Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom

Critical Practices for Embracing Diversity in Education

Susan Baglieri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317283324
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom is a core textbook that integrates knowledge and practice from the fields of disability studies and special education. The second edition has been fully revised and updated throughout to include stronger connections between race, class, sexual orientation, gender, and disability to emphasize intersecting identities and experiences; stronger emphasis on curriculum and teaching rather than on attitudes toward disability; and updates to current events, cultural references, resources, research literature, laws, and policies.

Part I
Disability and Society

1
What is Inclusive Education?

Inclusion is the term used to describe school-based arrangements in which students with and without disabilities learn together in general education settings. Inclusion has been an integral step toward equity in education, the expansion of civil rights, and societal integration of young people with disabilities. Efforts to develop inclusion in schools and society have been underway for several decades. In the USA, for example, the 1975 Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA) (P. L. 94–142) first specified the right of students with disabilities to receive a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment. Recognized by many other nations, the 1994 adoption of the Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), proclaims the fundamental right of all children to educational opportunity. With the world as its forum, work to create inclusive schools and communities is a project shared by young people, families, educators, neighbors, employers, activists, and policy makers—in short, all of us.

There is clear consensus for the value of inclusivity and the desire for communities to embrace their members and enable all to strive toward engaged and satisfying lives. Work toward creating inclusive schools and societies, however, requires us to contend with histories and beliefs about ability and disability that have long led to exclusion. Many physical structures, like buildings and developed public areas, shape a built world that does not always enable equal access for all. Community systems, like education, work environments, and other service and recreation programs, can be slow to change. Beliefs and attitudes about difference, diversity, and disability that lead to prejudice and discrimination persist through culture. The confluence of inaccessible structures in the built world, the inertia of tradition, and the persistence of prejudicial beliefs regarding disability can be understood as ableism (Campbell, 2009; Goodley, 2014). When we understand that multiple factors, which operate in a complex and intertwining manner, contribute to the continued exclusion of people with disabilities from school and society it becomes evident that seeking inclusive education is a multifaceted and equally complex endeavor. Aiming to create inclusive education means to seek understanding about ableism and take action to resist and interrupt ways of thinking and doing that are steeped within the ways schools operate. In this chapter we begin by describing what we mean by inclusive education and outlining intersecting and allied commitments across areas of educational study.

Inclusion and Inclusive Education

In the USA, the term, inclusion, has become the most common to refer to practices that integrate students with and without disabilities in general education. Inclusion usually means that special educational supports, including specialized curriculum are provided in the general education setting. The Least Restrictive Environment (LRE) is a concept featured in the Individuals with Disabilities Education Improvement Act (IDEIA), which is the American policy that guides school practices for students with disabilities. The earliest version of the IDEIA was entered into society as Public Law 94–142 in 1975, and titled the Education for All Handicapped Children Act (EHA). The most current authorized version of the law is the IDEIA of 2004. The LRE specifies:

To the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities, including children in public or private institutions or other care facilities, are educated with children who are not disabled, and special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular educational environment occurs only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily.

(20 U.S.C. 1412(a)(5)(B))

The LRE clause is widely understood to indicate a preference for inclusion. It establishes the presumption that students with disabilities are educated with those who are not disabled in what are typically deemed “general” educational environments, to the maximum extent appropriate.

While inclusion nearly always refers to integrating students with and without disabilities in schools, a broader, more embracive idea of inclusive education also exists in education literature. Ballard (1999), for example, argues that inclusive education means the removal of barriers to learning for all children and works toward improving access and participation not just for students with disabilities, but for all those experiencing disadvantage in schools, whether related to “poverty, sexuality, minority ethnic status, or other characteristics assigned significance by the dominant culture in their society” (p. 2). Inclusive education strives for pluralistic teaching practices that create contexts for learning in which every student can identify with and connect to the school and to one another. The meaning and interpretation of the terms inclusion and the LRE have been the subject of contentious debate. For the purposes of this book we prioritize the language and concepts held within the broad idea of inclusive education to highlight the complex and multifaceted work of creating community and belonging in schools. Inclusive education is a concept that contains, but also transcends the emphasis on special education placement and service provision in general education. Inclusive education, in other words, encompasses the experiences of students with disabilities, but is not exclusive to them. The field of disability studies provides a useful foundation for understanding theory and practice in inclusive education.

