Disability as Meta Curriculum: Epistemologies, Ontologies, and Transformative Praxis

This edited book makes an epistemic claim that disability studies’ approaches to curriculum are doing more than merely critiquing how privileged knowledge excludes disability from curriculum theory and praxis. The scholars, in this volume, argue, instead, that Disability Studies embodies an epistemic space that not only demonstrates its difference from the normative curriculum, it exceeds curriculum’s confining boundaries. Thus, they argue for a “curriculum about curriculum”―one that critically investigates the epistemological, ontological, and pedagogical claims of the normative curriculum from the critical standpoint of disability.

Conceptualizing curriculum as cultural politics, each chapter offers a theorization of disability via a critical intersectional lens that addresses the following questions: What are the epistemological barriers/possibilities encountered when disability is brought into the intellectual ambit of curriculum theory? What would curriculum theory look like if disabled people re-imagined the curriculum? What is the link between curriculum and conceptions of specialized programming for students identified as disabled? And most critically, how do approaches to schooling and conceptions of ability within curriculum studies enact forms of racism, sexism, and heteronormativity as well as are complicit in the construction and removal of the disabled body from mainstream education? This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Curriculum Inquiry.

Gillian Parekh is Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair of Disability Studies in Education at York University in Canada.

Elizabeth (Ibby) Grace is an Independent Scholar.

Nirmala Erevelles is Professor of Social and Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Alabama, USA.