Abstracts - Earli

lended-learning module is a four-step model. It is examined if and how it is possible to improveintercultural competence by going through four steps of developing intercultural competence: 1.intercultural confrontation, 2. intercultural experience, 3. intercultural learning and 4. interculturalunderstanding.Contests over the meaning of special students in the USHugh Mehan, UCSD, La Jolla, CA, USAWhat do schools do with children who are difficult to teach or who are troublesome to manage?Such students, no doubt, have always been present in our schools. Yet the way we talk aboutstudents, and hence the way we act toward them, has changed significantly from the beginnings ofthe US to the present time. The history of special education has been a contest over therepresentation of students who are difficult to teach. A moral discourse in which students’educational difficulties were seen as sinful behavior dominated early Colonial times in the US.When waves of immigrants–especially those from Eastern European and Catholic countries, shiftsin populations from the country side to the city, and urbanization transformed the US into anindustrial nation, students’ educational difficulties were accounted for in a new way. Faultysocialization and bad mothering on the part of new immigrants was blamed for students’difficulties in school. In the 20th Century, the development of psychometric measures coupledwith a demand for greater educational efficiency, generated a psycho-medical discourse in whichthe source of school difficulty was placed within children’s brains–rather than their soul or heart.Despite this shift, the source of school difficulty remained beneath students’ skin and betweentheir ears. A social discourse, in which school difficulties are attributed to environmental, cultural,socio-economic or familial factors has competed with the psycho-medical discourse in whichschool difficulties are attributed to genetic or organic causes. After years of contestation, thepsycho-medical discourse has dominated, beating back a variety of social explanation for students’school difficulties–for reasons I will explore in the paper.Transforming teachers’ construction of student diversity through Collective ArgumentationRaymond Brown, Griffith University, AustraliaPeter Renshaw, school of Education, University of Queensland, AustraliaResearch on student diversity typically frames it as an individual trait, or capability. Rogoff &Guttierez (2003) contrasted this "trait" approach to diversity with the sociocultural approach thattreats diversity as situated and produced in social and institutional practices. Empirical studies ofteachers’ understanding of diversity (Paine, 1989; Achinstein & Barrett, 2004) have identified fourframes that teachers have typically deployed to categorise students: an individual differencesorientation, a categorical orientation based on considerations of social categories such as genderclass and race, a contextual orientation that locates patterns of difference between students at theintersection of psychological, biological and contextual influences; and a pedagogical perspective.In this paper, we suggest that these orientations are inadequate because they fail to consider theway institutional practices and everyday interaction patterns in schools actually produce andconstruct differences between students. To capture this dynamic process, we tracked across a oneyearperiod a group of eight teachers who were part of a "teaching experiment" on CollectiveArgumentation which promotes a more participatory and dialogical process of classroominteraction. We focussed on how teachers’ perceptions of students were changing as their ownpedagogy changed. Each teacher was interviewed about their students whilst watching a videotapedepisode from his/her classroom. We were interested in their accounts of how particularstudents had changed during the year and what categories and labels they deployed to describe– 228 –