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Schooling Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorders: Educational Systems of Formation and the “Behaviourally Disordered” School Child

Linda Graham    

This doctoral study examines the role of the school in the recognition, classification, diagnosis and treatment of children with "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder". Instead of a traditional linear argument, this thesis by publication follows a cartographical route - instead of traditional thesis chapters, there are seven scholarly journal articles. Whilst related, these papers each concentrate on different threads of the problem we call "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder". Connected by short linking summaries, they constitute a cartographic survey utilising Foucault's (1972; 1977) notion of a discursive/technological grid to examine "ADHD" as a discursive formation and schooling as a system of formation of "disorderly" objects.

Transcript

Interviewer: I’d like to welcome Linda Graham, welcome Linda

Linda Graham: Hello thank you

Interviewer: Linda can you please share with us what your Research is about?

Linda Graham: Well I suppose the topic would be ADHD or Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and schooling and the relationship between the discourses and practices of schooling and the increase in the diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder.

Interviewer: And what were you looking at with your project more specifically?

Linda Graham: Well it became fairly apparent to me, I mean during the 1990s I didn’t really know very much about ADHD but it became fairly obvious to me in media reports of everything that people hear about it that…..and all the questions of causality and why we might have this sort of /?/ rise in prescription of medication and diagnosis and you know in children that for example they were discussing bad food and bad video games and you know bad parents and like lack of discipline and basically bad food equals bad parents because parents are allowing their children to eat food that is full of additives and all that sort of thing and there seemed to be so many I guess ideas about why it was that so many children are becoming diagnosed with this kind of new and controversial disorder and it became apparent to me that the one kind of gap or a very conspicuous absence was the role of the school itself and the complicity of the educational institution.

And so what I wanted to do in my research was basically have a look at how the school and teaching practices and things that we say and do in the name of schooling, how that might be contributing to the diagnosis of ADHD in particularly young children and so I started my research 3 years ago and I used the work of a French philosopher Michel Foucault basically to set up a conceptual framework and a way of I guess approaching the research and I conducted what’s called a genealogy but there’s lots of different opinions as to what that is but the one that I prefer is that you basically it’s kind of archival research and you establish a corpus of material and so in my case that came from stories from popular media, print, radio and all the rest of it, scholarly journal articles that came from all different fields medicine, psychology, social work, education literature and economics and then there was also educational departmental literature so and I focused on Queensland so I used Department Policies from Education Queensland, particularly their inclusive education resourcing mechanisms and what that is……is the I guess distribution policies that educational departments use to distribute funding between you know students with special needs and then finally I used the identified school records from an alternative site placement centre in Brisbane.

And all together these masses and masses of documents kind of formed an archive of material and a genealogy is a kind of……basically a process of reading……..close reading and what you’re looking for in these documents is not so much any kind of definitive truth or something like that but what is singular and unusual in those documents and along that process what I’ve managed to do was to I guess identify dominant……..what we’d call dominant discourses in post structural research and that’s pretty simple to do because when you’ve got a corpus of material and some things get repeated over and over and over in those documents, I mean one that I didn’t choose but I suppose I could have was the notion of risk and safety and those were repeated over and over in different documents.  The ones that I did choose because you know you have to place

Interviewer: Yes what did you look up?

Linda Graham: Well particularly there were three kind of main discursive threads that I followed, first one were the discourses of inclusion, second was the discourses of education reform and as you can imagine that would be a pretty powerful one and then the third one was the little things said about kids in schools and I wanted to basically because I was doing a PhD by publication, mine has been different to I suppose a lot of other PhD……or at least the thesis is different because what I’ve ended up doing is each paper is kind of an interpretive exploration and so each paper I guess finds points of rupture in that archival data and follows that and they do link, there’s in the QUT Faculty of Education criteria, they stipulate that there should be 5 published papers in a thesis by publication, mine has got 7 so the introduction and conclusion are also in the form of journal articles and so basically in these…….what you have to do is when you’re publishing these papers, it’s not just a matter of getting papers published and that’s hard enough in itself but what you have to do is make sure that they tie together and that there’s a coherent research narrative so that in the end when you put them together and have linking bits and all the rest of it, that it actually functions as a thesis and it’s not just you know 5…….7 desperate papers so what mine did…….sorry go on

Interviewer: So what did you learn from your Research, just very broadly if you can try and summarise?

Linda Graham: You know what I think the…….probably the most important…..I mean…okay what I set out to find out I suppose was whether the school was implicated in that rise……...yes it is……but you know in the end I don’t think that’s the most important thing that I’ve learned, I think and this possibly the most controversial and somebody might follow me down the street and shoot me one night but I think the most important result…….or conclusion if you could call it that is that the current way of seeing difference and in particular the difference that comes to be called Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is not good enough and it doesn’t work well for kids who can be described in those ways and I think the most important thing that this research shows is that the ADHD construct and whether you’re talking about the medical or the psychological construct, what it actually does is service a political mechanism and I call it an escape goat and the reason I do is because schools and teachers and systems of schooling can effectively blame these kids for their own failure, they can use the construct as a means to shut certain kids out of getting support……learning support because in actual fact children who can diagnosed or described as having it even if they’re just suspected of having ADHD, those children don’t actually qualify for serious learning support so what ends up I mean there’s in Queensland there’s 6 categories of disability and those are the ones that are eligible for support outside of school based services so for example a child if they need teacher aide time, they don’t get it unless they can be diagnosed as having a speech language impairment or autistic spectrum disorder or physical impairment and on it goes.

