Browsing by Author "Pulkkinen, Jussi"

The specificity of children's behavior and children considered as special have been raised in school discussions as the cause of deteriorating learning outcomes, causing problems with teachers' time use and preventing teaching of the so called majority of children in primary school. Naming a child special affects the way and place of his/her teaching and therefore it is necessary to look at the definitions and discourses of special behavior. The purpose of the thesis was to find out how the behavioral problems and a child with a behavioral disorder named in many ways is constructed in expert articles and to examine the specificity of behavior using the social disability model of disability research. Sahlin's cultural model was used as a way to study the change in the discipline of special education together with changes outlined through paradigms. The study highlights the discourses special pedagogy experts have built on the specificity behavior of a child in the book series “Childrens’ Special Care and Education in Finland” over seven decades. These discourses are considered in the context of changes in special education and paradigms of special education. Critical discourse analysis was used as a research and analysis method in the study. The material of the study consisted of the texts of the thirteen editions of the book “Childrens’ Special Care and Education in Finland”, dealing with behavioural disorders. The textual material was analyzed by thematizing the medical, disability or feature related definitions of these texts, as well as the definitions of the social construction and creation of specificity according to the theoretical background of the research. After the thematizing, the selected text samples were analyzed for how the causes of specificity are localized and what is the child's position in them, and the discourses formed by these were named. These discourses were also examined in the context of changes in special education and the paradigms of special education. The research showed a hegemonic discourse based on psycho-medical interpretation, which at different times defined the child's position as a victim of the child's psychological and biological structure and as achild who is not mentally adaptive. Parallel and intertwined discourses were also built on a hegemonic discourse. The discourses of the specificity of behavior in the material reflected changes in the paradigms of special education and special pedagogy and the cultural reproduction of the category of specificity. According to the study, the discourse based on psycho- medical interpretation is the hegemonic discourse of the “Special Care and Education of the Child in Finland” book series, in which the child’s position is a child with internal pathology. The discourses of the material and the child's positions reflect changes in special education and in the paradigms of special education, as well as the cultural structure of the discipline.