Disability as meta curriculum: Ontologies, epistemologies, and transformative praxis

The field of critical curriculum studies is no longer bound by the limits of formal educational contexts. Its focus has expanded to foster complex and often contradictory expressions of democratic practices and spaces that pay close attention to both affect and embodiment in nuanced and avant-garde ways of be-ing and be-coming. Thus, it would be easy to assume that in this nurturing context, disabled bodyminds¹ (Clare, 2017; Kafer, 2013; Patsavas, 2014; Price, 2015; Schalk, 2018) thrive. And yet, disability continues to linger at the margins of radical curriculum studies – sometimes taken up almost opportunistically, often regarded as synonymous with deviance/brokenness/pathology, or conceived as the inevitable outcome of oppression. In contrast, disability studies scholarship exposes how constructions of the human exclude bodyminds who refuse to be confined by normative ideologies. In its stead, disability studies’ scholars and activists have offered counter-narratives that reject normative ideologies and support transformative ways of be-ing, knowing, and doing.

In this special issue of Curriculum Inquiry, we articulate a conceptualization of Disability as Meta Curriculum to support the epistemic claim that disability studies’ approaches to curriculum are doing more than merely critiquing how privileged knowledge excludes disability from curriculum theory and praxis. We argue, instead, that disability studies’ scholarship embodies an epistemic space that not only demonstrates its difference from the normative curriculum, it also exceeds its confining boundaries. Thus, in Disability as Meta Curriculum we argue for a “curriculum about curriculum” – one that critically investigates the ontological, epistemological, and pedagogical claims of the normative curriculum from the critical standpoint of disability.

The authors included in this special issue not only unpack the identified absence of disability within the discourses of curriculum studies, they also expose the imbrication of disability within the structural interstices of race, gender, sexuality, and class – an intersectional analysis that is rarely engaged during discussions of social difference within curriculum studies, in particular, and educational studies, in general. In the rare moments when disability is centered in educational contexts, as in special education, for instance, there is currently little recognition of the ways in which race, class, gender, and sexuality impact the experience of disability. Yet, long-standing demographic trends continue to uncover an over-representation of racialized and marginalized students living in poverty, enrolled in programs with reduced academic expectations and limited post-secondary access. In fact, disability studies’ scholars argue that these specialized programs are complicit in the broader economic replication and social stratification of privilege and inequality.

Taken as a whole, this special issue initiates an invocation of Disability as Meta Curriculum regarding ontology, epistemology, and transformative praxis by responding to the following questions:

• What ontological claims are made within curriculum studies that actively exclude disabled people from such theorizations? What would curriculum studies look like if disabled people re-imagined the curriculum?

• How does the discourse of “normativity” (re)constitute those bodyminds that exceed the boundaries of the human put forth by Western educational thought?

• How are educational practices that enact racism, sexism, and heteronormativity also complicit in the construction and removal of disabled bodyminds from educational space? What pedagogical interventions can a curriculum rooted in a critical disability studies perspective utilize to challenge these exclusionary and oppressive practices?

In addressing these questions, the special issue, Disability as Meta Curriculum, enables a more nuanced and accountable engagement between the fields of Disability Studies and Curriculum Studies – an engagement whose time has come to continue the work of pushing at the limits of curricular discourses rooted in normative ideologies.

Thinking with the Parenthetical, the Palimpsest, and the Practical…

While we started this introduction within the parameters of the normal (thinking of this introduction as curriculum, too), we realized that we too would need to exceed the confining boundaries of this (meta) curriculum. We, the three guest editors of this special issue, come to the table with very different modes of processing and engaging the social. Each of us brings to this project a complicated relationship to disability that has shaped both our personal and professional lives. And these diverse identities not only have shaped the ways we understand and explain disability, they have also impacted how we sought to frame this introduction to represent our (in)coherent collective work together.

Our attempts to align our diverse bodyminds into some semblance of the coherence required of an academic journal like Curriculum Inquiry came to a head during one of our virtual meetings called to organize the writing of this introduction. We each brought our strengths to the table. Nirmala loved theory and offered to take on the tasks of conceptualization, and Gillian, the practical member of the team, wanted to discuss how to translate her research into practice. This left Ibby (Elizabeth), uniquely situated as independent scholar and disabled (autistic) person to pause for a moment to say, “I feel in this whole process I am located in parentheses.” Recognizing that Ibby’s invocation of the parenthetical was bursting with conceptual significance, we urged her to keep talking and so she typed the following:

I was thinking that your (Nirmala) work is exciting because it is deeply theoretical, and theory excites me.

