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Studied by 5 peopleChallenging Neoliberal-Ableist Education Through Critical Pedagogy
Education
More disabled children are entering mainstream schools, raising questions about inclusive education.
Mass public education was not designed for disabled learners.
Michael Apple argues schooling is tied to capitalist system.
School curricula includes both formal subjects and transmitted values (hidden curricula).
Hidden curricula promotes cultural practices and values.
Children learn to be social citizens through education.
Jenny Corbett and Roger Slee encourage educators to question school cultures for alternative curricula.
This chapter explores inclusive education, recognizing neoliberal-able education and ways to challenge it through critical pedagogy.
Introducing Inclusive Education
Tony Booth defines inclusive education as increasing learner participation in culture, curricula, and communities.
School achievements are less important if the community fails to enhance teachers and pupils.
Peter Clough and Jenny Corbett outline educational responses to disability in the late 20th century.
Historical Responses to Disability:
1950s: Psycho-medical view of disabled child needing specialist intervention.
1960s: Sociological responses view special needs as product of exclusionary schooling.
1970s: Curricular approaches that may or may not meet learning needs.
1980s: Focus on school improvement via comprehensive schooling and systemic reorganization.
1990s Onward: Disability studies call for inclusive education recognizing diverse learning styles and equal participation.
What is Inclusion (and what about special education)?
Inclusive education necessitates understanding special education, which Felicity Armstrong describes as a 'wild profusion of entangled ideas'.
Special education places disabled children in separate settings with trained professionals.
Proponents argue separate settings better meet needs, but it removes children from communities and places them into specialized trajectories.
Graduates from special schools report limited education and low attainment, leading to segregated work and education.
Special schools can transplant mass education's failings to disabled children, defining the child as the problem rather than accommodating difference.
Special education can also refer to specialized procedures in mainstream schools.
Distinct learning methods are identified for learners with specific conditions like Down's syndrome.
Special educators risk 'promoting limited ontologies of personhood' based on a medical deficit-model.
Special education has been described as a segregating, racially biased philosophy and set of practices, a product of misguided scientific positivism, or merely as an ineffective, overblown solution to easily solvable school problems.
Intersectional Aspects of Special Education:
Nirmala Erevelles notes that the first special education classes in North America included the urban poor, Native, Hispanic, and African Americans.
Black and working-class children have been over-represented in special schools.
Jane Mercer argued that measures of intelligence reflect racial and class biases of professional assessment.
Disabled children remain largely in special schools and face challenges entering mainstream settings.
Meekosha and Jakubowicz suggest the drive for special schools is connected to professionalization of special educators.
When achievement problems are seen as residing within the child, schools and teachers avoid scrutiny.
Special schools breed unusual practices enacted by specialist teachers to instruct or manage homogenized groups of special needs children.
Roger Slee views special education as bound to a technicism rooted in deficit-based psycho-medical paradigms.
Practices of Integration:
Practices of integration emerged in the 1960s, promoting the right to education for disabled children in local schools.
The 1978 Warnock Report in Britain proposed 'special educational needs' (SEN) as a term for children needing extra support.
Marcia Rioux argues integration failed due to problematic ideas of disability, meritocracy, and self-reliance that ignored structural inequalities.
Integrated students remained the focus of special educators but in mainstream settings.
Carol Christensen notes that individual education plans (IEP) allocate resources based on identified individual requirements.
Special educational needs coordinators (SENCOs) in British schools were established but addressed individual children rather than school culture.
SENCOs and SEN children were often marginalized.
Simply cleaning up exclusionary contexts does not make them inclusionary if regular schooling values remain.
Integration is exclusive (allowing only the least disruptive) and inadequate (failing to address structural inequalities).
Learners with diverse needs are only incrementally accommodated in existing mainstream schooling cultures.
Inclusive Education:
In the mid-1990s, inclusive education challenged functionalist, deficit thinking of special education and compromises of integration.
Inclusive educators called for change to disabling philosophies of mainstream schools.
Sociology and materialist, radical humanist, and social constructionist theories were employed to critique and foster alternatives.
Inclusive education broadened options, developed skills and confidence, and exposed the impact of patriarchal, disablist, and racist education.
Accommodation, assimilation, and integration fit a consensus model, while inclusive education promotes conflict approaches, demanding educators rethink education and disability.
Inclusion is a response to special education and integration, understanding SEN children as a group constituted by a bureaucratic device.
For Lise Vislie, inclusive education:
Responds to all pupils as individuals.
Regards inclusion and exclusion as connected processes.
Is relevant to all school phases and types.
Philosophical and political reasons beg questions about implementation.
Enforcing Inclusion
Inclusive education became internationally enshrined in documents such as:
UNESCO's 1990 World Declaration on Education for All.
UNESCO's 1994 Salamanca Statement and Framework for Action on Special Needs Education.
The 2007 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.
These initiatives aim to promote human rights through access to various environments.
The Salamanca Statement set the policy agenda for inclusive education globally.
There was a growing consensus around rights to a common education regardless of background, attainment, or disability.
