Bring Back the Asylum: Reimagining Inclusion in the Presence of Others

• In Event: Roundtable Session 5
  In Roundtable Session: Disabiling Concepts of Inclusion and Exclusion

Abstract

How to educate children with disabilities has been debated against the backdrop of larger cultural understandings of inclusion and exclusion. The idea people with disabilities had a right to go to school birthed the ‘mainstream’ movement and its later incarnation ‘inclusion.’ These movements were direct attempts to reverse earlier institutionalization. But for many children, larger society’s version of inclusion equates to a form of systematic exclusion. Special education students from marginalized groups are being restrained, subjected to isolation, suspensions, expelled, and arrested at rates far exceeding White peers. Borrowing from Fernand Deligny’s conceptualization of the ‘asylum’ as a place of refuge, this paper imagines what kinds of schools and classrooms would materialize if we were to ‘bring back the asylum’?

Authors

• Gail M. Boldt, The Pennsylvania State University

• Joseph Michael Valente, The Pennsylvania State University