“Same, same but different”: The dangers of binary definitions of dis/ability in the neoliberal marketplace of early childhood education and care

Abstract

Introduction In this paper I aim to highlight issues, consider dangers and recognise challenges for adults who are involved in ECEC and the inclusion of children with disabilities. Drawing on my own and others' recent research, I examine the current ECEC environment in Aotearoa/New Zealand and explore the relationship between several key interconnected influences on inclusion. My position is one of commitment to the human rights of all children. I contend that all children, regardless of ability, have the right to be with and learn alongside their peers. Central to my stance is the view that differences in ability are part of the uniqueness of the human condition. Therefore, I consider it to be critically important to challenge beliefs and practices that contravene the rights of disabled people to be included in, and belong to, a community. What worries me most is an apparent renaissance of deficit views of disability since the introduction of privatisation in the ECEC sector. Deficit views of disability draw on simplistic binary comparisons between disability and ability. My concern is that, in recent years we have inadvertently been moving away from previous--and in my view, better informed--attempts to respect and include all children in our ECEC centres. As a heuristic to draw the reader's attention to the abled versus disabled binary, in this paper I have at pertinent points inserted a forward stroke or virgule into the word disability (i.e., dis/ability). This separation of dis and ability aims to show how our, perhaps unintentional, labelling and understanding of ability plays a role in the way we treat both abled and disabled children. As Anderson and Merrell (2001) state, the notions of disability and ability imply and construct each other. The virgule insertion here acts as an alert, drawing our attention to the fact that when disability and ability are viewed as binary partners a person with disability may cease to be viewed as a competent individual and instead the differences between abled and disabled are foregrounded. Several writers have explored disability as socially constructed (Barton, 1996; Fulcher, 1999; Oliver, 1996). This view is adopted in much of Aotearoa/New Zealand's disability legislation and policy as this quote from the New Zealand Disability Strategy (Ministry of Health, 2001) demonstrates: Disability is not something individuals have. What individuals have are impairments. They may be physical, sensory, neurological, psychiatric, intellectual or other impairments. Disability is the process which happens when one group of people creates barriers by designing a world only for their way of living, taking no account of the impairments other people have. (p. 7) This paper offers a particular perspective about the role the current market-orientated ECEC environment may be playing in the construction of young children with disability. This perspective is based in part on what I have observed over the last three decades of my own involvement in the ECEC sector. I also draw on early evidence from a research project I am currently undertaking that attempts to address these concerns by examining the current complexities and tensions surrounding inclusion from the perspectives of teachers, owners and families/whanau in the marketplace environment of the long-day ECEC sector. Long-day ECEC services are those open for the hours of an adult's typical working day, usually 7.30 am to 6.00 pm. I have worked as a kindergarten teacher, been the owner of a long-day ECEC centre and in recent years a researcher/ lecturer in ECEC. I have practised under multiple educational and ECEC sector reforms designed to support children with disabilities. These range from the introduction of special needs units, partial integration of groups from special education facilities, part-time supported inclusion of individual children and, most recently, initiatives to support full inclusion of all children. …