Children with the characteristics that come to be described as ADHD they don’t……..they’re ineligible and so what ends up happening to these children is I mean if they’re lucky and if the school has got enough resources, then these kids will get some form, they might get some support from a learning support teacher but if that school is stressed in terms of they’ve got lots of kids with say dyslexia and learning disabilities and difficulties that have been diagnosed, you see they’ve got a system of priority

Interviewer: Right

Linda Graham: So what ends up happening is the child whose difficulties in learning can be put down to lack of automaticity, impulsivity, hyperactivity or distractibility, they end up becoming seen in a particular way and what that does is it gives the school a loop hole with which to say well this is not our problem, there is something wrong with that child and too often the approach or the response to those kids is to say to Mum and Dad take them to a paediatrician and get their hyperactivity distractibility and impulsivity checked out, there’s also an awful lot of parents who have been complaining lately in the media that the school has either told them that if they don’t medicate their children, then they can’t come to the school they’ll be expelled or there’s children who have been diagnosed with ADHD and the school is pressuring the parents to get them re-diagnosed with ASD so that the school can get funding to support them which I mean that’s not such a bad thing in that what it does demonstrate is that the school is trying to help the child and possibly themselves but I mean there is I suppose an effort out there to try and get the learning support that the child actually needs but the biggest problem I suppose is that systems of education use certain categories of support and what those do is they create boxes and those boxes conserve to place limit on who can lay claim to resources.

Interviewer: And you probably have actually already answered this question but just for the purposes of the recording, what are the implications of your findings, what conclusions can you draw from what you were looking at with your research?

Linda Graham: I think the conclusions that I would draw is that schools and systems are professing to be inclusive but they’re engaging in practices that are anything but and by far the biggest problem that we’ve got is that we have governments that are trying to run schooling under economic rationalist conditions and I don’t think that it’s any mere coincidence that over the last sort of 15 odd years ADHD has become part of our common lexicon but at the same time we’ve had economic rationalist policies in Australia which is ripping money and funding out of public services such as health and schooling and education, so what you end up is teachers are being forced to plug the gap in the middle and unfortunately they’re being forced to look for where they can get funding, any kind of funding…….I mean there’s like a fraying fabric in the middle and you’ve got teachers trying to stitch that together by yeah I guess playing, there’s a funding play off going on which is if we can get kids diagnosed with something that you know that….can be helpful in terms of bringing funding into the school than great let’s do that which also might explain why the diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome is coming up in Queensland.  But also if they can’t get funding for particular children, say for example that child’s difficulties in speech and language are not severe enough, they couldn’t possibly fit a diagnosis of ASD, than what are teachers going to do, they can’t get support for that child, they can’t get teacher aide time, meanwhile research by Barry Fields at USQ has shown that and also internationally has shown that teachers feel most ill equipped to teach these kinds of children inclusively and teachers are actually…….quite a lot of studies have shown that teachers are actually quite hostile to the inclusion of children with any kind of behavioural problems, they’re much happier about including children that are of hearing impairment for example and one of the reasons is because a child that needs constant redirection and all the rest of it is a drain on the teacher, let’s not kid around, some of these children have severe………yeah they do things in class that would drive most people grey and I’m not denying…..in my research I have not denied the existence of children who are fidgety and distractible and hyperactive and all those other things but what I have tried to do in my research is say okay so the difference exists, is what we’re doing is the approach and the response to these children the best that we can do and quite frankly what I found is particularly in the educational context, no it’s not because what you end up having is either the lucky ones getting support and the unlucky ones getting often behaviour management that is exclusionary and repressive or medicated up to the eyeballs and that’s not good for anybody really so yeah so I suppose I mean the future directions for my work is what I want to do is a national comparative analysis of the different resulting mechanisms used in…..by state by state because what I have found is say for example Western Australia they have quite an expansive category system, they’ve got 8 different categories and Queensland has got 6, New South Wales has got 5, what I want to try and do is have a look at those different mechanisms and I guess different system responses to a difference in schools and try and get an understanding of which is the most inclusive and which works the best in schools and yeah what is best for these kids.

Interviewer: Okay

Linda Graham: Did any of that make any sense?

Interviewer: That was great, that was great

Linda Graham: I think I went around and around

Interviewer:    I was trying to be wary of the time because I think I’ve got someone coming up but thank you very much for your time and thank you for sharing your research with us

Linda Graham: You’re welcome

Interviewer: Thank you.