This paper builds upon my previous presentation Towards defining the special in special education, which was presented at the EERA conference in Gothenburg, 2008. In that presentation, I claimed that the “special” found within special education is the good and un-normal person. Here I want to further this claim through a theoretical model outlining how we construct and educate the special in special education. Disabilities are constructed, but, as pointed out by Hacking (1999), simply to say that something is constructed is close to saying nothing. Presentations of a constructed disabled person typically imply that he or she is a product of our society, followed with convincing arguments about how this is mistaken and harmful. To describe disabilities as a products is not, however, very helpful if we aim to understand and lessen the negative aspects of this construction. As emphasised by Hacking (1999), it is also possible – and in this context necessary – to view disabilities as a process, namely, to look at how people become designated as disabled. In other words, we have to understand the actual constructing process. The person is disabled because she or he is not able to do something according to a norm that we define as normal. Normality and normalisation are well known areas of special education (Askheim, 2003). In some way, even if there have been different constructions throughout different time periods, what we consider and accept as normal has consistently been an important feature of this field of knowledge (e.g., Foucalt, 1971). Various researchers have presented different models of understanding normality (e.g., Holst, 1978); it seems, however, that much of what we see in special education today seem to conform to one or more of three areas of normality: the area of biological normality, statistical normality, and moral and social normality. Biological, statistical, and moral and social normality are techniques we use to construct the disabled human being. Together, these techniques are part of a process where disabilities within special education are brought to life – to a social reality. To emphasise this constructing process, I claim that the learning problems are provoked into existence though their standards of normality. Each of these groups of normality can process groups of people with a set of learning disabilities.

Theoretical

I shall argue that it is important that those partaking in the discussion within special education take into account how the constructing standards can contribute to the understanding of the learning problem in question. Knowledge about this link between the different techniques to process disabilities and the different areas of learning problems can, therefore, expand an important part of our understanding of how special education can exist and intervene.