Whose difference counts? A critical discourse analysis of stakeholder perspectives informing a neurodiversity-based integrated curriculum for Thai primary students

Inclusive education is increasingly understood as the transformation of ordinary schooling for all learners rather than the placement of identified students, yet most of the world's neurodivergent children sit unidentified in mainstream classrooms whose pedagogy was never designed for them. This study examined how an inclusive, neurodiversity-based curriculum should be designed for one such setting: a Grade 3 classroom in a Thai community primary school. Using critical discourse analysis following Fairclough's three-dimensional framework, we analysed focus groups and interviews with 63 stakeholders, positioning 28 children as primary informants on their own conditions for participation. The analysis revealed pervasive but unlabelled neurocognitive variation, structurally unequal family support, and exclusionary pressures rooted in a single ideology: that all children learn through the same methods, pace, and media. Critically, stakeholders were already shifting discourse from ‘the child has a problem’ towards ‘the system must be designed to accommodate difference’, converging on five design requirements – multi-channel access, emotional safety, scaffolded reasoning, teacher support systems, and inequality-sensitive family engagement. The study extends neurodiversity-informed inclusion to undiagnosed Global South classrooms and shows that critical discourse analysis can expose the barriers to participation that conventional needs analysis conceals.