The idea of No Child Left Behind: Discourse models of law and pedagogy

This dissertation focuses on the intersection of law and pedagogy in special education classrooms as constructed in the discourse of special education teachers. The fitful and sometimes merely symbolic implementation of the prescriptions of school reform laws in individual classroom settings is well known. This dissertation seeks to unpack this phenomenon, not in terms of methods and practices that teachers embrace or reject, but in terms of discourses they espouse and enact, and the assumptions that underlie their constructions of their classroom identities and the classroom activity. This dissertation explores the situated meanings and discourse models found in the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Individuals With Disabilities Education Acts (IDEA), selected portions of the legislative hearings regarding these two acts, and interviews with seven teachers of special education students. It relies on Gee's (1999, 2007) seven building tasks approach to discourse analysis and the literature on subjective education theories and the pedagogy of special education in order to understand and discuss the ways the teachers in this study understood and responded to the standardizing impulses of NCLB within the individualizing context of special education, as constructed by IDEA and their own independent conceptions of appropriate pedagogy.;By so doing, this study hopes to offer new insights into the ways the positioning and construction of teachers, their roles, and identities in a given reform paradigm mediates the extent to which those reforms are embraced, rejected, or hybridized in actual classrooms. It suggests that the dynamic of school reform, like the dynamic of learning, is not the technical transmission and implementation of school reform laws, but rather an in-process and situated construction constantly modified by "the messy dynamics of desire, fantasy, and transgression" (Ellsworth, 1997, p. 43) that individual teachers bring to their work.