Disability And Education As Constructors Of Identity. Disabled Students`School Experience From The 1930s To The Early 2000

Author(s):

Joel Kivirauma(presenting / submitting)

Conference:

ECER 2014

Network:

04. Inclusive Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

04 SES 05 B, Theorising Inclusion: Disability, Identity and Participatory Democracy

Paper Session

Time:

2014-09-03

11:00-12:30

Room:

B014 Anfiteatro

Chair:

Elisabet Weedon

Contribution

What is disability? In common language we call somebody who has a impairment a disabled person. The more visible this impairment is, the easier it is to call such a person disabled. From the historical point of view this has been the dominating way of thought. (Braddock & Parish 2001). However, at least from the “linguistic turn” in the social sciences in the 1960s and onwards the matter has been far from self-evident. If we take as the starting point the thought that reality is linguistically constructed—language does not merely reflect reality but also creates it—disabilty is, as it were, separated from its direct link to impairment. Impairment is one condition—it might be said a necessary, but not a sufficient condition— in the process of the construction of disability. (Thomas 1999, Shakespeare 2006, Kivirauma 2007.)

In this article the historical construction of disability will be investigated through the school experiences of people with disabilities. The central research question is: what kind of identities do the schools offer to disabled students? As material for the research the authors collected biographies written by disabled participants for the biography competition in the year of people with disabilities 2003.

DISABILITY AND IDENTITY

Next we ask ourselves how disability and identity are linked. What does life as a disabled student especially add to the construction of identity? Tobin Siebers, who has investigated the relationship between disability and identity follows a mainly sociological tradition and defines identity as an epistemologically complex construction defined by navigation in a social environment. The identity includes all the customs and means by which an individual is included in a given social community. (cf. Hall 1999.)

According to Siebers (2013) the most central social force from the point of view of the construction of a disabled person’s identity is “the ideology of ability”. This may best be illustrated by an able and well-functioning body. In its most simplified form, it defines the criteria for perfect humanity according to which the value of each individual will be assessed. It is present almost without exception in all our values regarding humankind. Due to its capacity to create difference it also creates the concept of what is disability. The ideology of ability makes us fear disability and stops us from seeing and accepting it as a part of humankind. Disability reveals itself to us as a matter we have succeeded in evading and which we will succeed in evading in the future, too. The ideology of ability, to which disability does not belong, transfers the scrutiny of disability naturally to the field of medicine, a problem requiring treatment while at the same time to ability is associated all the desirable qualities of humanity such as intelligence, creativity, physical talent, and imagination; in other words upon the whole all desirable qualities associated with humankind. (Siebers 2013, 279-280). Directed by the ideology of ability we avoid and fear disability even though disability is an everyday phenomenon in all societies (Siebers 2013, 291; Coleman – Brown 2013, 158).

Method

The year 2003 was the year of people with disabilities in Europe. In order to commemorate this event the National Council on Disability organized a writing competition for disabled people and their relatives. The data for this article consist of the part of writings which took part in the writing competition and in which the school is mentioned in one way or another. Such writings are to be found altogether 65 or one writing out of five (20 %). Of the writings a clear majority, 48 (74%) are written by women, writings by men are 15 and from two of the writings the gender was not to be identified. From ten of the writings the chronology of the events described could not be inferred, so consequently 55 writings remained for the final analysis. The writings were read in a spirit of open-mindedness without any obvious preconceptions or theoretical compulsions to unravel results of a certain kind. The way of reading could presumably be described in a sense as a grounded theory type of approach. Of relevance here is precisely the inductive nature of the approach (Hallberg et.al. 2010, 213). However, I do not claim to start from an empty table. Due to the historical nature of the data I was of course interested in change. As someone carrying out research in the field of social disability I was interested in the relationship between the social and the medical model in the narratives. As a researcher in special education I was of course interested in the classical inquiry into the relationship between segregation and integration and in this context I paid attention to narratives which possibly diverged in this respect. With these tools I started reading the narratives.

Expected Outcomes

I am consequently interested in investigating what kinds of identities the schools have offered to disabled persons and what the narrators have learned about disability in school. And finally, what is there to be said about the role of school in the production of disability in the light of the analysis? The analysis of the data is in process and will be completed during spring 2014.

References

Bradock, David & Parish, S. 2001. An Institutional History of Disability. In Handbook of Disability Studies (Eds.Albrecht, Seelman & Bury), London: SAGE, 11-68. Coleman-Brown, Lerita. 2013. Stigma: An enigma demystified. In The Disability Studies Reader (Ed. L. Davies). New York: Routledge, 147-160. Couser, Thomas. 2013. Disability, LIfe Narrative and Representation. In The Disability Studies Reader (Ed. L. Davis), New York: Routledge, 456-460. Hall, Stuart. 1999. Identiteetti. Tampere: Vastapaino. Hallberg, Ulrika, Klingsberg, Gunilla, Setsaa, Wenche & Möller, Anders. 2010. Hiding Parts of One`s Self from Others - A Grounded Theory Study of Teenagers Diagnosed with ADHD. Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 12(3), 211-220. Shakespeare, Tom. 2006. Disability Rights and Wrongs. London: Routledge. Siebers, Tobin. 2013. Disability and the Complex Embodiment - For Identity Politics in a New Register. In The Disability Studies Reader (Ed. L. Davies). New York: Routledge, 278-297. Thomas, Carol. 1999. Female Forms. Experiencing and Understanding Disability. Buckingham: Open University.

Author Information

Joel Kivirauma (presenting / submitting)

university of Turku

Turku

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