From Inclusion to Community (Poster 3)

• In Event: Critical Special Education: Reexamination, Reimagination, and Rethinking of Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

Leveraging community philosophy and wholeness psychology (Anzaldúa, 1987; Cajete, 2016; Collins, 2020; Esposito, 2010; Harding, 1981; Jung, 2012; Noddings, 1996), I examine discourses of inclusion in the field of special education. In this critical inquiry I question whether educational inclusion alone can fulfill goals of liberation and justice, as entrance itself does not address the societal mechanisms of power that manifest within schooling.

Access to education historically has required unidirectional movement toward a normative center in which “inclusive education provides a veneer for assimilationist imperatives that obscures the consideration of disablement as cultural politics” (Slee, 1997, p. 56). Dominant cultural politics and ideologies, such as the presumed benevolence of colonial capitalist principles like independence, competition, efficiency, achievement, and production, create a context through which disablement arises as an embodied pathology (Acevedo et al., 2024; Apple, 1995; Author, Erevelles, 2024; Oliver, 1999). As the institution of education remains beholden to abled, white, patriarchal, cisheteronormative, class-privileged standards (Author; Erevelles, 2002), disabled bodies and minds are perpetually deemed as deviant from societal norms and thus in need of rehabilitation, correction, or intervention, more significantly for Black, Brown, or Indigenous people (Tefera et al., 2023). Such expectations of conformity perpetuate binaries of normal and abnormal, proficient and deficient, dependent and independent, inclusion and exclusion, or disabled and abled, thereby denying the present wholeness of students and of the institution of education.

I use critical analysis to explore how the organizing principle of community can expand the dichotomous inclusion-exclusion framework in special education. Just as wholeness requires the integration of an individual’s opposites, community is the collective integration of opposites. Whether collectively or individually, the process toward wholeness requires integrating realities into one’s awareness, realities that have been repressed, erased, rejected, excluded, or hidden. However, integration cannot occur with a mere charitable recognition that intends to change, improve, fix, deny, reject, or erase that which exists. Doing so undermines true integration.

I find that community as a representation of wholeness contains great possibility toward justice in education because community provides the foundation for human becoming. According to prominent voices of various freedom movements, transformation of the collective is mutually constituted by transformation of the self (Anzaldúa, 1987; Cajete, 2016; Freire, 1970; Harding, 1981; Rendón, 2023). Contrary to common uses of community that connote either the public sphere, shared affiliation, purpose, or identity, I conceptualize community as the reciprocity, awareness, and agency that results from wholeness. No physical or ideological center exists in community; instead, multidirectionality, heterogeneity, complexity, dynamicity, and socio-spatial-historical orientations anchor community. For example, least restrictive would not refer to the normative, general education classroom but rather to the center of the student (Cajete, 2016). Restriction would refer to any hidden reality that keeps school personnel from understanding the student’s totality. I conclude by addressing the pervasive binary logic in the field (Acevdeo et al., 2024; Artiles, 2019; Tefera et al., 2023) and offer suggestions of integration toward the wholeness of special education scholarship.

Author

• Amy L. Ferrell, University of Colorado - Denver