Global Education Reforms and the Italian Dispositif of Inclusion

• In Event: Disability and the Policy Enactment of Global Education Policies in Italy, Chile, and the United States

Abstract

a. Objectives

This paper analyzes the enactment of the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) and Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) as part of a dispositif of power that governs children identified as disabled or with special educational needs. By exploring the micro-practices of inclusion in schools, it illustrates how this dispositif mobilizes an educational norm that produces disabled subjectivities through strategies of power, making concepts of inclusion, self-fulfillment and freedom intelligible and enactable through economic and medical knowledges, thus sidelining the political aspects of disability. The presentation also foregrounds an ethical approach to rights, self-fulfillment, and equity to rethink disabled bodies as part of human diversity.

b. Theoretical framework

By using a post-structural perspective (Foucault, 1982), the paper explores the ontological premises of policies and identifies children with disability and special educational needs as made subjects through certain relations of power and knowledge. It problematizes the liberal thinking that underpins most of the (Italian) special pedagogy approaches and maintains that individuals are constituted through regimes of practices mobilized by contingent and context-laden truths that shape their identity.

c. Methods

The paper analyses the effects of power relations in producing disabled individuals by decentring the humanist subject and making them visible through a contingent and context-bound norm. By using Foucault’s (1994) dispositif, as an analytical and diagnostic device, it enables the problematisation of mundane practices of education that reproduce the child with disabilities as the other of the educational norm. It explores the micro-practices of the enactment of the global reforms through national policies that the disability dispositif enables in Italian schools.

d. Data sources

Data sources included Italian education policies that operationalise inclusive education (Framework Law no. 104/1992 defined disability, Directive of 27 December 2012; Ministerial Circular no. 8/2013; Buona Scuola Decree no. 66/2017), and policy objects including Individualized Education Plans, Personalized Didactic Plans, and Annual Inclusion Plans for schools.

e. Substantiated conclusions

The paper shows how the enactment of Italian policies have a regulatory effect on the school population (biopolitics) and a disciplinary effect on the self-government of young people with disabilities (biopower) (Foucault, 2004; Ball, 2013). It explores the management of children with disabilities through: a) objectification through medical and pedagogic services; b) subjectification through self-development; and c) rehabilitation towards a state of normality to overcome exclusions. The analysis illustrates how children with disabilities are included in the mainstream classroom but pathologized as subjects of deficit, and how the dispositif can support an analysis of ethical work for subjectively free citizenry.

f. Scholarly significance of work

The dispositif shows the workings of power relations in special education’s perspectives on disability, making visible the political dimension of pedagogy, assessment, and curriculum. It illustrates the connection between teaching and learning practices and national policies, and ultimately with global policies. The aim is to diagnose and rethink the workings of the norm in producing notions of rights, freedom, and inclusion.

Author

• Francesca Peruzzo, University of Birmingham
  Presenting Author