‘Staying in class so no one can get to him’: a case for the institutional reproduction of ADHD categories and behaviours

Abstract

This paper focuses a sociological lens on what two early years Australian school boys labelled as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and an early years teacher have to say about social relations within informal play environments. The boys participated in separate semi‐structured interviews where they predicted the likely outcomes of social interactions within informal play environments for a toy puppy that was exhibiting ADHD‐like behaviours. The students forewarned that the puppy should be ‘staying in class so no one can get to him’, and that ‘his friends will be cruel and tease him’, making him into a ‘bad’ puppy. A follow‐up interview with one early years teacher confirmed that the boys’ predictions reflected their lived experiences as students labelled as ADHD in institutional play environments. A theoretical framework based on concepts of social power and control is used to analyse the boys’ and teacher’s interview talk to explain how particular social discourses have the potential to trap students labelled as ADHD into this category and the difficulties one socially aware teacher faced as she tried to disrupt these dominant disabling discourses.