Inspecting Space-Time in the Classroom: Leveraging Crip Theory to Upend Exclusion in Educational Contexts

• In Event: Beyond Normal: Cripping Policy and Practice to Construct Liberatory Educational Possibilities

Abstract

Purpose
Educational scholars have embraced spatial analyses to understand and upend exclusion in educational contexts (Author, 2021; Gulson & Symes, 2007; Mann & Dudek, 2023). Within inclusive education, Waitoller and Annamma (2017) called for a spatial turn to analyze spatial production contributes to injustice toward disabled and minoritized children in schools. Spatial analyses are often guided by questions about the educational placement of disabled children. However, scholars of temporality challenge the “elevation of space over time in educational philosophies of inclusion” (Saul, 2020, p. 11). As two scholars who examine space and time and their implications for disabled children in schools, we explore how disabled understandings of space-time can dismantle ideologies of ability (Siebers, 2008) in schools.
Theoretical Framework
We draw from theoretical frameworks that center dialogical relations between space and time (Ritella et al., 2021). Exclusion often operates through the imposition and reproduction of normative ability in school systems. Space-time relations are crucial to understanding these processes. We draw on Ritella and colleagues’ (2021) conceptualization of chronotropic analysis in education research, focusing on how embodied and discursive interactions are embedded within relations of space-time. Drawing on disability studies concepts of crip technoscience (Hamraie & Fritsch, 2019) and crip time (McRuer, 2018; Samuels & Freeman, 2021), we centered the knowledge and perspectives of disabled people to imagine disabled futures (Kafer, 2013). By “cripping” space-time we expose normative productions of space and time and prioritize how disabled children manipulate and negotiate these productions. Cripping space-time is crucial for imagining liberatory educational possibilities.

Methods & Data Sources
We engaged a secondary analysis (Vila-Henninger et al., 2022) of data drawn from two broader qualitative studies : (a) Author 1 examined how teachers’ sense-making surrounding inclusive education and disability was constructed in conjunction with time and temporality, (b) Author 2 explored how socio-spatial dimensions of U.S. schooling influenced the ways teacher candidates (TC) made meaning of whiteness and ability throughout their educational journeys. We asked: How is inclusion/exclusion constructed in relation to childhood disability across space-time? Data sources included: interviews and education journey maps with 12 TCs, interviews and classroom observations with 22 in-service elementary school teachers. We oriented toward building theory through 3 stages of abductive coding (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014; Timmermans & Tavory, 2012): generating an abductive codebook, abductive data reduction through code equations (i.e., combinations of codes to operationalize broader phenomena), and in-depth abducted qualitative analysis.

Findings & Significance
We generated 3 interrelated themes. First, participants shared dilemmas about the placement of disabled children in general classrooms/schools vs. special classrooms/schools, highlighting the temporal underpinnings of a spatial concern. That is, spaces were constructed to maintain normativity such that those children who did not conform necessitated placement in different spaces operating in different, crip time(s). Next, our findings highlight how ideologies of ability (i.e., preference for able-bodiedness; Siebers, 2008), were constructed through the “discursive and material aspects of space-time relations” (Ritella et al., 2021, p. 5). Finally, our findings reveal how politicizing space-time is crucial to challenging exclusionary norms in school spaces.

Authors

• Tanushree Sarkar, University of Missouri

• Maggie Beneke, University of Washington