And Gillian was saying that her work is practical because it relates to practice, and that is exciting because it is real.

So, then I think, well now, what do I contribute?

So: I make things up poetically (which is like hyper theory), and am actually disabled (regarding disability, what could be realer?).

In this way I am to the outer edges of each thing, like parentheses, hugging.

Edgy, out there, but embracing.

Here is a visual:

(theory practice)

(Is the left parenthesis poetry and the right parenthesis being?)

We do want theory and practice to be together in a more emphatic way.

Maybe in order for that to happen, we have decided to de-marginalize the parenthetical.

A favorite quote:

“In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not.”

This may have been said by either Albert Einstein or Yogi Berra, but probably wasn’t.

Added parenthetical: (In reality, theory and practice need each other, and/or make each other more interesting.)

Parentheses are to theses what meta curriculum is to curriculum.

And thus, the notion of the parenthetical was born. Ibby, marking herself as be-coming a parenthetical person within this assumed collegial relationship as co-editors (in an etymological sense, which she will discuss below “put in beside” Nirmala and Gillian, but ontologically, in this case, embracing them), points to how disability as meta curriculum also exists in a parenthetical relationship with other categories of difference. Here, Ibby, invoking the parenthetical, forces us to examine the spatial location of disability as meta curriculum where “meta” is understood both historically and in the way of meaning-in-use. Thus, in this special issue, the term “meta curriculum” was conceptualized (by Ibby actually) so as to engage a different and new orientation to disability that could potentially be relationally transformative in education. As a site of inquiry, such an epistemic standpoint is significant as it can bring together the theoretical and the data-based practical by radical bracketing at the margins.

By pointing out how this bracketing at the margins has ontological implications for curriculum as it applies to disability (in particular), and social difference (in general), Ibby’s argument pushed all of us to keep thinking towards the parenthetical (and beyond it). Because the normative curriculum, notwithstanding an expansive field of curriculum studies, is subservient to a neoliberal logic that tends to dismiss the parenthetical as inefficient and hence useless for capitalist accumulation, those bracketed (disabled) bodyminds are eventually marked up for erasure. This was when Nirmala’s theoretical instincts drew her to the conceptualization of the palimpsest, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.) as “a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second.” The conceptualization of the palimpsest as marking the absent presence of (disabled) bodyminds in curriculum studies pointed us to the necessary work of mapping the practices by which (disabled) bodyminds are made to dys/appear via dis-placement in order to shore up the normative curriculum.

The epistemological possibilities invoked by the palimpsest pushed us to foreground the materiality of those consigned to the parenthetical. Here, Gillian’s question, “What does it look like in practice?”, required that we critically engage with educational policies/practices that implicitly or explicitly dis-locate (disabled) bodyminds within the parenthetical spaces of segregated education with its limited academic opportunities for students based on their perceived ability (Connor, 2017; Erevelles, Kanga, & Middleton, 2006; Slee, 2013). Their erasure from the emancipatory possibilities of education triggers a palimpsestous existence in which student capacity (and embodiment) is constituted in oppressive ways, demanding an over-writing of the margins that enacted these erasures in the first place.

So, there you have it. Our discussion instigated by Ibby’s calling out her bracketing at the margins moved us along the intellectual trajectory, first from the parenthetical, then to the palimpsest, and ultimately to the practical – a trajectory that also serves as the intellectual map of this introduction. As we move briefly through the different sections of this introduction, the style of writing shifts as we remain respectful of the different ways each of us as guest editors express ourselves. While this may seem disruptive to the normative formalities of academic writing in a reputable journal, our attempts to honor these disruptions is another way of demonstrating how disability as meta curriculum materializes in practice. Then, in the final section of this introduction we describe how the authors in this special issue, rather than reducing the parenthetical (contained) to the palimpsest (dys-appeared), instead reclaim what exists within the parentheses (disability at the intersections of difference) by making visible the faint tracings of the palimpsest (practices of erasure within the curriculum) in order to formulate insurgent ways of be-ing and be-coming (the practical) that enable (disabled) bodyminds to thrive at the intersection of difference.

