Minor bodies: how disability is figured in children’s yoga classes

Abstract

In this article, I argue that children’s yoga classes can reinforce normative understandings of disability, minoritizing disabled children, but also having the potential to reconfigure disabled children’s bodies in new ways. Yoga pedagogy is multifarious and malleable enough to be adapted to the distinct classroom cultures produced by teachers and students. I focus on interview data from three teachers of children’s yoga to discuss the different ways they understand disabled children in their classes. This analysis leads me to argue that teachers of children’s yoga mobilize various narratives about disability in their classes, such as the need for inclusion, separation, diagnosis, treatment and/or correction. It is critical that students, parents and teachers are aware of how these narratives and pedagogical approaches may produce minoritizing effects, or alternatively offer means for resistance or intervention to the minoritization of disabled children.

Notes

1. This programme was initiated by the Australian Sports Commission and provided training and funding for community coaches to teach a variety of sports in public schools during after school care. Yoga was not explicitly one of the sports endorsed by the programme, but teachers such as myself were certified to teach yoga within the programme and provided with teaching materials for similar sports, such as martial arts and gymnastics. In 2014, the programme was discontinued due to the Abbott Government’s revision of budget priorities.