophony of discourses emanating from the disciplines of educational psychology, special education and education, regarding what counts within the enterprises of identifying, classifying,  programming and accommodating for exceptional students in learning institutions. By utilizing the increasingly popular analytic deconstruction and discourse analysis methods for researching special education topics, the authors assert that the term “slow learner”, despite an apparent, recent, solidification of its meaning, is itself as a categorical inheritance that must be challenged as a mediated and mediating cultural, psychological and educational referent and descriptor. This challenging of the term/concept reveals its complicatedness and how the professional and intellectual use of the term remains riddled with hegemonic assumptions and self-fulfilling strangeness and monstrous misinterpretations of who “slow learners” actually are. The authors explore the “slow learner” in public discourse and in popular fictional North American media representations of “slowness” and “slow leaner” in such films as Being There and Forrest Gump and in the novel Lottery reflect and  but also augment its uses in educational discourse. The intent of this inquiry is to invite a conversation between disabilities and special education studies researchers, practitioners and educators to re-theorize mediated depictions of “slow learner”. Specifically, “slow learner” as a concept reminds us that, despite the more inclusive rhetoric of current iterations of educational classification processes, troubling, privileging assumptions may still linger. “Slow Learner” may also suggest that, as with other concepts deficit-based discourses of disability have given us, an important agitation to the unsettling of the power relations of “slow learner” that can be found in critical / novel uses of the phrase itself.