(The Ontology of the Parenthetical) – Elizabeth (Ibby Grace)

What am I up to?

First, I want to tell you some things about meta and curriculum, in what they were meant to mean, and what they do mean, and why both matter, with a little bit of Wittgenstein’s help, and a little bit of riffing on his help that I think he would not mind at all, which brings me back to the parenthetical, which I never really left.

Meta

The way we use “meta” – now came from an interesting misunderstanding, but we do use it that way now, so now it means what it means. More on this later, but here is what it used to mean, and how this happened.

“Meta-,” in Attic Greek, was a word piece describing location, usually “behind,” but also among or between (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.). Aristotle’s Metaphysics was named “Metaphysics” because it was placed physically behind, or after, the chapter called Physics, and there was not anything better to call it. It really seems to have been that simple.

Then it came to pass that the book itself, Metaphysics, blew everyone’s mind. It is about being, what it is to be. That is deeper than being about the actual stuff there is, in any prosaic way, and it is something that has kept people up at night for millennia.

Now, when you add “meta-” to a word denoting another concept, it means something like, relating to that other concept in a way that somehow goes beyond it in a deeper, more fundamental, or overarching way that makes you go “whoa.” This is not the technical definition, but everyone can relate to it. We have things now like metacognition, metafiction, meta-gaming, and things like, “Dude, that is so meta, my brain’s exploding.”

Some might say that the new meaning is a misinterpretation of the original, and therefore everyone is getting it wrong.

Wittgenstein (1953) might say that the way people actually use language has the more power to shape what it means than anything like a dictionary ever could. So now the new meaning is the real meaning.

In my mind, the meanings are braided together, old and new, bringing to mind other Wittgensteinian ideas of families (Kripke, 1982). When we speak of disability as meta curriculum we do mean to make you go “whoa,” but also the old locational, quotidian meaning persists. Disability really is behind, among, and between the curriculum.

Curriculum

Let’s talk about curriculum.

“Curriculum” was imported from Latin (currere) into English on purpose fairly recently by Scottish universities (1600 s) and referred to a running, a race track (currere – running of the course), which is what the word originally denoted (Maxwell, 2002; Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.; Pinar, 2011). Presumably, the University of Glasgow wanted the situation for students to be likewise quick and orderly.

The very fact that there can now be a whole field of Curriculum Studies suggests that perhaps it was not that simple, that the race before students is not as quick and orderly as a track for runners, or sometimes chariots. The journal you are now reading is one of the best places to find out why this is, in general, in every issue.

Meanwhile, here we come to announce that disability is among us: and now you are reading this issue.

(It would be a lot of fun to discuss here the word “issue” but it is not the time or the place. In keeping with the topic of curriculum, we shall stay on track).

Parentheses

Someone might think parenthetical statements are not important, and should be deleted. They are extremely difficult to ignore. They are a good example of how a potentially marginal thing can be powerful.

Parenthesis comes from the idea of putting in beside (Oxford English Dictionary, n.d.), so it is locational, like meta, and calls to mind a physical action, like curriculum.

I was a parenthetical academic once, and this did have particular ramifications. I was put in beside the other academics, not exactly the same as them, but not exactly marginalized like an unemployed disabled person, because I was in fact, at the time, an academic.

Here is an interesting anecdote that is also kind of maddening, but illustrates the difference between the concepts of marginalized and parenthetical very well. During my time as a member of the board of directors of a prominent disability studies society, one of the editors of a premier disability studies journal associated with that society wanted to create a “protective rule,” which was actually stratifying and othering, and ultimately silencing. The idea was that authors whose specific disabilities were categorized as developmental or intellectual must automatically be considered research subjects, and should therefore be “protected” by being required to go through an Institutional Review Board for Human Subjects Research in order to be allowed to publish in this journal – even if their paper was not the kind of paper usually or properly considered human subjects research, such as a rhetorical(?) essay or a philosophical article.

When I pointed out that my own disability was categorized in this way, the editor then offered to add the clause that university professors could be exempt because of their institutional affiliation.

My belief is that here, the editor in question, who may or may not experience parenthetical life in the academy to some degree herself – and it would be interesting to see to what extent, if so, her status plays into such actions and stances – separated my own autistic self (merely parenthetical, but potentially academically available) from the autistic selves of the totally marginalized (probably not to be heard by scholars unless with major mediation by acceptable voices).

