Abstract
This paper is a critical examination of the state of Canadian literacy education and research and its effects on young children. Its purpose is to appraise the ways in which disability is currently being produced and practiced in early school curricula and to argue for a theoretically rich curricula which begins from children’s strengths. To accomplish these goals, this paper commences with a brief appraisal of curriculum studies’ lack of attention to issues of dis/ability, considers major movements in literacy curricula, then contends that an innovation in literacy curricula the authors term, “the biomedical approach”, is pathologizing entire school populations and inflicting upon them reductionistic literacy curricula. This paper illustrates the biomedical approach through a narrative of a public school and the experiences of its early years staff and students.
Highlights
Our purpose in this paper is to forward a critical appraisal of the ways in which disability is produced and practiced in early school literacy curricula
We briefly show the state of dis/ability in curriculum studies and present two approaches to literacy curricula: the psychological approach to reading and the socio-cultural approach to literacies, which until very recently have been dominant and have cleanly split school children and their curricula along the lines of dis/ability
We demonstrate how the biomedical approach, when combined with particular educational policies, disables entire school populations and inflicts upon them reductionistic literacy curricula
Summary
Our purpose in this paper is to forward a critical appraisal of the ways in which disability is produced and practiced in early school literacy curricula. We demonstrate how the biomedical approach, when combined with particular educational policies, disables entire school populations and inflicts upon them reductionistic literacy curricula.
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