Unspeakable: the discursive production of a ‘tragic subject’ among children in the early childhood classroom

ABSTRACT

For the children in the inclusive early childhood classroom, there are acceptable, but only limited ways to speak about disability, and sometimes no way to speak. Discourses of tragedy and suffering have a pervasive, and historically resilient, association with disability in education. A subject of tragedy is discursively created in the classroom via discourses of development and special education, as one who is in need of sympathy, remediation and cure. A normal is re/produced in the classroom and as young children take up the sanctioned discourses that individualise and medicalise subjects, exclusionary practices are observed that reinforce a privileged normal and a subjugated Other. Troubling embedded discourses that privilege the normal, and pathologise the Other, exposes uncomfortable remnants from the past. Interrupting dominant discourses and rethinking the way that they subject us all provides some promise for re-imagining inclusive education.

KEYWORDS:

• Inclusive early childhood education
• discourse
• post-structural theory
• exclusion
• tragedy
• silences

Notes on contributor

Karen Watson is a Lecturer in Early Childhood Education at the University of Newcastle, Australia. She has been an early childhood teacher for 35 years, teaching in early childhood settings, primary schools, in early intervention services and in pre-service teacher education. As an early intervention, with a newly completed Masters in Special Education, she became troubled by inclusive practices in early childhood classroom. This questioning shaped the direction of her doctoral study, in which she examined how young children encounter and negotiate disability and difference in early childhood classrooms, and the role that unquestioned normative discourses play in producing both inclusionary and exclusionary practices. Karen has published a book entitled Inside the ‘Inclusive’ Early Childhood Classroom: The Power of the ‘Normal’, as well as several journal articles and book chapters that focus on the uninterrupted effects of the normal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.