Reconceptualizing Disability in Education provides an essential critical exploration of problematic discourses, practices, and pedagogies that inform how disability is presently understood and responded to within the field of education. Luigi Iannacci interrogates and destabilizes ableist grand narratives that dominate every aspect of how disability is linguistically, bureaucratically, procedurally, and pedagogically configured within education. Ultimately, this book seeks to forward human rights for people with disabilities in educational contexts by clarifying and operationalizing inclusion so that it is not just a model necessitated by a hierarchy of legality, but rather a set of beliefs and practices based on critical analyses and a reconceptualization of current understandings and responses to disability that prevent inclusion and human rights from being realized. As the book is grounded in reconceptualist theorizing, it draws on multiple perspectives-including critical disability theory, post-modernism, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and social constructivism-to deconstruct and destabilize what is currently taken for granted about disability and those ascribed disabled identities within education. A variety of personal, professional, research experiences and data are offered and drawn on to critically address questions regarding philosophical, epistemological, pedagogical, organizational, economic, and leadership issues as they relate to disability in education. Critical incidents, interviews, documents, and artifacts are drawn on and narratively presented to explore how disability is presently configured in language, identification, and placement processes, discourses, pedagogies, and interactions with students deemed disabled, as well as their parents/caregivers. This critical narrative approach fosters alternative ways of thinking, speaking, being, and doing that forward a human rights focused model of disability that sees as its mandate the amelioration of people with disabilities within education.

Reconceptualizing Disability in Education provides an essential critical exploration of problematic discourses, practices, and pedagogies that inform how disability is presently understood and responded to within the field of education. Luigi Iannacci interrogates and destabilizes ableist grand narratives that dominate every aspect of how disability is linguistically, bureaucratically, procedurally, and pedagogically configured within education. Ultimately, this book seeks to forward human rights for people with disabilities in educational contexts by clarifying and operationalizing inclusion so that it is not just a model necessitated by a hierarchy of legality, but rather a set of beliefs and practices based on critical analyses and a reconceptualization of current understandings and responses to disability that prevent inclusion and human rights from being realized. As the book is grounded in reconceptualist theorizing, it draws on multiple perspectives-including critical disability theory, post-modernism, critical theory, critical pedagogy, and social constructivism-to deconstruct and destabilize what is currently taken for granted about disability and those ascribed disabled identities within education. A variety of personal, professional, research experiences and data are offered and drawn on to critically address questions regarding philosophical, epistemological, pedagogical, organizational, economic, and leadership issues as they relate to disability in education. Critical incidents, interviews, documents, and artifacts are drawn on and narratively presented to explore how disability is presently configured in language, identification, and placement processes, discourses, pedagogies, and interactions with students deemed disabled, as well as their parents/caregivers. This critical narrative approach fosters alternative ways of thinking, speaking, being, and doing that forward a human rights focused model of disability that sees as its mandate the amelioration of people with disabilities within education.

Educators have become increasingly interested in the diverse learning environments of young children and the ways in which children and childhood are positioned within those environments. The documentation and analysis of processes of pathologization and de-pathologization in early childhood may provide scholars with the understanding needed to develop more responsive educational approaches. Early Childhood Curricula and the De-pathologization of Childhood examines what is possible for young children when their education addresses their assets and is organized in ways that expand their identity options.

Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, Rachel M. Heydon and Luigi Iannacci shed light on the ways in which joint notions of normality and abnormality are used to pathologize childhood. As teachers and educational researchers, they offer first-hand accounts of processes that take individual children and turn them into 'others' who are seen as deficient or 'at risk.' Through a variety of critical, qualitative case studies that examine general literacy education, special education, early childhood education, and intergenerational learning environments, this book highlights the theoretical underpinnings of asset-oriented curricular practices and suggests what is possible for young children when their education begins from and cultivates their funds of knowledge.

Written for those interested in improving the lives of children through interdisciplinary studies, this volume offers sustained theoretical engagement that will appeal to educators around the world.

Early childhood education has earned a prominent place on the political agendas of many countries throughout the world because it concerns one of the most important topics for people and societies -- educating and caring for children and respecting their rights. Given the global attention and action related to early childhood policies and curricula, the time to explore the tensions, political agendas, and taken-for-granted notions about children, childhood, and learning is now.

This volume contains pan-Canadian research from scholars grounded in reconceptualist curriculum theorizing that draws from sociocultural, feminist, critical, postmodern, and decolonizing understandings about early childhood, education, and care. These reconceptualist perspectives exist to examine limits, problematics, and possibilities of ECE, and to provide counter narratives to dominant ECE discourse of developmentalism, economic investment, and the universal child.