Review_Author: Nick Fina
Book_Author: Hervé Varenne and Ray McDermott
Book_Title: Successful Failure
Reference: 1998, Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Date: 3/25/2007
Time: 8:37:53 PM
Remote Name: 72.81.13.40
Does success for some in America’s educational system require failure on the part of others? Do environmental and cultural models of disability better serve individuals who experience challenges than do models based on personal deficit? These questions form the basis of this interesting and thought-provoking book. The authors begin with a series of ethnographies that get us thinking. In Chapter 1 we meet four flavors of nine-year-old Adam: the happy-go-lucky, socially popular Adam of everyday life; the Adam with problems in cooking club arising out of his difficulty accessing the recipes unless he has a partner to help him; the still-more-troubled Adam in day-to-day schoolwork; and finally Adam in testing, where the system waits to pounce and proclaim him a failure and in need of intervention. Is Adam a failure? We see that the right answer depends on which milestone he is at on the spectrum between everyday life and school testing. And if that’s the case, we can only conclude that “failure” is located in Adam’s environment, not in him. We also wonder whether substantially different environments for homework contribute to different levels of achievement for Joe and Sheila, two classmates in a New York City neighborhood. We read of the workings of social classes, where successes in depressed settings like Manhattan’s West Side High are fleeting and of little consequence to their dismal, long- term prospects, and where failures in the affluent setting of Allwin Junior High School are also fleeting and of little consequence to what are generally bright futures. At the outset of Part 2, the authors have us ready to see the plausibility of embracing an unconventional view of disability: a view that declares disability to be a cultural, rather than a medical, fact. Their argument is convincing. We see how it can be possible that poverty and disability can be said to “capture” and strangle individuals in a web. With an institutional stamp upon one’s forehead, failure is self- fulfilling. I have a young friend, a 26-year- old woman named Anne, who suffered traumatic brain injury and its side effects as the result of a bus-car collision in 1998. She has spent the intervening years fighting her way back into the mainstream of life. She was a ballet dancer from the time she was a small child until high school field hockey crowded it out of her schedule. But her love of the dance remained. Recently I learned that my nephew, a ballroom dancer, is involved with something called wheelchair dancing. In wheelchair dancing, one able-bodied dancer and a partner in a wheelchair, dance together. Every move that an able-bodied couple would do in all of the common ballroom dances has a correlate in wheelchair dancing. Ah ha. So if we redefine, culturally, what it means to dance, then one is no longer dance-disabled. I took Anne to the studio on Saturday March 24 and she danced with my nephew, taking her first step back into a world that she thought she had lost forever. Anne has taken a sledgehammer and pounded into oblivion one more barrier to a full and happy life. It’s a bit of an irony that my nephew, the wheelchair dancer, earns his living as a special education teacher. But then again, it really isn’t. Diagnostic and prescriptive work, as long as it focuses on accommodating needs rather than curing a medical malady or routing the challenged person into a life with unnecessary bounds, is worthwhile and valuable. I feel that the authors were a bit too willing to make villains of the American educational system and too unwilling to see that some of what happens in the process is beneficial. In the 1960s hearing loss caused me to abandon a dream of teaching at the college level. In 2004, with the help of two hearing aids and real-time captioning, I taught my first college course. Informed special educators, equipped with technology, can help those with special needs fulfill dreams without decades-long delays like the one I experienced. So if you’re open to thinking differently about poverty and disability, go get this little (264-page) book and read it.