Reconceptualising Disability as Our Problem: Collaborative Critical and Dialogical Pedagogy in Inclusive Education drawing on Intersectionality

• In Event: Parents and Communities as Holistic Support Systems for their Students

Proposal

There have been growing policy reforms to provide inclusive education for children with disabilities globally, and pedagogy has a crucial role in practice. However, existing literature tends to focus on the role of teachers rather than how the schools enable the development of capacities of children with disabilities to act and exercise their rights. This is problematic because this knowledge gap often results from the fixed assumption that regards the teacher as a knower and students with disabilities as a learner. Continued lack of attention to the agency of children with disabilities to address issues can be understood as the reproduction of epistemic injustice against children with disabilities, who tend to be excluded from research inquiry.

The purpose of the study is to center the educational experiences of children with disabilities, to examine what pedagogies education institutions and classrooms could embrace that enable the development of capacities of children with disabilities to act.

“Education has the potential to oppress or liberate” (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016, p.159). Hill Collins & Bilge (2016, 160) argues that Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (Freire, 1970), can be read as “a core text for intersectionality”. According to them, Freire claims that power relation analysis should consider gender, ethnicity and disability, age and other dimensions of inequalities. For Freire, pedagogy is not merely technical definitions, but more about “education as praxis” (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016, 161). Understanding pedagogy as a praxis can forefront the issues with social justice. Pedagogy matters since particular pedagogical practices can enhance or retard social justice, and “for oppressed people, different pedagogies can deepen understandings of social justice or limit them” (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016, 161).

Education for critical consciousness potentially enhances social justice. Critical education, however, is hardly applied to the field of inclusive education for children with disabilities, and is limited especially in low-income countries. While Liasidou (2012) proposed the usefulness of intersectionality to develop critical pedagogy as an emancipatory theoretical and analytical tool, debates remain at a theoretical level, and it is unclear how to practice.

This research uses the theory of intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989) in relation to critical education and critical disability studies, by applying them to examine diverse challenges in education among children with disabilities within schools and the role of students with disabilities themselves in acting to protest for justice.

Methodologically, this study is based on multiple case studies of inclusive education in post-conflict Nepal, where unequal distribution of power by social categories led to a decade-long conflict. Drawing on intersectionality as a methodological framework, participants included approximately 30 children with and without disabilities between grade six to ten in private and public inclusive schools in Kathmandu, ensuring diversity in relation to types of disability, gender, caste and ethnicity. Creative methods were developed and used to conduct research with children with disabilities and unpack their complex and often hidden experiences of injustice within schools.

Findings demonstrate that inclusive education in practice is still understood in a narrow sense in terms of ensuring children with and without disabilities learn in the same school, rather than what kind of pedagogy is to be employed in the classroom in Nepal. This is problematic because meaningful interactions hardly occur in practice due to the lack of space that enables transformative learning to truly understand the struggles of the oppressed and change the attitudes and behaviour of teachers and other students in the classroom.

This research can offer original insights into the field of inclusive education, by highlighting the importance of critically reconceptualising “inclusive” pedagogy (Skidmore, 2001) by starting from the lived experiences of children and people with disabilities. Previous research on the dominant pedagogical discourses of deviance and inclusive pedagogy has mostly been restricted to the role of teachers and adults as the knower, which often fails to analyse the struggles and insights of the oppressed, children with disabilities. Instead, this research argues pedagogy should actively engage with children with disabilities to grant epistemic justice to children with disabilities in school practice. This study argues that intersectionality’s concept of social justice and critical pedagogy are needed as an emancipatory theoretical and analytical tool to challenge and the limitation of existing pedagogical discourses.

Moreover, analysis of the educational experiences of children with disabilities demonstrated that, disability is not only what the environment creates but also how people make children and people with disabilities feel. From this perspective, previous studies on inclusive education that tend to emphasise issues related to children with disabilities are unsatisfactory, because these studies tend to overlook relationality, the important influence of everyday interaction in schools on children’s disabled experiences. Critical education’s dialogical pedagogy and intersectionality’s focus on relationality speak to the importance of navigating differences in developing a critical consciousness for individuals and knowledge production. Thus, critical and dialogical pedagogy needs to be aimed at fostering meaningful interactions between children with and without disability.

Lastly, critical and dialogical pedagogy should not be limited to understanding social inequalities. It should also contribute to the development of students with disabilities’ confidence in their agency, and their capacity to exercise their agency. In reality, however, this may not be achieved by children with disabilities only, who tend to face functional difficulties, while these difficulties should not determine what they can do. To make schools as venues for social protest from children with disabilities, collaborative critical and dialogical pedagogy is needed, where children and adults with and without disabilities collaborate to act, to enhance the rights and learning experiences of children with disabilities.

It is key to embed the collaborative pedagogy into everyday lives of children, rather than make it a special event only, if we aim to change the attitude and behaviour of stakeholders towards children with disabilities, from “their” problem to “our” problem.

These findings could inform similar tensions in other low-income contexts by providing an analytical tool to critically examine educational challenges in practice drawing on lived experiences of children with disabilities in schools and enhance multiple forms of literacy, from an intersectional perspective.

Author

• Anna Hata, UCL