At the time, I said: if I were not a professor, then, would I need to go through IRB to publish a philosophical essay to study myself as a subject and object in this journal, to protect myself from myself? Answer: “Maybe they could get institutionally affiliated co-authors?” (The editor did switch the subject back from the counterfactual version of me to the distant “they” immediately in this example, I recall. Was this an acknowledgement that the proposal was awkward, perhaps, or an embrace of my parenthetical self as not entirely marginal?)

I am not a professor now, but I am still parenthetical rather than marginalized, chiefly by virtue of the fact that I once was, and therefore am so well-connected I am called an independent scholar instead of a client with ID/DD (intellectual disability/developmental disability) who needs that editor’s ethical protection instead of respect.

Now that I am no longer a member of the board of directors of that scholarly organization, I do not know if the rule is in place that people with intellectual and developmental disabilities are unable to publish in one of the most important disability studies journals in the USA without what amounts to a patron or special permission. I do know that the article which may have precipitated all of this concern in the first place has been retracted. It may not be possible for the parenthetical to protect the marginalized in all cases.

On the other hand, this journal you are now reading has opened up possibilities for discussion of a situation and a future so much more important than parenthetical protection of the margins. When we open our interpretation of the location of between and beyond, and look from lateral to depth and amplitude, we can begin to touch on the palimpsest, and the practical.

Here we see the meta curriculum and the woven thread where the parentheses may appear marginal, but also embrace and encompass what comes between.

Disability is between and among us, and we are all on the same track. It is, in fact, one of the most universal – or normal – forms of not-being-normal we have in life, and through this we can learn together. When we look right at it, or through it, or with it, what we are learning, and how we are learning it comes to life and to light in new ways.

Tracing Palimpsests from Within the Parenthetical – Nirmala Erevelles

I first came upon this concept of the “palimpsest” in La Paperson’s (2010) article, “The Postcolonial Ghetto,” where he describes the “dirty work of schooling…as….another modernist project to create utopic schooling systems, where deviant schools must be closed and impure bodies and minds must be reformed” (p. 9). La Paperson, thus, explains how the postcolonial ghetto becomes a zone of dis-placement such that it is a palimpsest: “a map of absences – of what used to be there – or perhaps a map of the condemned…rarely important enough to leave more than a trace in official records” (p. 21). In this section, I take up the metaphor of the “palimpsest” as a methodological practice that maps the dis-placement of (disabled) students of color via exclusionary practices (e.g. in-school suspensions, expulsions) and into segregated spaces (e.g. special education, alternative schools, youth prisons).

The metaphor of the palimpsest appears in disciplines from literary theory, architecture, urban geography, media studies to technology, showing evidence of its metaphoric prowess and possibility (Powell, 2008). According to the Oxford English Dictionary (n.d.), a palimpsest is defined as “a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second.” Especially significant is that the original writing of the palimpsest is always imperfectly erased and as such can be accessed, providing a partial and yet complex, layered reading of the text. More generally, it could be argued that a palimpsest captures “such serial, imperfect, synchronic and diachronic erasures and writings… each of them partly erased to make room for…. [a] multilayered structure that emphasizes the coexistence of multiple visions and impacts of different cultures” (Ciută, 2016, p. 32). Dillon (2005) argues that the goal of a palimpsestous analysis is “not to describe ‘the way things really were’ … [but] rather, to offer an account of how an explanation and narrative of reality was established as the normative one” (Spivak as cited in Dillon, 2005, p. 255).

To explain how the palimpsest serves as an analytical tool, I draw on counter story-telling in order to read the layered structures of meaning and practice that shape these dis-locations. In the 4th grade classroom in my daughter’s public elementary school, there is a story being passed around in hushed whispers. A middle school girl, a classmate to several siblings of my daughter’s peers, has died by suicide. But these fourth graders also intuitively know that this is underground knowledge – knowledge that makes the adults around them more afraid rather than sad. My daughter tentatively discloses that she is having conversations on this subject via a series of questions, “What is suicide? Is it scary? Why did she do it? Will her brother who found her in the bathroom of their house be always very afraid? Did she suffer?” These are emotionally difficult questions, but I try to answer her by getting more information from adults so that I can piece together a narrative that can speak responsibly and thoughtfully to the sadness that accompanies the death of a very young person. I call my daughter’s principal to make sure that the story is indeed true and to suggest that the school counsellor help students work through this news that has clearly disturbed them. It is then that the principal apologetically explains that they were instructed by the district administrators not to discuss this sad event and to carry on with their regular day. And so, the normal every day functions of the school carry on – no moment of silence – no collective grieving – no memorializing of this beautiful spirit caught in a desperate sadness she could not speak of except through her death.

