De-Linking the Elementary Curriculum from the Colonizing Forces of Ableism

Abstract

Abstract What does it mean to teach and learn about becoming human amidst disability and race in the elementary school classroom? This broad question guides my conceptual paper here in a manner that focuses on the fruitful possibilities at the intersections between the fields of disability studies and decolonial studies. The first part of this paper intends to explore how the concepts of "dysconscious racism"(King, 1991, p. 133) and "dysconscious ableism"(Broderick and Lalvani, 2017, p. 894) are useful tools through which to conduct an analysis of how our education system remains rooted in the practices of exclusion and/or conditional inclusion that continue to valorize a subjective self steeped in western colonial logics. Through decolonial studies and Global South disability studies, the second portion of this paper seeks to question the limits of strategies of resistance that reinforce western-centric conceptions of the self while also making a case for interdependence. Keywords