The 1978 Warnock Report, the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, the 2001 Special Educational Needs and Disability Act, and the 2001 Special Educational Needs: Code of Practice made schools responsible for meeting the needs of disabled learners.
Special educational provision has maintained dominance and inclusive education has failed to grow substantively in Britain and other Western European countries.
In 1993, special education was a 30 billion-a-year industry in the United States.
Some early proponents of inclusion have backtracked.
Systemic Issues
To understand why inclusive education is failing, wider systemic issues must be addressed.
Neoliberal-Able Education
Neoliberalism refers to pro-corporate free-market policies that have dominated economic and cultural politics since the 1980s.
Unproductive welfare spending is reduced, and public services are increasingly aligned to business.
An alliance with market freedom is at the core of the Washington consensus.
It is linked to austerity, where economic rationality overtakes social welfare reform.
Neoliberal philosophies are enshrined in supranational organizations like the World Bank, WHO, and OECD.
The OECD represents the richest countries, which espouse free market principles and drive OECD initiatives around inclusive education, marketizing educational models and placing conditions on poorer countries.
Henri Giroux states that democracy has been reduced to a metaphor of the free market.
Characteristics of Neoliberal Education:
Common standards, assessment, and accountability for schools and teachers.
Shrinking resources.
Schools pulled into the competitive marketplace where productivity and accountability are paramount.
Increasingly stringent academic criteria.
Narrowing of curriculum.
Increase in educational testing and assessment.
This leads to the 'McDonaldisation of education' or a 'human capital paradigm approach'.
Teachers' unions splintered and morale eroded.
Services are commodified rather than seen as civic or human rights.
Common good equates with free competition and profitability.
There is a global privatization of schooling.
Schools are high-pressure places subjected to league tables and inspections.
Curricula are nationalized, focused on science, math, and literacy, allowing comparison between schools.
British GCSE system overhaul emphasizes exam assessment.
A neoliberal ideology subjects education to economic rationality.
Culture of Performativity:
Schools are governed and assessed through a culture of performativity.
Key are self-sufficient, self-regulating autonomous subjects.
Neoliberalism ignores social and cultural histories, focusing on individualistic understanding of human behavior.
Libertarian philosophy cherishes self-interest and distrust.
'Choice' allows schools to select desirable customers.
Neoliberal schools are stressful places with strict National Curriculum.
Objectionable children risk facing segregated provision.
Schools manage themselves rather than their pupils.
Wedell concludes that successful inclusion happens 'in spite of the system'.
New Disabilities, New Abilities
In neoliberal education, parents are consumers.
Wealthiest move to desirable catchment areas.
Inner-city schools suffer and fall into 'special measures'.
Gap widens between rich and poor.
Government Policies
In Britain, the Every Child Matters policy sought to promote well-being from birth to age 19.
British government aimed for every child to have the educational and social conditions to be healthy, safe, enjoy and achieve, contribute, and achieve economic well-being.
Policy makers appropriated ideas from the US No Child Left Behind policy.
A key problem was the reliance on a normative understanding of the child as a subject of neoliberal capitalist society.
While majority world contexts view the child in terms of community contribution, in the minority world, the child is a neoliberal vessel.
The child is innocent/responsible, player/worker, achiever/learner.
The marketisation of education creates new norms associated with achievement and the promotion of new forms of disability.
Neoliberal conceptions find their way into subjectivities.
Parents worry about child development.
Education and citizenship are fused.
Developmentalism creates the ideal citizen/learner.
Disabled children are deemed to be appalling or appealing.
There is a cultural imperative to fit in, to strive to be normal.
Deborah Marks draws attention to 'normotic illness': abnormally normal individuals who are 'overly stable, secure, comfortable and socially extravert; ultra-rational, objective, lacking imagination and empathy'.
Valerie Harwood and Nici Humphrey suggest parents want their child to be 'exceptional'.
Educational institutions are subjected to neoliberal-ableism.
Learners must demonstrate normalcy and abilities.
Demands of ableism fit the discourse of neoliberalism - inciting individual accountability and reduced state support.
Education defines the hyper-normal and über-abnormal.
New eugenics discourse sorts human beings on dis/ability.
New disability industry with billion-dollar outputs.
Labels like ADHD induce a clinical mindset.
Growth of ADHD transforms disruption into dysfunction.
School cultures are assumed to be normatively fine, while some children are cast as deficient intruders.
ADHD acts as an inference ticket to a quasimedical diagnosis.
Roger Slee worries about pathologising children, causing teachers to resist applying diagnostic probes to their own practices.
Just as disability is named, so too is ability.
Ableist Obsession
Educational achievement is of paramount importance, from ADHD drugs for college students to baby mindgyms and helicopter parenting.
The educational self has become an ableist obsession.
Inclusion Into What?
Roger Slee suggests inclusive education can become a bureaucratic means to minimize difference, maintaining existing structures.
Coming out as disabled can put one in a vulnerable position.
Inclusion can be seen as devaluing the educational requirements of normal children.
Inclusive education promotes a vision of the ideal learner as an entrepreneurial pupil.
Successful inclusion is measured against individuals inculcating themselves into a system of entrepreneurial success.
This is not radical inclusion, but merely celebration of those who manage to pass the threshold.
