Teachers as Diagnosticians: The Perpetual Mutations of the Role of the Teacher

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Friday 11:40 am Four Seasons Ballroom 1
  In Roundtable Session: Kaleidoscopic Inclusion: Shifting Perspectives, Practices, and Teacher Agency (Table 9)

Abstract

This article examines the evolving role of teachers as diagnosticians, tasked with socio-medical assessments of students' bodyminds. I argue that the role of teachers now extends beyond conventional boundaries, categorizing and evaluating students in ways that influence legal, juridical, and medical outcomes. For instance, teachers determine which students meet intellectual benchmarks, which are removed from classrooms, and which are disciplined or ostracized as aberrant/othered. Using a postfoundational critique and crip theory, the article analyzes how these diagnostic practices segregate and shape student identities in power-laden ways. The article challenges entrenched educational norms and critiques the normative roles of teachers' qua diagnostics, revealing how such classifications profoundly impact determinations of livable being, thought, and reality for othered/made-aberrant folks in educational timespaces.

Author

• Brad Bierdz, Georgia Southern University