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2020). Crip temporalities refer to “the way disability disrupts normative understandings of time”
(Ljuslinder et al., 2020, p. 35) questioning the rigid capitalist temporalities that emphasize normative notions of productivity (Samuels, 2017; Samuels & Freeman, 2021). Crip time encapsulates both bodies and societies – crip time can refer to the extra time needed to perform tasks, both as a result of bodily pace and as a result of barriers to accessing the social world.
Iqbal, a fifth grader with a mobility impairment in Mumbai, missed fifteen minutes of
instructional time every day. His teachers and his parents decided he would leave school earlier than his peers, not only because it took him longer to walk down the stairs to exit the school but also because they were concerned for his safety when excited and excitable students ran down the corridors at home time. Iqbal’s loss of instructional time is associated with the pace of his body, the inaccessibility of school infrastructure, and the lack of imagination on part of adults to determine ways of ensuring equitable participation for Iqbal (Kafer, 2013).
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societies differ in how people operate through time with differing ideas about punctuality – with the former emphasizing clock time and the latter event time to organize everyday life.
It is unclear whether the critiques associated with the dominance of clock time within educational systems and their effects on teacher agency (Roth et al., 2008) and educational exclusion (Saul, 2020) apply to contexts of the global South, where neoliberal globalization, modernity, and capitalism have differential effects (Connell & Dados, 2014). Much of the research on Western clock time in education uses Adam’s research as a starting point. However, the spread of clock time and calendar time to contexts outside the global North is largely
understudied (Postill, 2002; Shahjahan et al., 2022). Shahjahan and colleagues (2022) highlight the importance of relationality and the collective in examining temporal experiences in the global South, questioning “the assumption that one has agency and control over one’s time” (p. 6) central to modern ideas about individuality.
There is also the question of how research on dis/ability categorization applies to inclusive education in the global South. The international spread of inclusive education
(Armstrong et al., 2010) leads to questions about the ‘post-colonial exertion of power’ through policy and practice. Scholars in the global South view the advent of inclusive education in the global South as an imposition that furthered the colonial project by neglecting the knowledge, history, expertise, and political economy of the Global South. (Grech, 2015; Muthukrishna &
Engelbrecht, 2018; Rao & Kalyanpur, 2020; Walton, 2018a) Inclusive education in the global North developed within a specific set of circumstances: existing theories and practices from special education, established mass and public education systems, strong legislative frameworks for disability rights, economic resources and expertise, and parental participation. In contrast, the
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global South face challenges of economic deprivation and colonized ways of being (Walton, 2018a).
Efforts to translate global inclusive education discourses in the global South are
complicated by the assistance provided by international organizations (Le Fanu, 2013). In Papua New Guinea, curricula developed using American or Australian do not translate to inclusive practices in the classrooms. Aid organizations failed to account for the lack of professional development opportunities, restricted access to technology, large class sizes, and poor teaching materials. Such challenges are documented in countries across sub-Saharan Africa, Vietnam, and China.
The failure of such efforts furthered parallel systems of education for children with disabilities in the South (Duke et al., 2016; Kalyanpur, 2016). Kalyanpur (2016) finds that “the concepts of inclusive education as envisioned in the North become distorted versions of the original intention” (p. 20) when applied without adequate consideration of local contexts of disability and education by international agencies. Language and terminology are also key barriers in this process (Rao & Kalyanpur, 2020; Singal, 2010). Such examples support the need to engage local knowledge and practices for inclusive education (Singal & Muthukrishna, 2014).
Yet, the ‘local’ is complex: it is not immune to discriminatory beliefs and practices that target and produce differences based on dis/ability, caste, class, religion, tribe, and gender. The increased violence against and disabling of minoritized groups by a majoritarian regime (Misri, 2022) highlights the ways in which exclusionary tendencies are contained within the local (Walton, 2018a)
Further, neoliberal globalization and a Western orientation have meant that American ideas of learning disabilities traveled across national contexts. Kalyanpur (2022) demonstrates
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how learning disabilities emerged as a new disability category in India following the global Education for All agenda. She cites how the definition of learning disabilities in Indian law is nearly identical to the United States Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. In a multi- lingual country like India, the assessment of learning disabilities is challenging. There is an over- reliance on American diagnostic tools to assess learning disabilities. This diagnosis has
drastically increased in India. Kalyanpur (2022) posits that this could be associated with the policy measures towards universal primary enrollment in India, the increased proliferation of and enrollment in English medium private schools, leading to a competitive school environment such that struggling students, largely English language learners belonging minoritized caste and class backgrounds, are labeled as having a learning disability. This is not endemic to private schools but also occurs in public schools, where increased teacher accountability mechanisms have led teachers to label more and more students as unsuccessful or ineducable (Mukhopadhyay &
Sriprakash, 2013; Taneja-Johansson et al., 2021). Kalyanpur (2022) highlights the role of two distinct but related phenomena. One, the emergence of learning disabilities as a category in India is associated with class, caste, and language, mirroring the emergence of race and class roots of learning disabilities in the United States. Two, the inclusive aims of Education for All created new forms of marginalization through neoliberal forms of international development that imposed universal templates of education development that do not align with the resource availability or cultural contexts of countries in the global South (Kalyanpur, 2020, 2022; Rao &
Kalyanpur, 2020). Through this dissertation, I explore how these two phenomena are tied to the organization of time and temporality within international and national inclusive education policy and practice.
39 2.7 Conclusion
By engaging with teacher narratives of enacting inclusive education in India, this dissertation addresses how time and temporality interact with teachers’ understanding and practice of inclusive education in the global South. In Chapter 3, I outline the methodological approaches undertaken in this dissertation. The findings of this dissertation are divided into three chapters. In Chapter 4, I elucidate how temporal tensions led to the creation of dis/ability
categorizations that render some students ‘out of time.’ The ‘out of time’ students become the objects or sites for inclusion. That is, excluded by the temporal regimes of educational systems, these students stick out as problems – problems of time, problems in time. In Chapter 5, I explore how teachers practice inclusion. I highlight teacher dilemmas in addressing difference in the classroom. I argue that these dilemmas are rooted in the dominant temporal regimes of schools.
In Chapter 6, I examine how past, present, and futures within school-NGO partnerships shape teacher dilemmas of enacting inclusion.
40 CHAPTER 3
3 Methodology
To understand teacher stories of enacting inclusive education, I carried out participant observations, interviews, and teacher workshops for a school term as ethnographic case studies at two school-NGO sites (Parker-Jenkins, 2018). Ethnographic case studies or ethno-case studies involve thick descriptions (Geertz, 1973) and engagement to examine how things are done (Parker-Jenkins, 2018). Using a comparative case study approach, I examined the layers of context through which schools and teachers enact inclusive education policies, such as school history and location, teacher experiences, school buildings, budgets, and infrastructure, and national and local policy contexts. The objective was to examine the relationship between the micro and the macro – between the classroom, culture, and policy (Alexander, 2001) and
between teachers, the NGO, and the state (Ball, 1993a) in the enactment of inclusive education.