Myth of the Normal Curve

Curt Dudley-Marling was a special education teacher for seven years and also taught third grade. He is currently a professor in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College where he teaches courses on language and literacy. His scholarly interests include the social construction of school failure, classroom discourse, and disability studies.Alex Gurn is a Ph.D. candidate in curriculum and instruction at the Lynch School of Education, Boston College. His professional work experiences include work as a community-based educator, as a language teacher with high school and adult learners, and as an out-of-school time specialist for the Massachusetts Department of Education. His other research interests span the sociology of education, cultural studies, youth literacy practices in and out of educational institutions, and qualitative research methodologies.

• Contents: Curt Dudley-Marling/Alex Gurn: Introduction: Living on the Boundaries of Normal – Curt Dudley-Marling/Alex Gurn: Troubling the Foundations of Special Education: Examining the Myth of the Normal Curve – Deborah Gallagher: Educational Researchers and the Making of Normal People – Brent Davis/Dennis Sumara: Decentralizations and Redistributions: A Complex Reading of Normality – Donaldo Macedo/Teresa Sordé Martí: Situating Labeling within an Ideological Framework – Steven A. Gelb: Evolutionary Anxiety, Monstrosity, and the Birth of Normality – Rebecca Rogers/ Michael Mancini: «Requires Medication to Progress Academically»: The Discursive Pathways of ADHD – Eileen W. Ball/Beth Harry: Assessment and the Policing of the Norm – Arlette Ingram Willis: Miner’s Canaries and Boiling Frogs: Fiction and Facts about Normalcy in Educational and Reading Assessment – Beth Ferri: A Dialogue We’ve Yet to Have: Race and Disability Studies – Felicity A. Crawford/Lilia I. Bartolomé: Labeling and Treating Linguistic Minority Students with Disabilities as Deficient and Outside the Normal Curve: A Pedagogy of Exclusion – Michael Gill: Sex Education and Young Adults with Intellectual Disabilities: Crisis Response, Sexual Diversity, and Pleasure – Jan Valle/Susan Gabel: The Sirens of Normative Mythology: Mother Narratives of Engagement and Resistance – Bernadette Macartney: Living on the Edge of the Normal Curve: «It’s Like a Smack in the Head» – Gerald Campano/Rob Simon: Practitioner Research as Resistance to the «Normal Curve» – Alex Gurn: Conclusion: Re/visioning the Ideological Imagination in (Special) Education.

«In this provocative and illuminating book, a stellar collection of authors critiques ‘the normal curve,’ one of the most enduring (and damaging) myths in American education. This must-read book will prompt readers to rethink their fundamental assumptions about ability and disability.» (Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Cawthorne Professor of Teacher Education for Urban Schools, Lynch School of Education, Boston College)«‘The Myth of the Normal Curve’ provides a much-needed critique of commonly and even scientifically accepted notions of normality. For too long we have supported an ideology of normality without much interrogation of the subject. This book provides that interrogation.» (Lennard J. Davis, Professor of English and Disability Studies, University of Illinois at Chicago)