In the present era of inclusion, special schools increasingly serve as spaces for the delivery of supplementary education and rehabilitation services for mainstreamed disabled children. A history of segregation and institutionalization weigh heavily on the sector, prompting many special educators to advocate for students' continued mainstreaming (often against students' wishes) through mastery of the necessary compensatory techniques and technologies that promise to help them attain equality with their non-disabled peers in mainstream schools.
Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research, including bi-weekly in-person participant observation and semi-structured interviews with educators and parents, in a public special school for the blind and visually impaired in southern France, this dissertation explores the narratives and practices that maintain educators in a deficit mindset vis-à-vis disabled lives, a mindset from which it becomes difficult to see the potential of visual impairment to contribute to an enacted, non-representational epistemology in an education system based on ocular-centric objectivism.
Nevertheless, students harness being together disabled at the school to make sense of the world through their unique phenomenologies in which sight often plays a surprisingly important part. Engaging anthropology, embodied cognitive science, and critical disability studies, I argue that sight shows up for the children as a tool of playful curiosity for learning in an always emergent present, a disposition I call "sight as question" that stands in contrast to the objectivist "sight as power" standard in mainstream schools.
In re-conceptualizing the special school as understated space of embodied knowledge creation, my dissertation makes three primary contributions. First, I show how the French state's race to mainstream all students has exacerbated reactionary approaches to educating disabled children, a reality now hidden behind an innovative facade of assistive technology. Second, I document how such situation continues with the full compliance of otherwise progressive-minded educators because of a historical cultural context wherein national public education is instilled with the status of meritocratic authority responsible for vetting all children for epistemic conformity as a matter of égalité. Finally, I offer an alternative perspective for repurposing special schools to spaces of phenomenological potential led by members of the disabled community and explore what, as such, they might contribute to teaching and learning in an age of artificial intelligence.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/f1p6-vx35 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Noland, Maria Ann |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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