Deficit Perspective Research Articles

Strength-Based Approach to Support Children with Asd

Because of the influence of traditional deficit mode, most people only view autism spectrum disorder from the perspective of defects. In practice, it also focuses on dealing with defects, such as poor performance, social emotional difficulties and so on. The long-term focus on defects will lead to negative labels, which have limited effect on solving the growing plight of ASD children. This thesis compares how to treat ASD from the traditional deficit perspective and the Strength-based perspective, and discusses the theoretical basis of the strength-based approach to demonstrates the rationality of the strength-based approach, and analyzes the Chinese background. Hope to guide more attention to the strengths of ASD children in future practice.

Building Allies and Sharing Best Practices: Cultural Perspectives of Deaf People and ASL Can Benefit All

Societal views of Deaf people typically stem from a medical or deficit perspective, which then informs educational practices. In contrast, educational settings that embrace a cultural perspective provide visual language and strategies that can benefit all students. This article will address three common myths about American Sign Language (ASL) and Deaf people and share research-supported pedagogical practices and recommendations on how to be an ally on behalf of Deaf people.

‘Siento que el inglés esta tumbando mi español’: A transfronteriza child’s embodied critical language awareness

ABSTRACT For many minoritized communities, sustaining or at least holding on to their home language and cultural identity has been a constant uphill battle. Nevertheless, Latina/o/x who speak Spanish, for example, have demonstrated to be linguistically and culturally resilient against hegemonic societal, institutional, political, and monolithic national ideologies. This article explores a single case study of a Latina transfronteriza child’s embodied critical language awareness. Merging Critical Language Awareness and Chicana Feminist Theory, the findings demonstrate how a Latina child makes sense of linguistic hierarchies, language loss, and how she challenges deficit perspectives imposed on her home language by relying on her senses and feelings. The article concludes by offering ways to understand and support critical language awareness with Latina/o/x students that stems from knowledge rooted in the brown body and their lived experience.

Crossing Borders in Initial Teacher Education: Supporting Translations in the Inner-City Practicum

Research examining teacher candidates’ preparation to teach in high-poverty, urban contexts marked by diversities and inequalities, throughout North America and internationally, is predominantly focused on examining and changing problematic attitudes based in white normativity and privilege. While this is extremely important, there has been a noted absence of research that supports translations of critical ideas from coursework into the practicum experience. In this article we share a case-study of eight teacher candidates supported by a practicum team approach designed to support these translations into the inner-city teaching practicum. The study is designed and analyzed through decolonial, settler-colonial, critical, and Indigenous theories and philosophies. The authors found common deficit perspectives in the practicum site, but that a relational focus across university and school contexts supported the translation of critical ideas into practice. This study recommends a more explicit engagement with settler colonialism and white privilege within both the practicum and coursework.

From Isolation to Interaction: A Social Network Perspective on Older Teachers’ Position in School Organizations and Age-Related HR Practices

Abstract Since workforce is greying, increasing pressure has been put on many sectors, including the public sector, to raise legal retirement age. Nevertheless, older workers, and specifically teachers, usually retire much earlier. In the organizational and educational literature, most studies regarding later career have been applying a deficit perspective: reporting on senior teachers’ challenges and difficulties. Only a limited amount of studies considers senior teachers’ potentials, learning, and further career development. In this present article, we approach late-career teachers from a non-deficit perspective. This article aims to contribute to a better understanding of senior teachers at work, by analyzing HR practices that target them. Inspired by a strengths use perspective, we focus on end-of-career teachers’ knowledge and expertise exchange and their position within the school’s network. In particular, we conducted a comparative mixed-methods case study (interviews, social network analysis) in 2 secondary schools with a sample of 10 end-of-career teachers, 4 younger teachers, and 2 principals. The results illustrate that older teachers hold central positions in their workplace and have, in accordance with the socio-emotional selectivity theory, limited but strong bounds with colleagues. Moreover, school principals in both schools seem to benefit from older teachers’ organizational knowledge by involving them in decision-making processes. Nevertheless, results show that the principals in the 2 schools mainly apply remedial measures to deal with changes due to aging. This paper ends with some implications for school principals: Applying a non-deficit developmental approach is key for sustainable HR management in schools across the lifespan.

