Between national idiosyncrasies and global grammar. An historical international comparison of special needs assessments

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Michaela Vogt
• Subject Area: General Education and History of Education ; Education Systems and Educational Institutions
• Term: since 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 382494855

From a historical as well as current viewpoint, Special Needs Assessment Procedures can be considered strictly formalized and at the same time (by the educational administration) legitimized processes of inclusion/exclusion from regular schooling. As such, Special Needs Assessment Procedures should be considered an enormous epistemic opportunity to focus on a crucial educational passage point which can – especially from the internationally comparative as well as diachronically comparative perspective – shed light on specific socio-cultural context in relation to the realization and development of specific Special Needs Assessment Procedure. Therefore, this project dedicates itself to the thematic continuation and extension of its predecessor by presenting innovative perspectives on Special Needs Assessment Procedures in the FRG and GDR as well as its counterparts in Canada and Italy. The timespan which this project will cover ranges from the years after WWII until the end of the 1980s. The project’s source material consists of archival sources which not only illustrate the procedures in the specific geographies but also describe the processes of their coming-into-being. Regarding sources, the project can benefit from its predecessor’s archival findings (from Görlitz and Frankfurt) which have not yet been fully analyzed. In these sources, the procedures, the employed diagnostic tools, and the final decision have been noted. The collected archival data will be worked in twofold fashion: Firstly, it will be analyzed by applying content-analysis and construct-analysis – both address the expert’s observation as verbalized in the archived forms. Secondly, the conditions and contexts influencing the assessment will be accessed by reconstructing key discourse elements of the time. Such an analysis, reconstruction, and contextualization will be conducted with reference to approaches from comparative educational science but also with larger theoretical ambitions in mind. Ultimately, the project aims at a systematized comparison which contributes to all levels prior outlined. Therefore, the project uses its predecessor’s results as an anchor point and will try to open up new perspectives as well as enhancements. As an overarching question, the project tries to identify – firstly for the FRG and GDR – transcending commonalities within assessments but also (national) idiosyncrasies. This identification process will be continued for Italy and Canada with special focus on to the function, realization, and institutional embeddedness of such assessment procedures. In the end, this study aims at presenting – backed up by empirical data – recurrent patterns within international versions of assessment procedures. By doing so, the project contributes to a potential Grammar of Special Needs Assessment, arguably the least common denominator of potentially excluding assessment procedures conducted in the educational context.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada, Italy
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. John Allison; Professorin Dr. Simonetta Polenghi