This narrative serves as a palimpsest because this student’s life is erased (there is no official record), actively superimposed by the “normative” practices of curriculum. The “dirty work of schooling” goes on – the children bend over their books doing mindless work, often under cruel conditions that refuse to respect their space and their personhood. Their experiences of dis-respect and their subsequent alienation occurs because schools pathologize (disabled) children and their communities using both ableist and racist tropes to explain these dis-locations as natural, and critical to enable the normal functioning of schooling. Fearful that these pathologized bodies hold vectors of dis-ease that can contaminate white heteronormative “respectable” space, school policies serve to actively erase the presence of these pathologized bodies – super-imposing other (normative) narratives like respecting the privacy of her family and fearing that speaking of suicide means that you condone it.

As pointed out earlier, however, the original writing of the palimpsest is always imperfectly erased and as such can be accessed, providing a partial and yet complex layered reading of the text. Thus, in January 2019, the local newspaper carried the story of a young man, JacQuan Winters, who had written a children’s book about his 11-year-old sister Kristen Amerson who had died by suicide five years earlier (Taylor, 2019). The book, entitled Kristen’s Rainy Day, is set the day after her death, and reads as if she was still alive making it through a rainy day as she confronts many difficult situations in her life with a positive attitude. Winters wrote this book to raise awareness of childhood suicide in schools and has started the Kristen Amerson Foundation. He has donated 36 copies of his book to libraries in the very school system that sought to erase her. We can say her name now – Kristen Amerson. We can mourn her passing now. We can sit in solidarity with her brother who refused to let his sister remain as the faint erased etchings in the palimpsest of the meta curriculum and remapped her life as that of transformative possibility. This is what a palimpsest enables us to do. This, too, is the work of disability as meta curriculum.

Are We Still Doing This? Tracking Institutional and Relational Experiences of Ability Grouping – Gillian Parekh

Moving from the ontological to the epistemological underpinnings that theorize Disability as Meta Curriculum, we now come face-to-face with the practical. How do schools (drawing on their ontological and epistemological assumptions) respond to disability through their enactment of policies and practices that implicitly or explicitly limit academic opportunities for students based on their perceived ability (Connor, 2017; Erevelles et al., 2006; Slee, 2013)? Here, students are dis-placed into special education with its non-academic or modified (sub-standard) curricular programs (Brantlinger, 2006; De Valenzuela, Copeland, Huaqing Qi, & Park, 2006; Reid & Knight, 2006); these programs bracket student access to post-secondary education, exclusion that is further replicated in the labour market. This continued stratification of access not only holds significant economic implications for students identified as having a disability or as requiring special education programming, but also holds important implications on long-term measures such as overall economic security and health (Fonseca & Zheng, 2011; Kearney, Hershbein, & Jacome, 2015; Pew Research Center, 2014).

One of the drivers for rethinking disability as the meta curriculum may be the continued evidence of conflation between race, class, and disability (Erevelles, 2011, 2014; Ferri & Connor, 2005), resulting in the disproportionate representation of racialized students and students living in poverty within restrictive special education and non-academic programs (Mitchell, 2010, 2015; Reid & Knight, 2006). Many studies have shown that the implicit assumptions made by educators and administrators around students’ capacity and the ways in which schools respond can, arguably, produce disability (Brantlinger, 2006; De Valenzuela et al., 2006; Parekh & Brown, 2019; Parekh, Brown, & Zheng, 2018). The production of disability through the assessment and placement within impairment specific and/or segregated programs, programs with historically limited post-high school options, is a clear example of disablement resulting from the interaction between students’ impairment and structural ableism.

