Abstract
This paper demonstrate how a non-speaking student with severe intellectual impairment participates in a classroom interaction. The reported research departs from traditional behaviourist type research on language and intellectual impairment by using an ethnomethodological approach. Through conversation analysis, and membership categorization analysis it can be shown how the teacher and student mutually construct their interaction and display their social agency and membership.
The paper will present (i) a research report on a classroom interaction between a non-speaking student with severe intellectual impairment and his teacher and (ii) use research data to demonstrate and explain the analytical tools used in the study. By focusing on the moment-by-moment structure of the interaction the workshop will demonstrate how participation and membership are constructed by the actions of both student and teacher.
In this research it was not so much the case of listening to different voices but of understanding the "voiceless". Ethnomethodological techniques provided a powerful tool in this quest. It is the researcher's belief that they can also contribute to our understandings of including the excluded by providing accounts of interactions through which issues of participation can be addressed.
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