Chasing Down the Educational Debt by Centering Race in Educational Supervision

Educational professional development is ubiquitous; yet the gains on student learning are minimal as measured by local, state, and federal assessment measures. Although there is widespread agreement that assessment data alone does not tell the story of what students are learning and teachers are teaching, the data is still alarming. Why is there a gap between the billions of dollars spent on professional learning and student learning outcomes? In this article, the author seeks to shed light on this disconnect, offering a framework that links deficit perspectives of Black, Brown, and Indigenous students and opportunity gaps associated with inept monitoring of instructional practices contributing to the educational debt in America (Ladson-Billings, 2006).

Controversies and Possibilities of Teaching and Learning EIL Approach: A Case Study in Indonesia

This study investigated the potentials and obstacles to learn and teach English as an international language (EIL) approach in one of senior high schools, in Tebing Tinggi. Indonesia. EIL is embracing the language variations among nations included native and nonnative English language. In our increasingly diverse communities, this approach is a talkback to the monolingual focus in ELT pedagogy and pay much attention to multilingual in the local and global communities and also situated English language education in global/local multilingualism. There were 6 English teachers and two classes (grade 1 and grade 2 which were approximately 60 students) in senior high school were interviewed designed to gain an understanding of both English teachers and students’ perspectives on English as international language (EIL) to get deep information about their tensions, conflicts, struggle, and challenges EIL teachers and students may experience before and after teaching and learning of EIL approach in five meetings. From this result, we could see there were some fertilities and infertilities that we got from implementing and acknowledging this approach. The fertilities that we cultivated were the students learned these topics as knowledge, embracing bright future of learning English, getting to know foreigners and countries, good experience with international friends, learn about their own country (transforming, reflecting themselves as Indonesia, proud to be Indonesia), well understanding the function of English, and fulfil the students’ needs. The other side, the infertilities of implementing EIL approach were they had deficit perspective toward themselves; they did not know about Englishes since it was never taught by their English teachers, bad environment from their community, their preferences and saw Englishes as an error and wrong perception about Englishes, and facilitation and resources as well. From the teachers’ perspective, there were also controversial and possibilities of teaching EIL in this school. They welcomed to the nature of English and getting to know EIL approach, well understanding of English as a tool for students’ future, and willing to pursue English teaching effectively. But, they concerned to the students’ problems, teaching beliefs, preferences, lack of understanding of English variation diversity, curriculum and textbooks. Those problems made them afraid to make any risk, little faith to apply EIL, and created two different worlds of English standard and nonstandard English. By seeing those results bear fruitful pedagogical implications for learning and teaching English, they are meta-awareness; broaden exposure of English learning and teaching, and open English pedagogy.

Librarians’ Perceptions of the Challenges for Researchers in Rwanda and the Potential of Open Scholarship

Abstract Open scholarship is a major reform movement within research. This paper seeks to understand how open scholarship might address the challenges faced by research in Africa, through a study based on a participatory collaborative workshop to create a partnership with librarians in Rwanda. The literature review identifies three broad perspectives on the apparent under-performance of Rwandan research: one locating the issue in the unequal scholarly communications system, a second pointing to a country deficit and a third blaming cognitive injustices. The Rwandan librarians see researchers as challenged through the pressures on them to publish, the costs of research, poor infrastructure, lack of skills and limited access to literature. Collectively these challenges constitute a critical barrier to research. These limits fit largely the country deficit perspective. Open scholarship as conceived in the Global North is only a small part of the answer to the challenges faced by Rwandan scholars. To promote equity, notions of open scholarship need to take into account the conditions under which research is conducted in less privileged contexts such as Rwanda.

Disrupting the Narrative on Recruiting Graduate Students of Color in Counselor Education

The voices of students of color are largely absent in the literature on graduate student recruitment in counselor education. The existing literature focuses on university personnel and can portray a deficit perspective of students of color. Using grounded theory and a critical race theory framework, we sought to develop a theory that described the motivations of graduate students of color for pursuing counselor education. We interviewed 19 graduate students of color and used a constant comparative method to understand their motivations for and supports utilized in pursuing counselor training. Grounded in our participants’ counternarratives, we identified a theory to describe their drive to serve marginalized communities, to attend programs committed to diversity, and the supports they received in applying to graduate school. Based on this theory we provide implications for how counselor education programs can demonstrate a commitment to diversity and support graduate students of color through the application process.

