Research Area:  Machine Learning

Abstract:

The field of critical curriculum studies is no longer bound by the limits of formal educational contexts. Its focus has expanded to foster complex and often contradictory expressions of democratic practices and spaces that pay close attention to both affect and embodiment in nuanced and avant-garde ways of being and be-coming. Thus, it would be easy to assume that in this nurturing context, disabled bodyminds1 (Clare, Citation2017; Kafer, Citation2013; Patsavas, Citation2014; Price, Citation2015; Schalk, Citation2018) thrive. And yet, disability continues to linger at the margins of radical curriculum studies – sometimes taken up almost opportunistically, often regarded as synonymous with deviance/brokenness/pathology, or conceived as the inevitable outcome of oppression. In contrast, disability studies scholarship exposes how constructions of the human exclude bodyminds who refuse to be confined by normative ideologies. In its stead, disability studies scholars and activists have offered counter-narratives that reject normative ideologies and support transformative ways of be-ing, knowing, and doing. In this special issue of Curriculum Inquiry, we articulate a conceptualization of Disability as Meta Curriculum to support the epistemic claim that disability studies approaches to curriculum are doing more than merely critiquing how privileged knowledge excludes disability from curriculum theory and praxis. We argue, instead, that disability studies scholarship embodies an epistemic space that not only demonstrates its difference from the normative curriculum, it also exceeds its confining boundaries. Thus, in Disability as Meta Curriculum we argue for a “curriculum about curriculum” – one that critically investigates the ontological, epistemological, and pedagogical claims of the normative curriculum from the critical standpoint of disability.

Keywords:  
Curriculum Inquiry
Transformative praxis
Disability
Meta curriculum
Ontologies
Epistemologies

Author(s) Name:  Nirmala Erevelles, Gillian Parekh

Publisher name:  Taylor & Francis

DOI:  10.1080/03626784.2019.1664078

Volume Information:  Volume 49

Paper Link:   https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03626784.2019.1664078