Abstracts – Session Two
12:20 – 1:20 – 6EN – 356
Chair: Eileen Joy
Alison M-C Li: Stories of, in, through children: Enabling or disabling inclusion in early childhood education
Children’s stories offer invaluable insights into their experiences of the world (Engel, 2005). This presentation draws from the findings of a doctoral study about children’s storying. The study situates the early childhood education (ECE) setting as the storying environment that constitutes and images everyday lives and identities of all children, including children who require extra support in meeting educational needs.
By illustrating children’s storying episodes, this presentation aims to explore what inclusion or exclusion, relative to disability, looks like in ECE setting in two national contexts. Protagonists in this presentation are two children in the larger study: One child in Aotearoa New Zealand with intellectual impairment and autism and another child in Hong Kong with learning and communication delays.
Guided by Vagle’s phenomenological perspective (2014), children’s storying experiences (regarding physical and social environments and identities) were interpreted as stories of, in, and through protagonists. Contextual pairs of storying episodes were analysed along the realm of inclusion or exclusion to highlight the unique and contrastive features in the contexts (Tilly, 1984).
The preliminary findings showed that storying experiences in which children played agentive roles and had the ownership (e.g., failure and success, conflicts and compromises) were key to inclusive education. Another contributing factor was the storying environment where children found connected peer relationships and interactions. Preliminary cross-contextual findings from Aotearoa New Zealand and Hong Kong will also be discussed.
Evelyn Christina: Using Childhood Studies and Disability Studies to Understand Children’s Peer Cultures in a New Zealand Inclusive Primary School
Children’s peer relationships are a significant part of children’s experiences in schools. Different kinds of peer relationships children have may differently influence children’s learning and social-emotional experiences. Schooling practices play important roles in supporting, maintaining and preventing different peer relationships from occurring. In the last decade, changes in policies around inclusive education and the increase in immigration have changed New Zealand schools into spaces with increasing student diversity. Initiatives that have encouraged schools to adopt digital learning strategies and innovative learning spaces have also influenced the schooling landscape. How have these changes entangled with increasing diversity shaped the way children interact with one another? What kinds of peer interactions are actually meaningful for children in these changing contexts? Drawing concepts from Disability Studies and Childhood Studies, the current study aims to critically examine and understand the kinds of relationships that matter for children and how these different children’s relationships form within an inclusive school. A year-long fieldwork with an ethnographic orientation will be conducted in a New Zealand inclusive primary school to allow the researcher to gain deep understanding of the children’s social worlds. Findings from the current study may contribute to the emerging field of Disabled Children’s Childhood Studies. The study may also create new understandings of children’s peer cultures which could inform educators to better support children’s social experiences in inclusive schools.
Sandra Yellowhorse: K’é as Pedagogy: Transforming Indigenous Special Education
This paper is concerned with the settler colonial construction of “disability” and its ideologies which inform Special Education. I trace the ways in which colonial rubrics underwrite conceptions of disability through the processes of “becoming” (Said, 1975). Such processes have created a constellation of violence predicated on normative politics and neoliberal laws that benefit Western society and the state-apparatus. I discuss how settler colonial capitalism works through normative ideology and law and how it is written onto the bodies and minds of people who are deemed “disabled” through Western eyes. This in turn is manifested in current educational planning endeavors, particularly those associated with Special/Inclusive Education. Indigenous planners are currently faced with the challenges regarding Indigenous schools who take up “transformative” educational practices but who still rely on colonial frameworks of ability to think and plan for Indigenous children with difference. We require Indigenous perspectives of difference and inclusion predicated on our own worldviews and customs. I offer K’é, which is a Diné epistemic knowledge system and identity marker as the foundation for rethinking the potential of Indigenous ideologies regarding difference in the movement for transformative education. Countering colonial conceptions of being as they are implanted in law and policy requires that we untangle ideologies of difference and imagine new ways forward for Indigenous children. It begins with grounding our own intellectual pedagogy and knowledge of diversity, care, relationships and inclusion as Indigenous peoples. K’é, offers us this potential to imagine radical transformation.