Time and exclusion

Abstract

Drawing on interviews with parents of children with complex disabilities in several school systems in a US state, this paper examines how temporal units such as the school day and school year and practices organized around artifacts like clocks and calendars work as ‘devices of temporal distanciation’ to separate children with disabilities from other children and exclude their families from critical relations with schools. The paper focuses on two kinds of effects: the ways differentiated timetables separate children and the ways constructing school time in bounded, discrete units limits the ability of parents and children to make key elements of their lives visible to the school.

Keywords:

• disability studies
• education
• time
• exclusion
• parents

Notes

1. All interviews were confidential and the names of interviewees are withheld by mutual agreement.

2. The school district had responded to a state mandate to close a segregated school for children with disabilities by moving self‐contained classes from that school into a handful of regular schools spread around the district. As at the segregated school, transporting children to these sites entailed long bus rides. Now, however, reckoned against the other children's schedules, the arrival and departures times became legible as ‘late’ and ‘early’. Sherman's misfortune was an infrastructural effect: the district used special buses to transport children with severe disabilities. Sherman had a severe disability. Riding the bus meant he was delivered later and collected earlier than his classmates. A group of parents filed a grievance to end the practice.