Agency in Real-Enough Time: Situating Teachers’ Efforts Toward Inclusion Within Local and Enduring Struggles

• In Event: Roundtable Session 3
  In Roundtable Session: Disrupting Norms of Ability and Disability

Abstract

Reviewing qualitative data from multiple sites, I deployed the framework offered by Holland and Lave (2001) to unravel the local and enduring struggles that informed the discursive contexts in which teachers worked towards “inclusion”. The study disclosed teachers’ practices at the confluence of multiple discourses such as time and individualization that collectively constructed inclusion in uncertain terms. Data revealed that mobilizing notions of personhood both expanded and complicated meanings of accessibility in classroom practice. Drawing on the entanglement of diverse commitments within educators’ practices, I offer an understanding of inclusion as a pedagogy of deferral that privileges the pragmatic negotiation with local and widely circulating discourses while simultaneously upholding long-term commitments to equity, including the disruption of norms of ability.

Author

• Srikala Naraian, Teachers College, Columbia University