Would rethinking learning disabilities benefit Kuwait?

Abstract

Learning disabilities education in Kuwait grew from Kuwaiti’s wholesale importation of the Western, medical model of disability – a model basically incompatible with Kuwaiti culture. Conflicting factors include its problematic normal/abnormal binary, its assumption that the ‘deficit’ is located in the student and the segregation of students by label. As proponents of disability studies we investigate whether, and if so how, Arab educators at Kuwait’s only learning disabilities school talk about this incompatibility. Through focus group and individual, in‐depth conversational interviews we found that they acknowledged this tension, but that they dealt with it in more complex ways than we had anticipated: by compartmentalizing, accepting the imported model as the only alternative to overcrowded public education and subjugating their experiential awareness to that of the Western scientific model.

Keywords:

• disability studies
• learning disabilities
• Kuwait
• teacher assistants
• local culture
• imported model

Acknowledgements

Our sincere gratitude to the principal for access to the school and to the participating TAs for their candor and generosity with time and information.

Notes

1. Pseudonyms protect the participants anonymity.

2. Quran translations are taken from Pickthall (1992).