Commentary: The Need for More Expansive Frameworks: A Practical Perspective

The intent of this volume was to address the following questions: What is considered acceptable knowledge about learning disabilities? Who decides? Where does knowledge come from? Who uses it and for what purposes? Who benefits? In their article, Artiles et al. (this issue) focus explicitly on the issue of culture and how it has served to impact the field of special education, both in general and specifically in the area of scholarship and research in learning disabilities. The article notes that cultural issues have traditionally received minimal treatment, including in the LD Initiative, which attempted to synthesize knowledge (Bradley & Danielson, 2004) in the area of learning disabilities. Artiles et al. also note how narrowly culture as a construct has been conceptualized. The authors consider three aspects of this problem within the field of learning disabilities scholarship and practice: the ways that cultural factors have been considered in theories of learning and development within the field, the cultural practices that surround the use of research knowledge in practice, and the cultural practices that are embedded in decisions about what should be sanctioned as acceptable knowledge production. The Need for More Expansive Frameworks One of the main arguments of the article is a call for a broader and more nuanced view of culture, a "cultural theory of learning" that allows for an analytical focus larger than the individual in isolation. In this proposal, the authors point to the contributions that research in informal learning might make to such a development. In addition, they consider work from a variety of interdisciplinary perspectives, including social neuroscience psychology, that have begun to tackle these issues with more expansive frameworks. What does this mean for theory related to learning disabilities and special education in general? Certainly it would be ideal were we to have at our disposal frameworks that "integrate attention to biological, cultural, and cognitive frameworks, and that place them in the historical, institutional, and ecological dimensions of human activity." The truth is that currently we do not. As a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Minority Representation in Special Education (National Research Council, 2002), I, like other members of the team, struggled to come up with the comprehensive framework that might help change the longstanding and exclusive focus on individual deficits that had characterized much of special education policy and practice. The compromise was to embrace the now popular Response to Intervention (RtI) approach, thus broadening the unit of analysis beyond the individual student and acknowledging that disability is as much a function of the individual as it is of the social context. Yet, this approach assumed that valid, research-based interventions were available for all populations, which may not be the case, and as Artiles et al. note, the promise seems to have exceeded the reality because of the narrow ways in which RtI is sometimes implemented. Moreover, a recent expert-consensus white paper has argued that this approach is an inadequate way of identifying specific learning disabilities (Hale et al., 2010). Interestingly, the psychometric approach recommended does not consider the historical difficulties that have been encountered with groups of students for whom overrepresentation has been a longstanding problem. Cultural Considerations An interesting paradox related to the uneasy relationship between the constructs of learning disabilities and culture is that the very definition of learning disabilities excludes culture as a causal factor. At the same time, however, the definitional issues related to learning disabilities are most problematic with respect to specific racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups where cultural issues are often the focus. This controversy is most notably evident in the relatively long history of research on the issue of overrepresentation of specific subgroups of the population, specifically Latino and African American students, and especially in the judgmental categories, or those cases in which physical or intellectual impairments are not immediately or easily distinghished. …