Unspeakable: the discursive production of a ‘tragic subject’ among children in the early childhood classroom

Abstract

ABSTRACT For the children in the inclusive early childhood classroom, there are acceptable, but only limited ways to speak about disability, and sometimes no way to speak. Discourses of tragedy and suffering have a pervasive, and historically resilient, association with disability in education. A subject of tragedy is discursively created in the classroom via discourses of development and special education, as one who is in need of sympathy, remediation and cure. A normal is re/produced in the classroom and as young children take up the sanctioned discourses that individualise and medicalise subjects, exclusionary practices are observed that reinforce a privileged normal and a subjugated Other. Troubling embedded discourses that privilege the normal, and pathologise the Other, exposes uncomfortable remnants from the past. Interrupting dominant discourses and rethinking the way that they subject us all provides some promise for re-imagining inclusive education.