“How Can I Uproot the System?”: Justice-Oriented Outcomes From Community-Based Research in Schools

This paper is based on a qualitative case study designed to answer the following research question: “What learning about justice resulted from this collaboratively created service-learning class driven by a community-based research pedagogy?” It demonstrates how researching alongside primary stakeholders in Title I schools produced justice-oriented learning outcomes for students. Specifically, the course helped students better understand the value of diversity, their own deficit perspectives, systemic inequality, and the university’s responsibility to the surrounding community. The course also fostered in students the ability to distinguish paternalistic models of service from empowering models of service, the ability to identify unjust policies, a desire for advocacy, and an openness to working in Title I schools. One author of this paper is a service-learning professional, and the other is a faculty member who instructed this course.

Health, Wellness, and History: Enhancing Self-Perceptions for Black Students through Revolutionary Approaches to Education

24 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 2 84 No.2 HEALTH, WELLNESS, AND HISTORY: ENHANCING SELFPERCEPTIONS FOR BLACK STUDENTS THROUGH REVOLUTIONARY APPROACHES TO EDUCATION By Erin Lewis and Annette Teasdell Harmful and inequitable curricular and pedagogical practices in US schools are detrimental to Black students.1 School discipline disproportionality, low expectations, and deficit perspectives of Black students and their achievement often lead to school-based trauma and psychological distress.2 Subsequently, discussions regarding school-related mental health issues in the Black community have increased. There has also been a growing body of research on the socioemotional well-being of Black students in regard to racial trauma and other adverse experiences related to school and home life.3 In light of these developments, this article applies the theoretical framework of critical race structuralism (CRS) as it investigates schooling experiences and overall health and wellness among African Americans. Specifically, CRS analyzes racial and ethnic relations in social and institutional systems in terms of the intersections of race, culture, gender, and social structures.4 As such, this article addresses the following research question: How can revolutionary approaches to teaching history and social studies foster positive self-concept and enhance self-efficacy among Black students? In the context of this paper, revolutionary pedagogy (RP) is defined as a “philosophy of education that seeks to overturn ordinary thinking, methods, and practices of creating and delivering knowledge to children by employing Africological, Kemetological, and rhetorical techniques to reset the instructional focus for children .”5 RP advocates for teaching as a tool to nurture positive school identities and encouraging emancipation from oppression through critical consciousness. In the context of CRS and RP, self-concept and self-efficacy among Black students are directly related to wellness. Self-Concept, Self-Efficacy, and Wellness Self-concept can be defined as the way a person sees themselves, which influences their behavior, cognition, and mental health.6 Relatedly, self-efficacy refers to a person’s belief in their ability to navigate various situations while completing a course of action.7 Self-efficacy also impacts the way people think and how they are motivated. Self-concept and self-efficacy are crucial to human development, and they shape thoughts, actions, and emotions, which impact school achievement and engagement. These aspects of a person’s self-concept have broad implications for overall health and wellness, which generally refers to the well-being of the entire person (mental, physical, emotional, etc.).8 As such, health and wellness have been integrated into educational practices to nurture positive development of adolescents, as socialemotional learning is linked to improved academic and life outcomes.9 Self-concept, self-efficacy, and school identity are elements of overall health and wellness that schools must nurture to foster students’ growth and development. In consideration of the COVID-19 pandemic and in light of CRS, it is imperative to address health and wellness among African American students, who are generally underserved by public schools. Deficit Narratives and Black Students’ Identities Deficit perspectives of African Americans, which are proliferated in the US and generally around the world, have devastating effects on school-aged youth.10 Although most BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 2 | 25 84 No.2 Black students are particularly resilient, schools can become enriching places of care.11 While supporting positive identities and mediating underachievement, culturally responsive teaching and anti-racist curricula can help disrupt the harmful effects of miseducation and curriculum violence, meaning the deliberate manipulation of educational content that compromises the intellectual and psychological well-being of learners.12 In terms of CRS, curriculum and lesson planning that supports positive self-knowledge and self-concept can nurture qualities that are needed to persist in schools and society .13 Revolutionary Approaches to History and Social Studies In this sense, by helping Black students excel academically and personally, revolutionary approaches to history and social studies courses foster positive self-concept and self-efficacy. These revolutionary approaches include teaching strategies that center students while supporting the following tenets: 1) human beings originated in Africa; 2) all humans migrated to other parts of the world from Africa; and 3) Africans made significant contributions to and in some cases were pioneers of geometry, medicine...

