Education

Scholars of disability studies (DS) who engage the topic of education tend to struggle with its chimerical nature: sometimes “schools” are abusive prisons, sometimes pathways toward greater social justice, and it is not always easy to tell the difference. While contemporary theories of DS education tend to point toward hopeful developments such as inclusivity and participatory design, scholars are also aware that certain features of asylums of the nineteenth century lingered in classrooms of the twentieth and even twenty-first centuries. This history and the wide variety of current educational theories lead DS scholars to conclude that “normality is a shifting social construction comprised of several competing interests” (Rogers and Mancini 2010, 100). Disability studies scholars and activists continue to debate just what those “competing interests” are, how they emerged historically, how their power should be addressed, and how positive change can be effected in educational settings.