Beyond Inclusion: Disability Studies in Early Childhood Teacher Education

Abstract

Since its inception, the field of early childhood special education has been steeped in deficit model understandings of disability. From this vantage point, disability has been reduced to a set of problems or deficiencies inherent in individuals’ bodies. Entangled with problematic ideologies of racism and classism, disability labels soon became a tool for othering “other people’s children.” Recently, however, scholars in Disability Studies in Education have begun the task of troubling these shared histories of exclusion and rewriting the very text of dis/ability. Central to this work involves troubling taken-for-granted ideas about diversity and difference as well as our responses to difference in the classroom. In this chapter we explore what it might mean to embrace a disability studies perspective in early childhood special education. Specifically, we show how this shift would entail: (1) confronting ableism in theory and practice; (2) adopting an ethic of belonging and becoming; and (3) moving beyond inclusion toward honoring disability identity, culture, and politics.