As produções acadêmicas em educação especial: uma análise de discurso

Abstract

This research focuses on conducting an analysis of academic productions in the area of Special Education, considering the discourse on disability, the relation between Special Education and Regular Education and inclusive education. Based on studies by Pessotti (1984), Fonseca (1995), C. Marques (1994, 2001), I was able to identify three different ideological formations, namely exclusion, integration and inclusion, which allow us to discover the positions taken by such discourses regarding people with disabilities. As a methodological resource, I used the discourse analysis under the French perspective. Ten dissertations make up the corpus discursivo of this research which approaches issues related to Special Education, produced in 2001, in the different Post-Graduate Programs in Education and Special Education in Brazilian Federal Universities, listed in the Banco de Teses da Fundação Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (Theses Base List of the Foundation for Coordination of Higher Education Personnel Improvement). The concept of disability between authors is predeterministic, since they adopt a clinical discourse, with some authors showing a shift towards an interactionistic approach. Education for people with disabilities is treated by the authors in a dichotomized manner in Special Education and Regular Education, although in their approach they claim that the former is part of the latter. The authors approach inclusion-related issues from the point of view of a break with exclusion and integration paradigms, considering that inclusion must extend to all social areas as everyone’s entitled right. Although these ideas are present in the authors’ discourses, contradictorily as to the school inclusion of the disabled, some of them defend isolation of the individuals with disabilities, or propose that, before inserting children with disabilities into a regular school teaching, they should be assessed by the degree of compromise they have, thereby deciding on those who can and those who cannot attend regular school. When analyzing the proposed issues we can see that the authors defend the integration paradigm, where their signs of giving visibility to those issues related to disability are most explicit. However, they sometimes still take an exclusivistic position and at other times point to an inclusivistic discourse towards which they still have not moved because they are part of the same society that does not consider the inclusion paradigm as the basis for all its social and educational practices.