Precarious, Debilitated, and Ordinary: Rethinking (In)Capacity for Inclusion

Abstract

As the effects of high-stakes accountability mandates increasingly impact curricular enactments in schools, careful investigations of the "how" of inclusion may allow the disclosure of its complexity to stretch the ways in which it is currently theorized. Drawing on a series of ethnographically-oriented studies of inclusive practices in schools, I have extracted three canonical elements of schooling that have remained largely unexamined within curricular theorizing for social justice, namely: 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. Deploying an intertwined theoretical framework that includes critical disability studies, spatial theory, and writings of US Third World feminists, I argue that these elements collectively compel a (re)consideration of capacity within the construct of inclusion that can then evoke alternate imaginings of inclusive practice.(In)capacity for inclusion Precarious, debilitated and ordinary: Rethinking (in)capacity for inclusionThe idea that my being, my attitudes, and my feelings of truth or morality are the products of histories beyond my control, induces the fear that every step forward I might take will simply serve to reproduce the worst of these histories … (Gina, preservice special educator, written reflection, 2014)Capacity is not discretely of the body. It is shaped by and bound to interface with prevailing notions of chance, risk, accident, luck and probability, as well as with body limits/incapacity, disability and debility.