Theories of Inclusive Education: Introducing Disability Studies

Disability studies is an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that seeks to expand the ways that society defines, conceptualizes, and understands the meaning of disability. Disability studies developed within and through the Disability Rights movement, which emerged during the 1960s “as a time of excitement, organizational strength, and identity exploration” through which people with disabilities, “like feminists, African Americans, and gay and lesbian activists . . . insisted that their bodies did not render them defective, [and] could even be sources of political, sexual, and artistic strength” (Nielsen, 2012, p. 160). Early and continuing efforts of disability rights activists draw attention to political, economic, and social conditions that affect the lives of disabled people as much as, or perhaps more than, the impact of impairment. With its origin in disability rights, the purposes of disability studies are markedly political. Longmore and Umansky (2001) explain, “Disability studies takes as its domain the intricate interaction among cultural values, social arrangements, public policy, and professional practice regarding ‘disability’ ” (p. 12). They focus on contributions, experiences, and history of people with disabilities as a means to articulate past and present understandings of disability and reflect the aims of the Disability Rights movement. Through the joint missions of scholarship and activism, those aligned with disability studies underscore disability and disabled persons’ experiences as distinctive and productive worldviews through which to engage in examination and critique of culture in order to pose problems and possibilities.

A significant contribution of disability studies to educational thought and practice is the articulation of the medical model and social models of disability. The medical model establishes disability to be an experience and identity belonging to the individual as a reflection of an abnormally disordered body, mind, or affect. Social models of disability, in contrast, propose disability experiences and identities as those that become embodied as people are enabled and disabled through their interactions in society. Disability, then, affects an individual, but is a reflection of how society regards and facilitates or impedes interactions among people with all kinds of bodies, minds, and affects. Disability studies involve examining the policies and practices of societies to emphasize and study the social and cultural determinants of disability, rather than the focus on physiological aspects within the medical model (Linton, 1998). Ware (2001) forwards, “the new disability studies understand disability as a way of thinking about bodies rather than as something that is wrong with bodies” (p. 110).

The medical model is the dominant perspective about disability in society and its influence in education is evident. Shea and Bauer (1997) explain that the medical model “contends that the disability should be diagnosed, prescriptive programs should be designed, and efforts should be made to remediate the disability” (p. 423). In the medical model, fixing or curing the disability can become the primary focus in the child’s life and education. This perspective can lead to all other activities, including future planning, being suspended until the child is cured or remediated. Biklen, Ferguson, and Ford, at the vanguard of inclusive educational thought, in 1989, pointed out:

Students perceived as having problems, like something broken, are sent to resource rooms, special classes, even special schools or institutions, to be repaired and later returned. Unlike a repair shop, however, many students in special education— indeed the preponderance of them never escape the special label and placement (excluding those with speech impairments that are either cured or simply disappear by the time students reach secondary level). They stay in the repair shop.

(p. 8)

A significant outcome of the medical model’s prevalence in education, then, is the focus on the individual as the site of problem and the development of education practices that prioritized remediation of disability. This priority, however well intended and potentially helpful, has been enacted in ways that attach special educational supports and services to particular classes that only have children with disabilities, which precludes their participation in other aspects of schools (Taylor, 1988). Disability studies offers tools for analysis that challenge the idea that “the assigned roles of people with disabilities are inevitable outcomes of their condition,” which is the assumption in a medical model (Linton, as cited in Fleischer & Zames, 2001, p. 206).

The development of social models of disability within education shifts our work from a primary focus on how to remediate disability to examination of how the school environment facilitates or impedes interactions among children with all kinds of bodies, minds, and affects. Agitating for the right of children with disabilities to have equal access and opportunity in schools is a way that the Disability Rights Movement influences education, with particular emphasis on inclusion. Disability studies practitioners further point out that instruction to children with disabilities that focuses only on their diagnosis and remediation of impairment inequitably constrains their school experience. By framing disability in its social dimensions, attention is instead focused on how schools and curriculum may be constructed and reformed to enable students with disabilities to gain access to learning and participating with their peers.

Scholarship in disability studies with particular respect to education is burgeoning (Gabel & Danforth, 2008). Barton and Armstrong (2001) offer a view of inclusive education that prioritizes attention on removing barriers to access. In doing so, they shift the focus from the “deficient” student—as in a medical model—to the responsibility of the school and its creation of barrier-free social and organizational structures. They explain:

From the perspectives we have adopted, inclusion is not about placement into an unchanged system of provision and practice. Also, it is not merely about the participation of a specific group of formerly categorized individuals. . . . It is about removing all forms of barriers to access and learning for all children who are experiencing disadvantage. This approach is rooted in conceptions of democracy, citizenship, and a version of the “good” society. . . . Thus, inclusive education is not an end in itself but a means to an end—that of the realization of an inclusive society. This necessitates schools adopting a critical stance both internally and externally toward all forms of justice and discrimination.