However, many students that end up in special education or non-academic programming are not identified as having an impairment, but are instead perceived, however vaguely, to share traits of incapacity, whether it relates to learning, to conduct, or to adhering to the school’s social norms and expectations. The sorting process of students across in-school and post-school opportunities has long been socially accepted with students’ perceived capacity used as justification for their future social and economic success (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). However, when aptitude is assigned only to certain bodyminds and the institutional response is to enhance or limit academic opportunities accordingly, then the processes through which students are organized (e.g. special education, tracking, etc.) become complicit in the enactment of racism and classism (Parekh & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2017). Knowing the material and long-term corporeal implications of such academic trajectories, as well as knowing who is most vulnerable to be perceived as “at-risk” or as incapable of learning, we can justly draw upon Puar’s (2017) conceptualization of debility and explore the ways in which policies responsible for the sorting and organizing of students result in a form of school-produced debilitation.

In a large-scale qualitative study within one of North America’s largest public education systems, a critical administrator provided a summary example of how school-produced debilitation is initiated.

[W]e’re still pathologizing students, we’re still looking at families as coming with “not having”, as opposed to looking at what they do have and giving the space and agency for students to be able to be who they are in their classrooms. And we know that that happens across racial lines, and we know that happens in low socioeconomic areas, and so I think disability becomes the default, because we’re pathologizing. “You’re not behaving in my worldview,” right? My worldview says you have to act and perform in this way, so therefore there must be a disability… (Parekh, HSP_A_transcripts)

The corporeal consequences that result from how schools respond to the perception of incapacity, can, themselves, produce debility. Once labeled, placement in special education and non-academic programming can result in the negative, deficit-oriented shaping of identity and reduce access to learning, all of which can have significant material consequences. The subsequent stigma students experience from this process of pathologizing and systemic response of curtailing opportunities for curricular engagement also have the potential to shape students’ relationships and identities. This, too, can be an example of the palimpsest, where students’ identities and potential are erased and overwritten by the identity and potential subsequently ascribed through “normative” schooling practices. There is a clear relational connection of power and subjugation that circulates between the ascription of a label, the enactment of policy that sorts students within and across schools, and the often undisclosed consequences of these institutional decisions. It is not until we take up disability as the parenthetical, as truly meta curricular, that we can begin to challenge the “otherness” constructed through institutional responses to perceived difference. Disability as the parenthetical holds tremendous potential to shift institutional practice at its core. As Ibby stated, when we see disability as “between and among us” as opposed to something to seek out, remove, and exclude, we challenge the erasure and re-ascription of student identity (as theorized by Nirmala), as well as many long-established schooling practices designed to maintain unequal power relations. This is an exciting new way forward in theorizing disability and seeking disability justice in education.

Engaging Disability as Meta Curriculum

What we have done with the introduction to this special issue is show how Disability as Meta Curriculum is materialized via three conceptual interventions – the parenthetical, the palimpsest, and the practical. Acknowledging that the “dirty work of schooling” attempts to bracket, erase, and label students, limiting the potentialities of disability as meta curriculum, the authors included in this special issue invest these three spaces – the parenthetical, the palimpsest, and the practical – with both critical analyses and radical re-imaginings. Keeping with the theme, Disability as Meta Curriculum, all the authors in this special issue consciously re-imagine disability and curriculum outside the confines of (special) education and normative curriculum studies, over-writing the improperly erased margins with transformative analyses and praxis. To do so, they deploy a diversity of methodologies that include auto-ethnography, narrative, theoretical, and empirical analyses, Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR), and reflective pedagogical praxis.

This issue begins with Alyssa Hillary’s thought-provoking article “Am I the Curriculum?” that echoes Ibby’s recognition (early in this introduction) of finding themselves within the parentheses of the normative curriculum. While enrolled in a course on Augmentative and Alternative Communication, Hillary, who identifies as autistic, describes through autoethnography the complex duality of accessing the curriculum while simultaneously be-ing the curriculum. Hillary points to the ontological dilemmas (similar to students of color) of finding themselves being constituted via diverse and contradictory subject positions – student, curriculum, teacher, as well as the researcher and/or the object of study. This ontological predicament is further heightened by ableist overtones because the normative curriculum typically disregards the voices of autistic children and adults since, as it argues, “it is [only] through speech that [one] must join the human race.” Thus, for Hillary, who uses intermittent speech, the affective as well as ontological effects of being bracketed out requires first a refusal and then a re-writing of the narratives that tend towards erasure rather than recognition. Here Hillary embodies the ways in which disability as meta curriculum extends far beyond the text to foreground the ways the normative curriculum renders as palimpsest those bodyminds who exist outside its boundaries requiring radical re-writings of the margins.