The radical ends of inclusive education should be harnessed by seeking out allies.
Challenging Neoliberal-Able Education: Critical Pedagogy
Values of social justice are important.
Inclusion is implementation of alternative curricula that make schools welcoming.
Critical pedagogy confronts cultural violence of neoliberal education.
Rooted in work of Paulo Freire and Augusto Boal.
Emerged in US and Britain as re-reading of education as liberation.
Early writings were Marxist, while later contributions embraced feminism and anti-racism.
Alliances between disability studies and critical pedagogy have been less developed.
Critical pedagogy reshapes education by challenging forces of neoliberalism that wage war against collective structures.
Inclusive spaces are found in critical pedagogy's emphasis on creating environments in which non-aggressive, receptive faculties are developed.
This reclaiming of the politics of education opposes the entrepreneurial character of neoliberal-able education.
Transforming the Meaning of Education
Critical pedagogy addresses why a learner's failings occur.
Schools need challenging when they perpetuate social relationships needed to sustain the dominant culture.
Bringing critical pedagogy and disability studies together fundamentally rethinks education's relationship with society.
Critcal pedegogy suggests:
all individuals in spite of difficulties are respected as equals;
it is accepted that participation might be different for some people but inclusion in social life is the goal for all;
equality is an end not a means;
it is not necessary to be equal in terms of ability or talent as one can still contribute to the community;
the value of both non-marketised and non-productive contributions are recognised;
a redistribution of resources is required.
Key Elements of Critical Pedagogy:
Transforms the meaning of education, teaching, relationships and self-awareness.
Is a moral and political practice.
Is an organizing act of collective education.
Replaces authority-based banking method with liberatory methods.
Is less about technique and more about cultural politics.
Resists corporatization of education.
Views education as part of the community.
Views education as social transformation.
Challenges privileging of reason and embraces alternatives.
Transforms knowledge as part of a struggle for human rights.
Provokes students to deliberate and resist.
Views the classroom as ideological.
Embraces subaltern voices but does not take a laisser-faire approach.
Looks for incidences of student resistance.
Contests desirability of advancing minority causes.
Promotes tolerance and dialogue.
Is responsive to oppressive language and develops alternative critical forms.
To enable participation teachers and schools require:
broadened curricula choice
radical changes to pedagogical practice
*Critical pedagogy of school culture places moral and political principles before administrative convenience.
Traits of inclusive schools:
Value diverse needs.
Fosters care, belonging, and community.
Provides belonging even if the child cannot academically attain.
Emphasizes acceptance, tolerance, and creativity.
Following Corbett and Slee, inclusion engages with cultural synergies and the hidden curricula of schools.
Inclusive schools promote
difference within education as an aspect of reality
reject views of normality as homogeneous
a pedagogy of diversity
Broaden Curricula
Students are excluded when curricula are narrow.
School curricula contributes to poor behavior when they do not engage.
Innovative curricula developments can bring in pupils.
Curriculum must be entrenched in disability studies.
Recasting curriculum to engage with politics, history, and theories of disability studies may engender critical literacy.
Impairment Literacy
Challenges disabling environments and ablest embodied knowledge and practices.
Pedagogy must be an encounter with the disabled self.
Disability studies should be an ethical component of all curricula.
Aids teachers and pupils to articulate an ethics of disability.
Views disability as an alternative source of values and norms.
Promotes alternative teacher-learner relationships.
Revise the Teacher-Learner Relationship
Inclusive school nurtures relationships.
Jarman suggests that a feminist ethics-of-care approach complements a disability study, and support transforms into mutuality and interdependence.
The Issue is not about treating everyone the same.
Apple promotes horizontal pedagogy:
Working alongside pupils as agents of their own learning
Permitting more unruly behavior, so long as it does not violate the other children.
Critical pedagogies are caring pedagogies.
Acknowledge Social Justic
Caring and reciprocity in the educational relationship
ordinariness, extraordinariness, intuition and personal shared understandings between the agents of pedagogy
Recognizing the potency of "Becoming"
A special unit permits, to support one another through the careful interventions of teachers and support staff.
Critical pedagogies invite relational becomings of teaching and support staff too.
Inclusive schools should have staff trained to support students with disabilities.
Teaching training programs should include education and disability studies to link to the every day workings of schools.
This approach to teaching and learning is what Wedell defines as co production. Treat everyone equally, but not the same.
Teachers needs to be involved in self critique.
Promote Conscientisation
Students and teachers need deeper understanding of social realities to prompt community recreation.
This is achieved by creating a space for dialogues to challenge norms.
The willingness to embrace this is encouraged through conscientisation around the politics of disability.
Inclusive reading can have:
Material that reflects the increasing diversity of classrooms.
Promote positive attitudes towards abilities.
Creative Industries
Inclusion can be found from creative industries, like disabled performing artists which help bring awareness.
Conscientisation can enact a new ontology of disability.
Conclusions:
This chapter revealed challenges in advocating an inclusive approach to education in a global context deeply marketed and marked by neoliberalism and ableism.
Critical pedagogy, radicalized by disability studies, offers alternate versions of education.