One of the central tasks of teachers is to  "Stimulate a supportive school climate and environment for learning […] promote the use of data information systems for school diagnosis to identify struggling students and factors of learning disruptions; adequate student counselling, mentoring to support students and smoother their transitions to continue in education." (OECD 2012, S. 11) 

These key issues for teachers are focused on in this contribution. Firstly, this contribution deals with the question of how emancipatory diagnostics can be used to enable pupils in inclusive school settings to realise and articulate their abilities and needs.

The second question focused is how participatory pedagogical diagnostics based on these insights can be used to support pupils’ educational decisions. The third question is how are collective norms, including and excluding barriers and power relations within schools, as well as pedagogical diagnostics, visible in the collected data.  

Answering these research questions is as important in Austria as it is in many other European countries. Here, educational decisions are not only taken on the basis of pupils’ competences, but also on their background. On the basis of theories which deal with inequity in education, such as the model of social reproduction (cf. Bourdieu & Passeron 1971) or the rational choice theory (cf. Boudon 1974), this contribution aims at empowering all pupils to recognise their own abilities and needs and to use this knowledge to take the right educational decisions for them based on these – and not on their socio-economic background or on how they are categorized by the system of external differentiation (e.g. special needs).

The Council of the European Union advises that „attention should be paid to effective ways of supporting diverse groups of learners, including those with special needs and/or from disadvantaged backgrounds. " (2014, 2). Therefore, this study examines inclusive school settings based on a social model of disability, which means that there is a distinction between individual impairment and social barriers.

The results of this study contribute to further professionalization of teachers, especially in the field of pedagogical diagnostics, since “Teachers need diagnostic […] tools that allow them to monitor and respond to what children are learning in order to ensure that they are acquiring a depth of understanding and knowledge." (OECD 2012, S. 139). Apart from the analyses of learning requirements and teaching and learning processes, the task of pedagogical diagnostics are „to facilitate assigning the students to learning groups or to individual support programmes, as well as the more society-based task of managing staff development or giving out qualifications […].“ (Ingenkamp & Lissmann 2008, 13)

One must not forget that transformative aspects serving identity development are inherent in ascription processes and that they are „places of power“ (Butler 2009, 11). Due to this, diagnostic ascription processes bear certain risks, just like they bear various opportunities. (Reisenauer & Ulsess-Schurda 2018)

For individual students, pedagogical diagnostics and its results play a central role in their prospective educational and therefore also in their career and life opportunities. In this context, this paper deals with questions of social equity, with patterns of attribution and with structural barriers due to these attributions. Goals are on the one hand the emancipation of students with a denied ability for self-determination and on the other hand further change towards inclusion in school settings.

The participatory dialogic diagnostics designed in this paper therefore serve to enable and to guide the particular students in actively designing their own educational processes and to make existing barriers, social norms and normative notions of reality, as well as efficacious discourses and power structures visible to contribute to their reduction. 

This study is part of the field of study of emancipatory and participatory disability research (Barnes 2001) and one of the Disability Studies’ principles „nothing about us without us“ (Hermes & Rohrmann 2006) is, therefore, fundamental to the research design. The study on emancipatory and participatory diagnostics collects its data by narratives, written by 12-to 13 year old Austrian students. Narratives are seen as fundamental to human life and take a special role in our construction of identity. Narrative knowledge helps us make sense of the complexity of human lives and thereby storytelling is a fundamental way of expressing ourselves. For that reason, the design of the study is inspired by collective Haug´s (1990) memory work. As part of the study students compose these written narratives based on photographs provided. Depending on the writing abilities of the students, the researchers offer to transcribe oral narratives or work with supportive communication tools. The collected data is analysed in guided student groups (approx. 3 students) using Bohnsack’s (2003) documentary method. The aim of this method is to reconstruct tacit knowledge and (collective) frameworks of orientations, which are documented in the analysed utterances, and which form the basis of the respondents' everyday practice (Bohnsack et al. 2010). Making people’s frameworks of orientation explicit helps to understand what they need, what they are aiming at and what they are trying to achieve in general. This information is crucial for a tailor-made support of individual pupils in order to best support their educational choices and careers (Gerhartz-Reiter 2017). In this study the research subjects become researchers. The aim is to not only to do research about, but much more with the persons concerned, in order to make their personal perceptions and constructions visible. Students are involved in the collection as well as in the analysis of the data to make sure that their own views are considered, and to enable them to articulate themselves. Central to this research project is the active participation of ALL students of inclusive school classes in the process of pedagogical diagnosis of their abilities and competences, with the final goal of attaining a higher degree of autonomy in their educational decisions. In these diagnostic processes the essential question is how students can best express what they need in order for them to become what they can and want to become, without being restricted by attributions of their capacities or incapacities.

A significant part of the daily pedagogical work of a teacher is the pedagogical diagnostics of students’ abilities. These diagnostics are essential to how teachers talk to their students, to the learning resources and learner support offered, and to the suggested course of further education. Apart from an analysis of the current standard school system, this study shows the choice of methods that can help enable students to design their own learning processes and educational biographies. Emancipatory and participatory instruments of pedagogical diagnostics are fundamental to this study. Among the findings are the possibilities of emancipatory diagnostics that enable students to recognize and articulate their abilities and needs, as well as participatory pedagogical diagnostics for the support of educational careers. Moreover, chances and obstacles regarding participatory and emancipatory processes in schools are analysed. The study shows a research design capable of including all students - also those who temporarily or permanently lack certain abilities - in research processes to do with pedagogical diagnostics in schools. Teachers can subsequently put the findings to specific use and draw conclusions concerning their practical pedagogical actions.

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