“We inhabit a world of stories,” Priya Lalvani and Jessica Bacon remind us in their article, “Dominant Narratives, Subjugated Knowledges, and the Writing/Righting of the Story of Disability in K-12 Curricula.” And yet, invoking both the parenthetical and the palimpsest, Lalvani and Bacon note the erasure of the “story of disability” in the (normative) K-12 curriculum. Recognizing that “stories have the power to liberate and empower, but also to marginalize, or silence,” the authors demonstrate how a critical disability studies perspective refuses the parenthetical and rewrites the palimpsest. By first foregrounding the absent presence of disability in the normative curriculum, the authors then over-write the normative discourses of disability, replacing them with stories that recognize disability as a naturally occurring human variation situated in historical and current cultural practices and norms.

Similarly, Mildred Boveda, Ganiva Reyes, and Brittany Aronson, in their article, “Disciplined to Access the General Education Curriculum: Girls of Color, Disabilities, and Specialized Education Programming,” use testimonios to bring the erased margins of the palimpsest to light. Recognizing the General Education Curriculum as the palimpsest that erases the lived experiences of disabled girls/women of color in the meta curriculum, the authors draw on three narratives: from lived experiences with bipolar disorder, to pedagogical practices employed within the US school context, to discussions about disability in teacher preparation programs. The authors use a decolonial/intersectional feminist lens to challenge the dominant westernized (i.e. colonial/white supremacist/ableist/patriarchal) ontoepistemology in order to rewrite the faint tracings of the palimpsest that has erased disability from the meta curriculum. Refusing this erasure, the authors argue for a humanizing curriculum that centers the mental health of girls/women of color as they write their struggles and their meanings into existence. Boveda, Reyes, and Aronson suggest re-orienting pedagogical praxis that favors relationality and community over isolation and individualism. By foregrounding disability as meta curriculum, the authors demonstrate how communities of solidarity can be constituted within the parenthetical spaces of the normative curriculum.

In her article, “Through Space into the Flesh: Mapping Inscriptions of Anti-Black Racist and Ableist Schooling on Young People’s Bodies,” Patricia Krueger-Henney also demonstrates how the parenthetical spaces of the normative curriculum, with its celebration of Western European heteronormative ableist culture, are rewritten when inhabited by disabled, Black, non-white, gender-variant, poor, and immigrant youth. Krueger-Henney recognizes how school practices render invisible the trauma caused by “anti-black racist and ableist narratives that accumulate inside the bodies of targeted youth” that confine them in parenthetical spaces reducing them to a palimpsest. Inspired by youth-driven visions of fugitivity, Krueger-Henney uses YPAR to enact practices like critical body mappings, which can disrupt ongoing anti-Black racist and ableist narratives about racialized youth that continue to frame them as helpless, immobilized, and insensate. Drawing on an “ocular ethic” that renders visible how anti-Black racism and disability co-constitute the meta curriculum, the youth co-researchers in Krueger-Henney’s study refuse the erasure of their self-knowledge about the bodily injuries of schooling while at the same time generating “life-saving fugitive visions” for youth-centered learning conditions both inside and away from schools.

In their article, “DisCrit Solidarity as Curriculum Studies and Transformative Praxis,” Subini Annamma and Tamara Handy foreground classroom relationships between students and teachers mediated by power and oppression that are an essential component of the meta curriculum. The authors argue that these classroom relations occupy an epistemic space that locate multiply marginalized students (e.g., Black, queer, gender non-conforming, and disabled students) within a violent space of discipline and punishment – a space that can be disrupted when these classroom relationships are conceptualized within the framework of Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit). Resisting the erasure of this intersectional approach to relationships in the classroom, Annamma and Handy draw on DisCrit and Disability Justice principles to overwrite the normative curriculum and open up an epistemic space where multiply-marginalized students of color “can tell the truth with their bodies, minds, and behavior.”

In the theoretical article, “Precarious, Debilitated and Ordinary: Rethinking (In)capacity for Inclusion,” Srikala Naraian examines discourses of inclusion as they shape specific ontological understandings of disability. Naraian identifies three enduring elements of schooling: “the durability of place and time in the discourse of schooling and inclusion; the centrality of learning need within conceptions of inclusion; and, the necessity for agents of change to promote inclusion.” Naraian draws on these three elements to understand how educators, families, and teacher educators take them up in the context of inclusion. In doing so, Naraian opens up a space within curriculum studies to examine normative conceptions of “teacher” and “student” that currently inform the work of educators and scholars, as well as legislators, who seek to address inequities in schools.

