Where Are the Children's Experiences? Analysing Social and Cultural Exclusion in 'Special' and 'Mainstream' Schools

Abstract

In this paper we employ ethnographic data to illustrate that disabled children encounter discriminatory notions of 'normality ' and 'difference' in both 'special' and 'mainstream' schools, and that these experiences relate to both the structural forces in schools, and the everyday individual and cultural practices of adults and children. In contrast to much of the literature in the eld, this paper examines the everyday life experiences of adults and disabled children from their own perspective. We highlight disabled children's own criticisms of 'special' and 'mainstream' schools to illustrate the uid nature of disabled children's lives within educational settings. We argue that schools will be prevented from becoming fully inclusive until adults who control schools take account of children's views of speci c educational processes and until educational policy makers adopt a more nuanced multi-level approach to inclusion. Children should be enabled to challenge the structural, cultural and individual conditions which create disability.

Young people's embodied social capital and performing disability

“…The paper, as a component of this broader special edition, begins to address the marginalisation of 'disabled' young people in geography and social sciences (Davis and Watson, 2001). The absence of the voices and experiences of disabled children within the social science arena reflects and reproduces their particularly marginalised position within broader society.…”

'Me and the 5 P's': Negotiating Rights-Based Critical Disabilities Studies and Social Inclusion

“…Others such as Cockburn (2002) argue that this distinction often results in ineffective social policies that do little to challenge the root causes of inequality. This distinction is similar to that made between social policies aiming to provide opportunities for 'integration' into the same social spaces, and those that actually aim to enable 'inclusion' defined as 'equality of experience' within the same social spaces (Davis and Watson, 2001;Davis et aL, 2003).…”

Children and disability: Special or included

“…For children categorised as 'special', their access to resources is not assured until they prove themselves sufficiently different to qualify. In such ways special education theory and practice constructs, maintains and institutionalises difference (Davis & Watson, 2001) and does not address diversity in the context of the wider population.…”

“…The term 'special education' refers to a way of thinking about children as different, distinctive or 'other' and a way of thinking about teaching that is embedded in the medical and psychological deficit models of the special education field (Biklen, 1988;Davis & Watson, 2001;Slee, 2001). Maintaining special education, therefore, involves a commitment to maintaining a particular way of thinking about children with disabilities that sees them as separate and not to be included in how we think or act toward other (non categorised) children (Brown & Riddell, 1994).…”