“If You’ve Seen the Tool, It Seems Like Everything Is ‘At-Risk’”: Leadership Discourses of Medicalization and Control for Inclusion

• In Event: Roundtable Session 10
  In Roundtable Session: Leadership for Social Justice Roundtable on Leadership Discourse and Inclusion

Abstract

This qualitative study follows nineteen inclusive leaders who effect a shift from disciplinary to therapeutic methods when dealing with students showing disorderly behavior. Since leaders set the terms of discussion and policy, this is a discourse study of that effort. Response to Intervention and Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports are the fundamental tools they apply. In practice, the data-driven practices and requirements of RTI/PBIS reify a medicalized discourse, squeezing out other possible social justice discourses such as institutional racism, classism, and homophobia that could explain students’ unwanted behavior. This study affirms the need for culturally responsive RTI/PBIS, and highlights the need to disrupt disciplinary and medical discourses that constitute students as either unruly or ill.

Author

• Joshua Bornstein, Syracuse City School District