(p. 708)

Barton and Armstrong (2001) provide a clear call for inclusive educational reform that extends beyond the right of children with disabilities to access education. Inclusive education is a process, or project, that emanates from a critique of schooling that recognizes that injustices experienced by children with disabilities are rooted in systemic problems that are also experienced by many others.

Taking a critical stance to examine education, and not just special education, characterizes the work of disability studies in education. As Tom Skrtic (1991) points out in the groundbreaking book, Behind Special Education, the system of special education emerged to enable schools to proceed without changing to meet the needs, goals, or expectations of children and families. Labeling struggling children as having disabilities and moving them to the parallel system of special education provided a rationale for preserving the bureaucracy of schooling. In what Skrtic deems an organizational pathology, the development of special education is the symptom of a dysfunctional educational system that does not serve its communities. In short, the foundations of a disability studies perspective on inclusive education hinges on our willingness to recognize that schools and the education system must shift to meet the diversity of communities if they are to play a productive role in seeking equity, justice, and democracy.

In imagining schools in their potential to move toward equity, justice, and democracy, disability studies finds strong allies in the fields of multicultural and social justice education. Before disability studies and before the EHA was passed in 1975, the struggle for civil rights in education, equal opportunity, and desegregation of schools was already well underway for African-American children. The extended study and works in the ongoing project to seek racial equity in education yields deep understanding of the conditions and impact of segregation and contributes a range of perspectives on how to work toward educational equity. Although movements for multicultural and social justice education have emerged along separate trajectories and with differing specific commitments, they share a perspective on schooling and education that informs inclusive education within and in partner to a disability studies framework. Each, separately and in intersection, have much to contribute to inclusive school reform.

Multicultural Education

Multicultural education is a ranging and diverse area of study and practice that challenges the dominance of White and Eurocentric curriculum and practice in schools (Banks, 1993; 2005). The racial desegregation that occurred in the 1950s in the USA is often thought of as students of color being integrated into “White” schools. The response of the education system, then, was to assimilate children of color into contexts that had been created in their absence and in the presumption of the supremacy of White culture. At the heart of multicultural education is the need to reform schools in ways that account for and are accountable to students of color. Banks (1993) identities five initiatives undertaken within multicultural education. Work toward (a) content integration strives to diversify the canon of school curriculum to increase its representation of people of color and their works. A critical perspective on processes of (b) knowledge construction requires educators to understand and engage with the impact of perspective, values, place, and time on what is presented as knowledge or truth. Efforts toward (c) prejudice reduction explicitly target racial bias and assumptions. Developing (d) equity pedagogies and (e) school cultures in which students of color are empowered aim to improve teaching practices and broader institutional structures of schools to result in increased opportunity and access to achievement toward educational equity. Over several decades of work, the umbrella of multicultural education has grown beyond a sole interest in the experiences of children of color. Work toward seeking equity for other groups at risk of marginalization in schools—including girls, young women, gender non-conforming youth, lesbian and gay students, children from non-dominant religious, ethnic, and linguistic families, and students living in poverty—is often addressed within a multicultural framework (Steinberg, 2009). Disability is also increasingly becoming part of its purview (Connor, 2012). Those in multicultural education argue that social stratification, collective experience, and shared history contribute to worldviews and ways of knowing associated with group identities that influence life in schools and interactions with curriculum.

The influence of social stratification and the opportunity gaps among students who attend poor, affluent, urban, rural, or suburban schools is well documented. Similarly, that inequitable access to educational opportunity correlates with race, disability, and language is also a persistent finding in educational research (Blanchett, 2006). Multicultural education advances work to desegregate students by race, disability, and gender, as well as equalize students’ opportunities to access advanced content and high quality of teachers and facilities. Another facet of multicultural education aims to articulate the relationship between social group identity and life in schools. In the germinal work, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches, published in 1903, W.E.B. Du Bois described the concept of double-consciousness. Du Bois proposed double-consciousness to capture the experience of being Black in America as negotiating “two warring ideals” between Negro and American identities. It represents the struggle between knowing the self as an American whose worth and place is perceived through a lens of White supremacy, and as a person of African descent estranged from heritage and culture by enslavement and colonialism. African-American experience, through this lens, may be understood as one of conflicted striv...