Understanding curriculum as normalizing text: disability studies meet curriculum theory

Abstract

Although post‐structuralists within curriculum studies have examined many contexts of curriculum theory, they have been silent on disability. This silence is worthy of study, especially because of the growing significance of disability studies in the humanities and the social sciences. I question post‐structuralist arguments in curriculum theory from the epistemological standpoint of disability studies. I extend the post‐structuralist project of deconstructing and reinterpreting text to examine the material implications derived from interpretations of normality as a discursive construction. I ask the following questions: What are the historical, social, and economic conditions that produce the distances and inter‐relationships that exist between the ‘disabled’ and the ‘normal’ world? How do these conditions prevent scholars from providing emancipatory representations of Otherness? How can educators construct a curriculum that can produce oppositional knowledges that will contribute to the possibility of not just textual but also material and social transformation for all students?

Acknowledgements

I thank Robert Young for helping me work through several difficult sections in this paper, and Robert Boostrom and the unknown reviewers for their helpful comments.

Notes

Nirmala Erevelles is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies, 208 Wilson Hall, Box 870302, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487‐0302, USA; e‐mail: [email protected]. Her research interests are in disability studies, social foundations of education, feminist theory, cultural studies, post‐colonial theory, and qualitative methodology. She is currently working on a book on post‐coloniality and disability in transnational contexts.

1. See Davis (1997), Linton (1998), Mitchell and Snyder (2000), Albrecht et al. (2001), Wilson and Lewiecki‐Wilson (2001), Snyder et al. (2002), and Gabel (2004).

2. See Thomson (1997b), Gabel (2001), Ware (2001), a radio programme by Block (1997), and web‐sites such as the Disability Social History Project (n.d.), Disability Studies in the Humanities (n.d.), and Edge: Education for Disability and Gender Equity (n.d.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nirmala Erevelles

Nirmala Erevelles is associate professor in the Department of Educational Leadership, Policy, and Technology Studies, 208 Wilson Hall, Box 870302, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487‐0302, USA; e‐mail: [email protected]. Her research interests are in disability studies, social foundations of education, feminist theory, cultural studies, post‐colonial theory, and qualitative methodology. She is currently working on a book on post‐coloniality and disability in transnational contexts.