Minimal Brain Dysfunction, Ritalin, and Racial Politics

This chapter examines psychologists’ involvement in the 1960s and 1970s in inventing a diagnosis known as “minimal brain dysfunction” (MBD) – a precursor to attention deficit attention disorder (ADHD). Although asserted to be a physiological matter, one best treated with stimulant drugs like methylphenidate (Ritalin), MBD was not based on a clear medical symptom. Quite soon, the modal individual for whom Ritalin became considered the most appropriate treatment was a white and middle-class child. As desegregation was often followed by the new phenomenon of tracking within schools, and as more African American children were labeled as suffering from “mild mental retardation,” the contrasting diagnosis of MBD represented a new disease entity to address the cognitive challenges sometimes faced by privileged children of the predominantly white suburbs. Simultaneously, a growing number of commentators, both African American and anti-racist white, came fiercely to protest what they perceived to be a disturbing tendency to overprescribe stimulant medications to poor children of color.

The Lady Lisle

The Lady Lisle features two near-identical boys from different ends of the social spectrum. The possibility of altering the development of their inborn natures through upbringing and education is explored and contested when the two are swapped by the villain, Major Varney. The upper-class child is sent to a middle-class school where he is raised in such a way as to negate detrimental qualities which initially seemed innate. Contrastingly, the lower-class child, James, impersonates the true heir and proves to be selfish, violent and eventually murderous, like his father. Yet it is never entirely clear to what extent James’s behaviour is due to heredity or to his emotionally abusive upbringing. A shift in narrative tone is identified which moves from making allowances for James due to ‘nurture’ towards castigating him as bad by ‘nature’. In this way Braddon raises questions about the malleability or fixity of the personality, about how we define, recognise and value naturalness, but ultimately combines the forces of education and hereditary degeneracy in order to segregate the lower classes, and to bring the morally upright middle classes together with the affluent upper classes.

Building trust, elevating voices, and sharing power in family partnership

Research has shown that traditional ways of promoting family involvement in school are often ineffective, especially among families whose approach does not align with the middle-class child-rearing practices embraced in many U.S. schools. To encourage greater family involvement, a Colorado school district is piloting a program in which educators and families partner to build relationships and make decisions together. By elevating the voices of marginalized families, school leaders hope to strengthen the bonds between families and schools, to the benefit of the students.

Reading Categories Identified in the Reading Activities of a Caregiver and a Middle-Class Child

This paper aims to report the findings of a research project, developed from the need to make contributions about the characteristics that emerge, when a three-year-old child and his caregiver carry reading activities out. By the use of recordings and students’ artifacts, in order to collect data; and analyzing the information collected through categorization, this case study revealed that both, the child and the caregiver, exposed reading attitudes and actions which have relationships with intake process, cognitive processes, emotional statements, autonomy, and the application of strategies to understand the text. In addition to this information, this study concluded that reading processes are complex and there is a considerable need to develop research around this topic.