The social construction of learning disabilities.

Underpinning the technical gaze that dominates learning disabilities theory and practice is the assumption that learning disabilities are a pathology that resides in the heads of individual students, with the corollary that remedial efforts also focus on what goes on in the heads of students classified as learning disabled. This article begins with a critique of the ideology of individualism that situates individual success and failure in the heads of individuals as a means of introducing an alternative perspective--social constructivism--that locates learning and learning problems in the context of human relations and activity. Extended examples are used to illustrate how the performative aspects of learning disabilities emerge in the context of human relationships.

What learning disability does: sustaining the ideology of schooling.

This article uses discourse theory to determine what kind of relationship learning disabilities have with taken-for-granted assumptions of schooling and the social and political contexts in which schools are situated. The authors argue that learning disabilities, by helping to explain several contradictions and anomalies of schooling, function to sustain dominant assumptions underlying schooling and society. From this perspective, the field of learning disabilities plays a role in maintaining a status quo in which the inequitable distribution of social goods in society is seen as the "natural" consequence of an "equitable" meritocracy.

Locus of control and learning disabilities: a review and discussion.

It has been widely reported that an external locus of control is associated with children who experience failure. A review of the relevant literature indicates that learning disabled children, like other groups of children who have experienced failure, are more likely to exhibit an external locus of control than their normally achieving peers. In particular, learning disabled children have been found to be more likely than normally achieving students to attribute their successes, but not their failures, to external factors.