Disability and teaching

When I was asked to review Disability and Teaching I responded with great enthusiasm and anticipation. The work of Susan Gabel on disability and educational inclusion provides a well-informed and astute critique of the everyday dynamics of educational exclusion, combined with some highly insightful suggestions for pedagogy that not only includes disabled students from the outset, but also transforms some of the oppressive and authoritative educational relations that are so commonly practiced in our schools. Her writings, and in particular her paper ‘Some Conceptual Problems with Critical Pedagogy’ (Gabel 2002), have inspired my own work on radical inclusive pedagogy, and for this I am deeply grateful. David Conner has written extensively on the usefulness of social model approaches in education and is one of the main initiators and organisers of the annual Disability Studies in Education conference.

The current book is designed as a teaching resource for use in teacher training courses. It is part of the Routledge book series Reflective Teaching and the Social Conditions of Schooling, which includes short texts around issues such as gender, language diversity and culture, as well as some texts that consider social issues in the teaching of subjects such as reading and mathematics. As such, it is not a ‘traditional’ disability studies text, but rather a text that starts with the day-to-day practices and dynamics of teaching (through the use of four case studies), and aims to contextualise these within the sociological and political debates about disability. Further, one of the stated aims of the book and the series is to encourage reflective practice amongst teachers. To do this, the book takes an unusual structure, somewhere between an exercise book and a textbook.

The first part of Disability and Teaching introduces us to the four case studies upon which the book is based. These present real situations that arise in schools as part of the attempt to include students with ‘special educational needs’ within mainstream classrooms. The case studies encompass broad issues and contexts, such as the tensions in a teachers’ meeting when the head teacher tries to implement more inclusion, the hidden ableist assumptions and attitudes some teachers might have towards inclusion, and the intersections of race, class and disability. Each case study is described over a few pages, followed by some reflective questions and a blank page for readers to note their thoughts. Then we are presented with a series of short comments made about the case study by various people, such as teachers, parents, disabled people and school students. These are followed by another series of reflective questions and a blank page for reader’s notes. Overall this presentation of the case studies takes over half the length of the book. The structure makes it somewhat awkward to read as a continuous text, but each of the case studies can serve on its own as a teaching resource distributed to students to facilitate debate and reflection. The book is aimed at practicing and prospective teachers, and I would suggest that it is used with prospective teachers who have already completed a substantial part of their school placement, as the text requires some level of familiarity with the everyday dynamics of teaching.

The second part of the book aims to contextualise the case studies within public political debates about education. It features three readings of the case studies, from conservative, liberal-progressive and disability-centred views. These three views are presented in consecutive sections, each written as a first-person monologue from advocates of each position, and followed by questions for the reader to reflect upon. This style of writing, while quite accessible to non-academic readers, leaves a lot of the theoretical bases and implicit assumptions of those discourses unexamined and unpacked. For students to meaningfully engage with these political views, further reading is required, and the book would have been a more useful addition to course reading lists had it further engaged with some of the theoretical critiques or referred readers to alternative sources. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the section outlining the ‘disability-centred view’ (based on the social model of disability) is the most developed. It offers some exciting ideas for inclusive practices that challenge exclusion and institutional disablism on many levels, and brings forth a voice that is rarely considered in teacher training programmes. However, as many of the examples in this section draw on the four case studies, it is difficult to imagine how this section can be used as a stand-alone reading.

The final part of the book presents the authors’ views in more depth, broadening the question of inclusive education to explore issues of normalcy and challenge some of the assumptions around the purpose of schools, the definitions of knowledge and the conceptualisation of the processes of teaching and learning. Making connections between those issues and the practical realities of teaching is highly significant, and indeed what made Gabel’s work so valuable to me. I would have loved to see these issues, and particularly the connection between philosophies of education and inclusive educational practice, explored in greater length and depth. Perhaps the book would have profited from a shorter presentation of the case studies (and in particular the readers’ reactions to them, which, while bringing up important issues, are quite fragmented and confusing) and more elaborate explorations of the positions presented in Parts Two and Three.

Overall, while Disability and Teaching does not work as a standalone reading, some parts of it may be adopted for use as teaching materials in teacher training programmes, alongside some more theoretical texts that expand on the important questions raised in the book.

Anat Greenstein
Manchester Institute of Education, The University of Manchester, UK
[email protected]
© 2014, Anat Greenstein
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2014.984934