Discourses of Costa Rican secondary school teachers about dis/ability

Abstract

This article presents part of the results of a research developed at the Research Institute in Education of the University of Costa Rica that has one of its general interests to answer the question: What are the concepts that the discourse of Costa Rican secondary school teachers reveals about the issue of disability?  To answer this question, a qualitative approach was developed at the methodological level, for which semi-structured interviews were conducted with secondary school teachers belonging to the Costa Rican public education sector. From this material, a discursive analysis was developed based on a procedure of identification of textual propositions and the elaboration of discursive implications. The results show that the opposition normality - abnormality is a key element to understand the teachers' discursive constructions. In this way, discursive cores are identified as the idea of disability as a burden and as an impairment, as well as another set of interventions that were classified as critical discourses around functional diversity. One of the main conclusions of the article is that, despite the important changes in legislation and public policies regarding disability that affect the educational field, there are still a number of conceptions that reveal prejudiced views about what is understood by disability. One possible application of this article is precisely to identify the stigmatizing conceptions that become recurrent and take them as a starting point to establish a reflexive dialogue with teachers.