Reconceptualizing Disability in Education (Critical Issues in Disabilities and Education)

This book provides an essential critical exploration of problematic discourses, practices and pedagogies that inform how disability is presently understood and responded to within the field of education. Iannacci interrogates and destabilizes ableist grand narratives that dominate every aspect of how disability is linguistically, bureaucratically, procedurally and pedagogically configured within education. Ultimately this book seeks to forward human rights for people with disabilities in educational contexts by clarifying and operationalizing inclusion so that it is not just a model necessitated by a hierarchy of legality, but rather a set of beliefs and practices based on critical analyses and a reconceptualization of current understandings and responses to disability that prevent inclusion and human rights from being realized. As the book is grounded in reconceptualist theorizing it draws on multiple perspectives including critical disability theory, post-modernism, critical theory, critical pedagogy and social constructivism to deconstruct and destabilize what is currently taken for granted about disability and those ascribed disabled identities within education. A variety of personal, professional, research experiences and data are offered and drawn on to critically address questions regarding philosophical, epistemological, pedagogical, organizational, economic and leadership issues as they relate to disability in education. Critical incidents, interviews, documents, artefacts etc. are drawn on and narratively presented to explore how disability is presently configured in language, identification and placement processes, discourses, pedagogies and interactions with students deemed disabled as well as their parents/caregivers. The critical narrative approach fosters alternative ways of thinking, speaking, being and doing that forward a human rights focused model of disability that sees as its mandate the amelioration of people with disabilities within education.