Undoing ableism - teaching about disability in K-12 classrooms

Susan Baglieri and Priya Lalvani place critical enquiry at the centre of teaching and learning about Disability and Ableism. They identify Education as pivotal for citizenship formation in order to become fully participating members in a pluralistic society. Rejecting the persistent idea of the medical model of disability that permeates Education, this book posits that both the academic discipline and the US education system require reform. Proponents of the medical model of disability, consequently, are complicit in creating otherness, division, and exclusion for those who, according to this model’s tenets, are regarded as inherently inferior, cast as outsiders challenging cultural norms. In agreement with the eminent progressive educator Paulo Freire, the authors reject what the former referred to as the banking model of education as it constitutes an understanding of education based on accruing knowledge with which to buy a place in society. The banking model usually ignores the societal, political, and cultural context in which schools operate.

Education, according to the authors, is, or ought to be, an interactive, collaborative effort, where all pupils are active participants. The authors’ work takes place within a critical education tradition that regards participative citizenship as a key element of education and society building, an ongoing entwined activity that has little in common with the banking model or its ontological sidekick, the medical model of disability. Being unable to accrue normatively sanctioned knowledge whilst being constructed as inferior can hardly be described as conducive to full participation for disabled pupils and, subsequently, the adults they have the realistic opportunity to become.

In progressive education traditions, school buildings mean more than the imparting of subject matter. Critical and progressive educators assume that value systems, behaviours and responses to societal phenomena are formed in the image of those responsible for national curricula and those headteachers who oversee schools. Since Disability and Ableism usually are implicit, silenced or actively eradicated, be that through prejudice or prevalent social norms at the institutional level, suggesting that Disability and Ableism be put on the curriculum for K-12 schools in such a context and societal climate is a necessary move. Schools should not be hermetically sealed bodies of knowledge, accessible only to normally functioning children where teachers enter disability free classrooms, neutrally imparting their subject matter. The authors mention intersecting social injustices, too, for instance the disadvantaged climate in which BAME pupils progress through the US education system and the problematic ways in which prejudices against entire groups intersect with ableist notions of normality. On the other side of such an argument are those who express concern for overworked teachers, stating that workloads are already too heavy without their having to attend to disabled pupils. This falls under the overarching theme that is supposed to legitimise disability-related discriminatory conduct as mentioned in chapter 12, Undoing Ableism with Critical Pedagogy. I would argue that such a theme has become part of several well-established tropes in the education sector and society generally. Justifying exclusion based on intellectual inferiority, for example, is commonly used by some parents demanding that disabled pupils not be taught in the same classroom as their children. In the same vein, the authors mention scarcity of resources as another overarching theme in their superb chapter 12. Legitimising the ongoing exclusion of disabled pupils is a necessary ableist activity. As little as people wish to see themselves as racist, and reactions from White people to newly emerging literature on Black history or Colonialist oppression reveals the ingrained racism amongst White people rather drastically on occasion, people generally, and this includes teachers, do not wish to be identified with someone who excludes disabled children. To illustrate this further, the authors mention that even or perhaps especially in special education, too, staff conceive of disability as locations, i.e. as the inclusion room or a diversity day laden with the symbolism and stigma of otherness, singled out for treatment and schooling away from normatively performing pupils. Disability, the authors argue, takes place elsewhere to avoid disrupting, disturbing, and challenging what is considered education for normal children whilst the underlying Ableism fuelling such logic somehow remains a permissible prejudice.

Baglieri and Lalvani include pragmatic advice in each chapter, ranging from critical enquiry into prejudice against disabled people on tv-shows (e.g. how villains are often portrayed as disabled) to suggestions for teachers on how to encourage their pupils to investigate accessibility in their own school environment. Additional reading recommendations abound in each chapter and the links provided to disability organisations and other resources are extremely helpful. Undoing Ableism could not be a more appropriate title for this learned book. For this reason, I consider it particularly suitable as an outstanding resource in the genre of continuous professional development, not only for teachers and head teachers but other professionals whose job it is to ensure that disabled pupils’ needs are met and their rights to schooling are honoured.

I fully agree with the authors’ ambition to place Disability and Ableism on the curriculum. The subtitle, alas, may suggest to a wider audience, even within the academic discipline of Education, that knowledge about Disability and Ableism should stay compartmentalised and ‘special’ – to be taught, probably, by special education needs teachers to K-12 pupils. To preempt such compartmentalisation, and the authors do concern themselves with this problem, too, Chapter 12, Undoing Ableism with Critical Pedagogy, might better capture the imagination of education researchers outside of special education, and many more, if it were made chapter 1. What I, as an invested reader, want from this book is to see a strong opening, piquing the interest and intellectual curiosity of many more than special education needs professionals. The self-assuredness and strength of the authors’ convictions as expressed in chapter 12 would do exactly that. Historically, few outside disability studies are interested in Disability, therefore, the co-authorship of a disabled colleague, ideally from a different discipline, would have been an important step to ensure better representation and, vitally, recognition. Including a chapter about the problematic absence of disabled teachers in schools could also have served as a powerful step towards breaking away from intrinsic power structures in which nondisabled academics and nondisabled school staff write about Disability and all others are either disabled or working with disabled people. As recent literature elsewhere has underlined, the absence of disabled teachers is a serious problem in schools and universities, reinforcing prejudices about ability and superiority. In much of the disability and, more recently, ableism literature, disabled scholars and disabled teachers remain almost invisible except for a handful of successful scholars. While teaching about Disability and Ableism in K-12 schools is vital, the way in which the book conveys this to outsiders and newcomers may result in precisely the same outcome as so many other books before it: its circle of readers might be too narrow for change at the structural, institutional and cultural level.

Having experienced firsthand what it means to slide from a privileged position to the margins of academia, and having witnessed how my knowledge production within ableist structures gradually shifted towards something suspect because my work was perceived as too deviant from what was expected, an urgent question – and I suppose it has always been urgent since exclusion is by no means a new phenomenon - is how to convince wider key target groups to read important books such as this and then engage appropriately with its content.

This book warrants a strong recommendation on the strength of its scholarship and pragmatic insights, and its general usefulness exceeds most of the books I have read in the genre of professional development in education. While I realise that this is not the actual or main intended genre for this book, it certainly should be.

On a final note, disabled people toil incessantly to put Disability and discussions about Ableism on various agendas, and they receive extraordinarily little foundational support from anyone at any of the levels herein discussed. Yet without parents, teachers, academics, and policy makers, fully grasping the sometimes brutal direct experiences of prejudice, pupils will invariably find themselves transitioning into further education and other contexts that are as ableist as the schools Baglieri and Lalvani are trying to change for the better. Making this book matter to a wider circle of professionals and other readers may prove to be an impactful, pragmatic, and participative solution in line with the authors’ highly justified ambitions.

Claudia Gillberg
National Centre for Lifelong Learning, ENCELL, Jonkoping University, Jönköping, Sweden
[email protected]