Narrative Inquiry into Chinese International Doctoral Students’ Journey: A Strength-Based Perspective

Aim/Purpose: This narrative inquiry study uses a strength-based approach to study the cross-cultural socialization journey of Chinese international doctoral students at a U.S. Land Grant university. Historically, we thought of socialization as an institutional or group-defined process, but “journey” taps into a rich narrative tradition about individuals, how they relate to others, and the identities that they carry and develop. Background: To date, research has employed a deficit perspective to study how Chinese students must adapt to their new environment. Instead, my original contribution is using narrative inquiry study to explore cross-cultural socialization and mentoring practices that are consonant with the cultural capital that Chinese international doctoral students bring with them. Methodology: This qualitative research uses narrative inquiry to capture and understand the experiences of three Chinese international doctoral students at a Land Grant institute in the U.S. Contribution: This study will be especially important for administrators and faculty striving to create more diverse, supportive, and inclusive academic environments to enhance Chinese international doctoral students’ experiences in the U.S. Moreover, this study fills a gap in existing research by using a strength-based lens to provide valuable practical insights for researchers, practitioners, and policymakers to support the unique cross-cultural socialization of Chinese international doctoral students. Findings: Using multiple conversational interviews, artifacts, and vignettes, the study sought to understand the doctoral experience of Chinese international students’ experience at an American Land Grant University. The findings suggest that Chinese international doctoral students use cultural capital (aspirational, linguistic, familial, social, navigational, and resistance) as leverage in this cross-cultural socialization process. Recommendations for Practitioners: The findings from this study offer insights for practitioners into what institutions and departments might do to support Chinese international doctoral students in their socialization journey. It is vital to support the whole student through understanding their different forms of capital. Recommendation for Researchers: Future researchers may want to further explore how students experience this process. An important question for future researchers to consider is: do Chinese international doctoral students benefit from multilingual discourse with their peers and from a multi-lingual command of the literature? Also, does the ability to read scholarly publications in both Chinese and English bridge a gap and strengthen professional identity development? Impact on Society: Significant impact on society includes improved opportunities for cross-cultural learning, international partnerships, and support for positive socialization experiences where diverse students may use their cultural capital as strengths and express new ideas. Moreover, there is also an economic benefit for the institutions and communities that rely on international students’ economic contributions. Future Research: Future research may want to explore how students perceive and experience multilingualism as a benefit in their education; for example, does the ability to read scholarly publications in both Chinese and English bridge a gap and strengthen professional identity development?

Funds of Identity and Education: The Journey of a Latina Educator from Linguistic Erasure to Linguistic Empowerment

This study had three aims: to present a case study and explain the funds of identity of a Latina educator; to use this as an opportunity to connect heritage language to ideological clarity and humanizing pedagogies in educator preparation programs; and to illustrate how pedagogy and language education can include transformational and healing elements when educators are engaged in culturally and linguistically affirming professional development. By understanding ourselves as teachers in relation to the communities in which we teach, we are able to develop ideological clarity and reject deficit perspectives that serve to erase non-English languages spoken at home in order to effectively serve and advocate for our multilingual, emerging bilingual and heritage language students. This case study of one Latina’s journey to linguistic empowerment may serve as an example of how future teachers can transform their own experiences of language loss into empowerment and reclaim their own culture, language, and values not only for themselves but for their students as well.

Moving away from the deficit perspective: Aboriginal child development in partnership with families

ABSTRACT A “diversity as fundamental heterogeneity” approach is required to contest the widely held perspective that Aboriginal children in remote communities in central Australia are growing up in deficit and disadvantage. This article discusses the current language perpetuating the deficit model of Aboriginal child development that is failing to recognise strengths of Aboriginal children growing up in remote communities in central Australia. Through stories about daily life in Papunya, this article argues that to understand and measure Aboriginal child development, it is necessary to also understand the child’s cultural context in which they are living and learning. Participant selection was conducted using key participants who became community researchers in the research project. The main findings were Aboriginal children in Papunya must grow up with a “two-ways” approach to education that prioritises their own culture and language.

Childhood innocence and experience: Memory, discourse and practice

AbstractThis article examines how childhood innocence is taken up in (92) memories of undergraduate students across four sites in the US and Canada. Drawing from Foucault's theory of discourse, we examine how three themes—innocence as not knowing, innocence as being provided for, and loss of innocence as exposure to adversity—construct childhood as the absence of conflict, which perpetuates the myth of an innocence/experience binary and encourages a deficit perspective of childhood. These findings contribute to teacher education and childhood studies by highlighting the importance of interrogating adult memories in order to disrupt normative assumptions about children.

