Disabling Consent: Discourses of Disability and Inclusion in Ontario's Early Childhood Education and Care in 1994
Abstract
Today, disabled children have access to child care programs, but access is provisional, not rights based. This is a study of what happened to push children with disabilities into a subordinate concern when, in 1994, Ontario’s Group K hospital programs for children with disabilities were closed and children were pointed toward inclusive child care instead. This critical discourse analysis of four early childhood education and care (ECEC) documents uses Thomas Hobbes’s social contract theory to show how ECEC planning and system design that excluded disabled children created further disabling conditions for children already experiencing impairment. The study asks: (1) How was children’s disability responded to in ECEC at a time of transition in social policy and administration in children’s programs? (2) What might Hobbes’s social contract theory contribute to a study of ECEC inclusion to understand how disability was produced? (3) How did discourses produce situations of exclusion, separation, and disappearance for children with disabilities in inclusive ECEC? (4) How was ECEC set up to fail children with disabilities by the Ontario government through its poor planning and child care system design? This study finds that two ECEC discourses—disability is a natural phenomenon of the body and children are children first—prioritize the nondisabled child and make children with disabilities disappear, in and from ECEC. Therapy discourses, originally of medicine but strengthened in the ambiguous governing infrastructure of ECEC in which disability is represented as weakness and vulnerability, are found to subordinate children with disabilities while also leaving educators with a great deal of unanticipated, invisible work. In 1994, the conditions of policy, planning, and available information had the potential to move ECEC into a better system for children with disabilities; however, this study concludes that the path that was taken instead—to not develop good policies and plans for disability in ECEC—meant that the conditions whereby children with disabilities are subordinate, less than, and not fully human were locked into ECEC. Now, the development of a Canada Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) system presents an opportunity to change the discourses that created the disabled subject in ECEC in 1994. A clear statement about disabled children as an assumed focus for all ECEC systems, including CWELCC, could shift the rhetoric of inclusion that has been so limiting to ECEC in Ontario since 1994.