4.1 Dis/ability in the classroom and the school
4.1.4 Disability is “not normal”: normativity as the desired, invisible center
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Mukhopadhyay & Sriprakash, 2013). Despite differences in dis/ability typologies and the institutional contexts that produce them, the tensions between neoliberal policies and social justice goals are observed across school sites (Grimaldi, 2012). The classifications of dis/ability at both sites reflect the problem of difference. The NGOs are recruited to address this problem.
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2002). In Chapter 6, I examine how teachers, schools, and NGOs then engage with a “well- intended hunt for disability” (Baker, 2002, p. 665) that transforms children into the site for interventions of inclusion, a kind of inclusion that rests on the identification of deviance and the Other (Graham & Slee, 2008).
Teachers understand disability as that which is not normal. Disabled children are marked by difference from other children. They are said to possess a lack or deficit that renders them incapable - they do not know anything, are unable to be independent, and display inappropriate behavior. Disabled children are seen as objects of pity - disability is viewed as bothersome to the child. They are viewed as fragile and unpredictable. Disabled children have problems that must be identified and diagnosed to be able to intervene: “there is some problem with this child”. The intervention emphasizes ways in which disabled children can be “fixed” or “become normal like us.” For many teachers, the benefits of regular schooling for disabled children, over special schools, is that disabled children’s proximity to normal will allow them to become normal.
However, straying too far from normal warrants different schools and different teachers, “if they can be handled in class, they are okay”, “she is not so disabled”, and “the ones who are too disabled have different schools.” That is, disabled children’s needs must not be too excessive, and their bodies and minds must comply with the norms of the school and classrooms (Goodley
& Runswick-Cole, 2013).
These descriptions of disability are not unique to teachers at the two schools, or to teachers in India. Instead, they highlight the ways in which the operations of ableism (Campbell, 2009) and the ideology of ability (Siebers, 2008) construct disability as a negative ontology – disability is characterized by absence or lack (Baker, 2002; Campbell, 2009). Disability is
understood as something that is “missing or not timely enough”, an “outlaw” that must be caught
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and brought into the fold of normativity (Baker, 2002, p. 697). Further, in everyday life,
compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006) renders disability both invisible and hyper-visible at the same time – it is both at the outside of the center and detected instantly in its otherness.
This simultaneous invisibility/hypervisibility informed interactions between me and the teachers about disability. In interviews, teachers assumed I was able-bodied, describing disability as,
"people who are different from us. Not like us but a little bit different from us."
In the excerpt below, Asqa explains that disabled people are “different from normal people” and that their “mind is a bit slow compared to what it should be.” Yet, the breakdown of language to define, identify, or examine what constitutes normal highlights how normativity operates as a naturalized, invisible site of power (Graham & Slee, 2008; Matus, 2019),
Interviewer: Hm, you said they are different/separate from normal kids. And that some kids are normal. So who are the normal kids?
Normal kids…those who are normal! I mean…normal is normal right! (surprise, laughter)
Interviewer: Then how do we know they are normal?
[Pause] those who look normal…their answer is normal…(Aqsa, Ahmedabad)
As I continue to try to understand what she refers to as normal, the myth resurfaces, “normal is normal”, Normal is…they are normal! Normal is…They are normal (Aqsa, Ahmedabad).
Bringing the “myth of the normal child” into conversations about disability highlights the tensions embedded within ‘dis/ability’ – the binary and mutual embeddedness of ability and alterity of deviance and normativity (Baker, 2002; Campbell, 2009; Goodley, 2018). Thus, examining teachers’ classifications of ability brings to surface the “politics of ability” (Baker, 2002, p. 698) that operate in schools and classrooms. For instance, Bushra questioned where
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disabled children fit within her ability classifications of "diamond, average, weak, slow"
responds,
Interviewer: They are? Not normal?
They're normal people.
Interviewer: But they're not ordinary?
[laughter] You're confusing.
Interviewer: [laughter] You're confusing me.
Ordinary are the average ones. And the disabled are normal. I mean those who are normal, those who are not disabled, they are normal, like us. There is nothing in them, there is nothing, no bad thing in them that makes them different, they are normal.
Interviewer: Right. But if they work hard, they can also be good.
They can be like others, ordinary or diamonds.
Interviewer: But you just said that they're like us only!
[laughter] Means they can enter the stage, you know. They are just a little below, quite below and low, but if they work a bit hard, they can do things like everyone else.
(Bushra, Mumbai)
To “enter the stage” as disabled is to enter normativity, “like everyone else.” Children considered a normal kind of disabled, could understand things "in the normal way" - the normal way is the way that,
Other children can understand. Means if I write on the board and explains then all the children can understand and even, they (disabled) can understand. I don't have to tell them specially the way other disabled children have to be explained, you have to explain
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things to them clearly and very well, sometimes they require hand holding. But this disabled girl doesn't need that. (Khadija, Ahmedabad)
Yet, the presence of disabled children brings to question “conventional views of the normal body/mind” (Baglieri et al., 2011, p. 2134). When pushed to examine the relationship between disabled children and their classifications of ability in the classrooms, teachers backtrack, stumble, and struggle. Disabled children could be "average rigor", could be "normal", could be
"very clever but needs some help", and they could “still be brilliant."
Overall, disabled children are viewed as disruptive in the classroom, are slower and take up more time in the classrooms, they "cannot understand things quickly", "a slow learner",
"require a bit of extra attention", "vastly different from slow learners - some disabled children don't learn at all." Further, the disabled child is described as lacking age and grade-appropriate learning levels. When compared, Zoya describes one of her disabled students as more "normal", he tries to learn and unlike the other child, is not aggressive and does not bully or hit his
classmates. Her response is to give them opportunities to answer questions on the board, "I ask him questions of his level so that he feels safe and feels like he is also competent and that his classmates will clap for him the way they clap for everyone else." (Zoya, Mumbai). Yet, even the more "normal" disabled child takes up too much time, "there are small small things (like copying from the board) for which I have to wait for him. He needs more time than everyone else" (Zoya, Mumbai).
In the next section, I focus on the ways in which dis/ability typologies across the two school sites rest on temporal assumptions. I demonstrate how the “outlaw ideology” (Baker, 2002) is associated with the temporal regimes of educational policy and practice that create “so- called target groups for inclusion” (Graham and Slee, 2008). In particular, I argue that it is this
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temporal exclusion – and the ways in which students become ‘out of time’ in the classroom – that determines sites for intervention. Popkewitz (2020) describes this as the ‘double gestures of inclusion and exclusion’ (Hertzberg, 2015). That is, how schools, as sites of making “kinds of people” create objects of exclusion in advancing inclusionary goals, “there is the hope of that recognition of difference enabling inclusion. Yet, the recognition of difference establishes difference. Inscribed in the hope of inclusion are fears of dangerous qualities and characteristics of the child that are threatening the actualization of that hope” (Popkewitz, 2018, p. 149). In the next section, I examine how different “kinds of people” are made through temporal structures of schools.