ADHD characterized by inattention and/or hyperactivity and impulsivity is one of the most common – and controversial - neurobehavioral diagnoses in childhood. There is a lot of debate about whether ADHD is a real disorder, the origin of which is due to the brain differences, or whether it rather reveals the cultural tendency to medicalize and (over)diagnose normal variation in children’s behavior (see Visser & Jehan 2009). In the context of education, prior research has shown that teachers’ knowledge about ADHD is limited (Kikas & Timostsuk 2015), ADHD is dominantly presented to teachers from a medical perspective (Freedman 2016) and teachers may be hesitant to unconditionally facilitate the inclusion of pupils diagnosed with ADHD (Gal et al. 2010; Haug 2014; Lee et al. 2015).

This paper examines the meanings given to ADHD in the pedagogical documents written by Finnish teachers. The earlier studies have reported that the quality and contents of the pedagogical documents vary much, and that the documents often have objectives that are too broad, vague and not measurable (Boavida et al. 2010; Ruble et al. 2010). In addition, the pedagogical documents have been criticized for one-sided focus on pupils’ deficits and individual characteristics rather than on the social context of their problems (Isaksson, Lindqvist & Bergström 2007). In addition, the criticism has focused on low pupil and parent participation in the documentation process (Isaksson et al. 2007; Harris 2010) and the gap between pedagogical planning on paper and in the classroom (Kwon, Elicker & Kontos 2011).  

The starting-point for this paper is the social constructionist approach which views ADHD as a socially and culturally created concept whose meanings alternate according to historical time, context and its definers (Burr 2003). The research questions are the following:

1) What kinds of meanings of ADHD are constructed in the pedagogical documents written by teachers?

2) How do the pedagogical documents position pupils diagnosed with ADHD?

and

3) What kinds of theoretical approaches form the basis for planning instruction and pedagogical solutions in the documents?

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