Finally, also troubling the logic of inclusion in higher education contexts, Sarah Snyder, Kendra-Ann Pitt, Jijian Voronka, Fady Shanouda, Jenna Reid, and Danielle Landry in their article, “Unlearning Through Mad Studies: Disruptive Pedagogical Praxis,” argue for centering madness in pedagogical praxis in order to support a meta curriculum of “unlearning” that challenges students to consider how their engagement with madness in the classroom and beyond has the potential to disrupt sanist systems of oppression and the normalcy they re-constitute in these classrooms. Recognizing that university spaces continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people, the authors, instead, argue for mad positive pedagogies with their non-linear course structure and arts-based assessment and its focus not on mastery, but the uncertainty that knowledge creates. The authors of this concluding article conceive of disability as meta curriculum that can support transformative pedagogical praxis.

Beyond the Parenthetical and the Palimpsest: Towards (Transformative) Praxis

If, as we have argued, Disability is, in fact, Meta Curriculum, then it is imperative that any analysis of curriculum should engage disability. Notice that we choose the word “engage” rather than “include.” This is because while we have observed that even though curriculum studies (like other areas in educational studies) have expanded the sociological trinity of race, class, and gender to include disability, critical engagement typically entails placing disability within the parenthetical – “included” but not necessarily “engaged.” As a result, the stories we tell about disability in the curriculum tend to continue to pathologize disability, often treating it as an afterthought. More often than not, this treatment creates a palimpsest where the history of disabled people, their struggles against the violence of discourses of normativity (e.g. eugenics, pathologization, special education, institutionalization), and the transformative/oppositional/radical reconstitution of themselves in all their “crip”-ness, have been so actively erased that what survives are those faint etchings so blurred to be barely visible. This issue of Curriculum Inquiry is an attempt to over write those erasures. The authors in this issue are not content to stay within the parenthetical. Their work asks critical questions about how curriculum studies will engage – not just include – disability as meta curriculum. By writing the lives of disability into the meta curriculum, our work together refuses all bracketing – all erasure. We collectively call for engaging a critical praxis of disability as meta curriculum.

Acknowledgments

We, the three guest editors, thank Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández, the members of Curriculum Inquiry’s amazing, brilliant and rigorous editorial team of Doctoral Students (who taught us so much), and to both Gabrielle de Montmollin, and Amy Verhaeghe for their patient and caring support of us and our work throughout the process. We ran into snags and delays and your thoughtful and unwavering support without recrimination totally sustained us. We are also very grateful to all those who submitted articles to the journal. Though we could not accept all the submissions, we appreciate the hard work that was put into every submission that came our way and we hope that those essays have found a place elsewhere. To the authors whose work was accepted as part of the special issue, we are also grateful for your patient sticking-with-it attitude through the long delays in reviewing your work and your cheerful acceptance of the many edits we requested of you. We hope you found the process of working together as rewarding for you as it was for us. Each issue of the journal cannot come to life without the invisible and unpaid but invaluable and rigorous labor of the many reviewers whom we solicited to review these articles several times. We see your dedication to the work and hope we can pay it forward for you soon. And last but not least, working as a team teaches us so much about accountability in a context of care. We each brought different strengths to the table, we also brought different vulnerabilities. We are grateful to each other for the ways in which we could honor these differences with respect and care in order to complete the work. We have learned so much from this labor of love. Thank you.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Writer and activist Eli Clare (2017) has used the concept of bodymind to disrupt the dualism of mind and body as separate entities as evident in western European philosophy. Echoing Clare’s argument, disability studies scholar, Margaret Price, further argues that bodymind is “a sociopolitically constituted and material entity that emerges through both structural (power and violence-laden) contexts and also individual (specific) experience” (p. 271). Sami Schalk (2018) reimagines the term when analyzing the histories of race, gender, and disability to explain how transgenerational trauma in people of color exerts a psychological toll that materializes via lasting physical and mental manifestations of trauma on bodyminds. Our invocation of bodymind reflects these theorizations.