Applying Critical Theory to Disrupt Deficit Perspectives in Patient Communication and Health Literacy: “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” Podcast Series

There is increased awareness that health-related institutions, organizational and disciplinary policies and practices, and individual professionals have a role in creating or maintaining health inequalities. Critical theories may be especially helpful at this time, as their purpose is to critique and transform inequitable and unjust norms, systems, and practices. This paper shares examples from the podcast series “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication,” when critical frameworks from language and literacy are used to identify and interrupt deficit perspectives on individuals and groups, showing how deficit perspectives can hide in words, phrases, and discourses used in patient communication and health literacy.

Toward an antiracist genre pedagogy: Considerations for a North American context

AbstractThis article combines principles from critical race theory and genre pedagogy to show how K–12 English language teachers can engage in antiracist genre‐based literacy instruction. Genre pedagogy has become increasingly popular in North America as an approach to supporting multilingual students’ literacy development. However, genres of schooling are often treated as ideologically neutral and not related to the structural racism that permeates North American schools. As a result, genre pedagogy is implemented in ways that reproduce dominant practices and reinforce deficit perspectives of multilingual students of color. Therefore, we propose principles for an antiracist genre pedagogy that (1) teaches community countertexts alongside dominant ones, (2) identifies ideologies and knowledge structures in each, (3) increases focus on interpersonal meanings to analyze racializing dimensions of texts, (4) promotes remixing genres for antiracist purposes, and (5) destabilizes the white measuring stick used to evaluate “appropriate” classroom language use. By combining functional methods with radical goals, we take seriously Ladson‐Billings’s (2014) call for remixing pedagogies in ways that benefit and empower students who have been disserved by dominant schooling ideologies—in this article, multilingual students of color.

A Posthumanist Unsmoothing of Narrative Smoothing

Researchers assert that narratives do political work. Yet, in this article, we trouble the nature of this political work to account for narrative inquiry’s smoothing over of polyvocality for univocal coherence. Our posthumanist unsmoothing builds an analytical example around three successive Latourian tasks to bring to the fore competing voices and truths often obscured in conventional narrative. Drawing from ethnographic data of one low-income rural family, we seek to complicate the human-centered deficit perspective. In teasing out various voices and sociotechnical systems, this posthuman analytic exposes the hidden ways in which human lives are conditioned by political forces, which order the human conscious. As ethical beings, we take responsibility for promoting analytical tools as a means of addressing advocacy as well as social justice concerns. Ultimately, we expose implications for a narrative unsmoothing that rethinks democracy and political efforts to reclaim the voice of the marginalized, such that it can dismantle deficit perspectives, inform greater sociopolitical understandings, and mobilize more just democracies. Our task as critical scholars is to carve provocative methodological spaces for new lines of inquiry that expand our horizon of hope.

Each primary school a school-based language policy? The impact of the school context on policy implementation

Governmental education policies provide vague, general confines in which local actors have to design concrete policies tailored to their needs. Such policies rely on the local capacities of schools for implementing them. Recently, qualitative studies reveal that a great deal of variation in policy enactment should be attributed to school contextual variables. This study adds to these findings by examining to what extent school contextual variables influence the implementation of one type of education policy in Flemish schools: school-based language policies (SLP). It combines quantitative survey data from 28 primary schools with focus group interviews in a subsample of six schools in order to verify whether and why the school context affects the implementation of SLP. Results confirm that school context does affect implementation. Particularly, the ethnic composition of the student population is one of the main motivations for school teams to implement an SLP, and this is often associated with a deficit perspective. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/09500782.2020.1803352.

Towards Anti-Deficit Education in Undergraduate Mathematics Education: How Deficit Perspectives Work to Structure Inequality and What Can Be Done About It

A deficit perspective is a propensity to locate the source of academic problems in deficiencies within students, their families, their communities, or their membership in social categories (such as race and gender). While the deficit perspective is a common topic of discussion in K–12 mathematics education, it is a much rarer topic of discussion in undergraduate mathematics education. I argue that undergraduate mathematics instructors should take the deficit perspective seriously, because it structures educational experiences for students and instructors. In this survey article, I provide a brief review of the literature on deficit perspectives in mathematics education, and I offer practical suggestions for education from an anti-deficit perspective.