Inhumanizing the Concept of “Literacy” in an Early Childhood Special Education Provision: (Neuro)Queering Authorship
Sat, April 13, 11:25am to 12:55pm, Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Floor: Level 5, Salon AAbstract
Objectives or purposes.
This paper pivots around two vignettes of “intensive interactions,” from a fourteen-month sensory ethnography conducted in an early childhood special education classroom. I draw from the scholar-activist framework of ‘neuroqueerness’ (Yergeau, 2018), and Blackqueer theorist Ashon Crawley’s (2020) writing on ‘loneliness’ and ‘friendship’, to enact—what queer of color theorist Muñoz (1999) might term—a ‘dis-identification’ of neurodivergence: a neuroqueering that ‘works on and against’ humanist definitions of literacy.
Perspectives or theoretical framework.
Literacy instruction in special education classrooms maintains homonormative expectations of literacy capacity, whereby neurodivergent students are encouraged to pass as neurotypical by ‘approximating values of normalcy’ (Mitchell, 2014). Concomitantly, and while literacy scholars have problematised the idea of literacy for how it might better attend to embodiment, place, and intimacy (Flewitt, 2005; Hackett, 2021; Sherbine, 2019), use of neuroqueer theories to problematise literacy instruction (e.g., Kleelamp, 2020; Smilges, 2022) in special education have tended to rely on neurotypical/humanist definitions of literacy, thereby reinforcing normative understandings of literacy ‘ability’ as a set of individual competencies and so neurotypical hierarchies of em-body-mind-ment (of which Man is always the apex).
Methods.
In this paper, I share two vignettes from my PhD research, which was a sensory ethnography conducted as a series of weekly music composition workshops over 14-months. Although the wider study combined field notes with audio recordings and creative composition with a whole class of 30 children, the two vignettes shared here draw from 1:1 improvisations conducted with children who also spent some of their school time in a small, adjacent special educational provision and they were only recorded using field notes. In these workshops, I used Intensive Interactions as a structure for our compositions. Intensive Interactions is a communication tool for exploring reciprocity in communication practices. Rather than teaching linguistic concepts (for instance, through Makaton signs or picture exchange) or modifying behaviour (for instance, through social stories or applied behaviour analysis), Intensive Interactions emphasizes reciprocity and intimacy, with the support worker attending, mimicking, or responding to the service user’s every stim, sigh, loll, and rock.
Findings.
In the first vignette, Abdulkadir and I empty a cart of plastic food. In the second vignette, Rei and I topple about and spin around on rickety climbing frame. I consider how our interactions came to be mediated through each other but also by the plastic food and rickety frame. This, I argue, resembles what Crawley draws from Glissant to call an ongoing negotiation of the consent not to be a single being (Glissant, in Diawara, 2011). This negotiation, I argue, problematises the humanist idea of authorship of a literacy event coming from a bounded human being because of the deeply intimate way in which our capacities were modulated by each other and those environmental features without clear notions of intentionality. This negotiation of consent, like Crawley’s theorisation of friendship, is ‘anti-institutional’ in its rejection of neurotypical, humanist notions of the able, human, literate subject.