The Case of the Disappearing/Appearing Slow Learner: An Interpretive Mystery. Part Five: Time to Kill Time

Abstract

These concluding chapters follow the events described in the previous four parts of this narrative. Max Hunter, a private detective remains on the trail of “slow learners,” a category of students his client, educator John Williamson, claims are continually getting “lost” in Alberta’s school system. As this section begins Hunter and Williamson are in a bowling alley where they hope to remain undetected as they investigate recent reforms to Alberta’s special education system. At the conclusion of Part Four the detective and client read a terse statement on Alberta education’s website declaring that Action on Inclusion, the ambitious reform project “no longer exists.” These chapters examine the termination of this project, other recent educational reforms in the province and their impact on students labelled as slow learners, additional bureaucratic discourses that are toxic to slow learners and diversity in general, and a fleeting glimpse of hope involving how “slow” might be more generously reclaimed from its current deficit-based discursive usages.

Keywords

• slow learner
• efficiency
• bureaucracy
• inclusion
• inquiry
• lived curriculum