Inclusive education in practice: disability, ‘special needs’ and the (Re)production of normativity in Indian childhoods

ABSTRACT

Over the last few years, inclusive education provisions in India have expanded significantly, with a particular focus on ensuring that disabled children are able to access the same quality of education as their normate counterparts. However, despite policy support for the creation of more inclusive educational environments, the embodied experiences of disabled children are often not centered in classrooms. This paper therefore asks: how do explicitly inclusive educational projects come to exclude disabled children? The paper provides a critical analysis of how discourses around childhood and disability come to be taken up by the modern schooling system in a manner that reifies ableist hierarchies and often does not center the needs of disabled children. This paper draws on insights from ethnographic fieldwork to discuss how the disabled child subject is produced and disciplined within the modern school system in the National Capital Region of India. It highlights how disabled children, their caregivers, and educators in special and inclusive schools perform and push back on expectations of embodied otherness in and beyond classroom spaces. To do so, it demonstrates that being recognized as disabled is contingent on documentary proof. However, disability is experienced both as a label and an identity category.

KEYWORDS:

• Disability
• modern schooling
• inclusive education
• India
• disabled childhoods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 All names of educational institutions and research participants in this paper are pseudonyms chosen by participants and have been introduced in this paper to ensure the confidentiality and privacy of participants.

2 A benchmark disability is defined in the 2016 Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act as at least 40% of any of the 21 types of disabilities recognized under the Act. The 21 recognized types of disabilities are blindness, low vision, leprosy-cured persons, hearing impairment (including deaf and hard of hearing persons), locomotor disability, dwarfism, intellectual disability, mental illness, autism spectrum disorder, cerebral palsy, muscular dystrophy, chronic neurological conditions, specific learning disabilities, multiple sclerosis, speech and language disabilities, thalassemia, hemophilia, sickle cell disease, multiple disabilities (including deaf-blindness), acid attack victims, and Parkinson’s disease (RPWD Act 2016).

3 The National Capital Region consists of the city of Delhi, as well as a total of 20 districts surrounding the city across the neighboring states of Haryana, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh.

4 For a more expansive discussion of the history of special and inclusive education in Delhi, see Chapters 1 and 2 of Madan Mohan Jha’s From Special to Inclusive Education in India: Case Studies of Three Schools in Delhi (2010). See also Michael Bach and Mithu Alur’s The Journey for Inclusive Education in the Indian Subcontinent (2009).