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The polyphonic
classroom:
Are we all special
educators?
David Skidmore
The deviant and the normal
In his thought-provoking discussion, “The Special Educator and the Special
Teacher in co-operation for optimal learning occasions for all students” (Rosenqvist,
2010), Jerry Rosenqvist points out that regular schools have long been in the
business of identifying some students as “special”, i.e. not normal, and notes that
“In order to comprehend what is deviant you have to have an opinion of what is
normal” (Rosenqvist, 2010, p.152). He goes on to invoke the possibility of a far
more flexible model of how learners might be organised into groups than that
which prevails in most schools at present, whether in Sweden or Britain, or for
that matter whether we consider regular or special schools. Whereas most students
spend most of their time in settled classes whose membership remains relatively
constant over the duration of a school year, Rosenqvist invites us to think about
the possibilities that would be open to us if schools instead organised students initially
into much larger groups of, say, 100 in size, under the joint responsibility of
a team of 4-5 teachers. The large group could then be subdivided into smaller subgroups
whose composition might vary according to attainment in a specific area of
the curriculum; for instance, one homogeneous group comprising those students
“in difficulty” with regard to mathematics, and a different homogeneous group at
another time of those “in difficulty” with spelling. Students, however, would only
be organised in homogeneous groups periodically; everyone would also belong to
a more durable “home” group which was heterogeneous in its makeup, and would
SKiDMOre • 35