The paradox of in/exclusion: Special education schools as transient spaces of marginality and relationality in contemporary China

• In Event: Critical Perspectives and Globalizing Implications: Varied Explorations of Global Education and Power

Proposal

Since the turn of the 21st century, inclusive education has been established globally as a basic human right for children with disabilities to be educated in the least restrictive environment alongside typically developing peers. In China, however, a controversial model of voluntary mainstreaming where special needs children were largely unidentified and to borrow Lane (1995)’s metaphor, “drowning in the mainstream,” has been supplemented by a “segregate then educate” policy in recent years to chart different educational pathways for different ability groups. Since the early 2000s, special education schools have sprung up across the country with growing governmental support; there, students with a range of special needs are accommodated in socially, spatially, and educationally segregated settings.

In the global movement towards disability inclusion, why has China embraced segregated placement in its newest round of special education policy? What kind of space are special education schools? How do actors make sense of the spaces and negotiate stigma and marginality for a better future? And ultimately, how can a deepened understanding of disability placement in a non-Western context contribute to a more expansive dialogue on inclusive education globally? This paper pairs historical, policy and ethnographic research to examine special education schools as spaces of marginality and potentiality in today’s China. As I will illustrate, far from being self-defining and sovereign spaces, special education schools in China are nonetheless sites of potentiality where educators and guardians craft a nuanced story of care and pedagogies amidst social stigma, and offer insight on how inclusion needs to be broadened from the entanglement with place towards relationality and being.

In and out of institutions: A brief history of special education in China

This section examines how China’s disability history is intimately intertwined with colonial encounters and western influences.

In the late 19th century, Western missionaries set up the earliest schools for the visually impaired and the deaf, which marked the beginning of special education in China (Pang and Richey 2006). In the 1950s and 1960s, influenced by then-ally Soviet Union, newly founded People’s Republic of China set up segregated residential schools where students participated in physical labor and political life in order to remediate their disabilities (Piao 1998). The early days of institutionalization practiced by the missionaries and communists met with the push for inclusion in the reform era. In 1988, China joined the global bandwagon and piloted the Learning in Regular Classrooms (LRC, suiban jiudu) initiative to admit students with mild physical or intellectual disabilities into neighborhood schools (State Council 1988). However, the LRC movement’s failure in debunking ableism in the general education setting allows normative ideas of learning to continue as-is, and reduces the inclusive rhetoric to perpetuation of the status quo. As a result, the LRC movement’s token inclusion of students with special needs has led to renewed policy interest in expanding special education schools in recent decades.

From the missionary establishments for the visually impaired and the deaf to the communist residential schools, from the LRC movement to the contemporary revival of special education institutions, de/re-institutionalization has been a constant theme in the educational history of China’s special needs population as a mechanism of care and control, with unmistakable western influences entangled with domestic appropriations. It challenges us to examine the peculiar role the institution continues to play in our contemporary striving for disability justice.

Rethinking spatial segregation as zone of proximity: A theoretical framework

This section explores the theoretical framework of how the micro geography of marginal spaces may both reinscribe exclusion and entail particular kinds of relationships to transform vulnerable groups’ lived reality. Social scientists have grappled with the notion of proximity when thinking about socio-spatial marginalization. Disability studies scholars (Rutherford 2020; Landsman 2009; Rapp and Ginsburg 2011; Mercieca 2013), in particular, have used the notion “zone of proximity” to explore the effect of nondisabled persons living closely with special needs children and developing new imaginaries of kinship, personhood, and advocacy in an ableist society. Special education schools in China constitute an urban marginal zone, where students and families with disabilities experience paradoxically “inclusion through exclusion” in an enduring ableist society that reinscribes normalcy and its Other as the very prerequisite for inclusion. At the same time, they are also a “zone of proximity” where teachers, students, and their guardians do not just occupy a space they are forced into, but enliven it for shared subject-making and creative self-fashioning.

The research methods and setting

I conducted in-depth interviews, participant observation, and focus groups in one special education school, which I call Sunbelt, in Guangzhou Municipality in southeast China over five and a half non-consecutive months between 2016 and 2023. Established as a government-funded special school in 2012 and located in the outskirts of Guangzhou, Sunbelt served the catchment area of a peri-urban, semi-rural district where migrant workers and low-income populations resided, and operated on a rental property at the time of research. The majority of Sunbelt families came from working-class backgrounds, as having a disabled family member often leads to downward social mobility due to the need for extra caretaking and healthcare expenses.

Findings & Conclusion

The findings illustrate the struggle, negotiation, and moral striving that went into the making of Sunbelt and its actors as “special.” Specifically, I offer an account of how families came to the special school (Theme 1: The windy paths to Sunbelt and the school (non)choice), how teachers viewed their work and repurposed stigma into positive identities (Theme 2: Special educators and circuit of (non)reciprocity; Theme 3: Temporal plurality and the re-purposing of stigma in the special school), and how pedagogies and experiences in the zone of proximity enabled fictive kinship (Theme 4: Emerging kinship narratives in the zone of proximity). The study highlights the plurality of inclusive trajectories globally and takes seriously the question of “inclusion into what…” in order to broaden inclusion beyond placement towards new sociability, kinship, and public intimacy, without which the inclusive agenda remains elusive.

Author

• Jinting Wu, State University of New York, University at Buffalo