Abstract
Disabled people represent the biggest single global minority apart from women, but there is a relative lack of attention to disability issues worldwide. A number of international instruments, most notably the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD), require countries to provide disabled people the same access to participation in all spheres of life as they do for the rest of the population. Despite, these measures, substantial gaps remain. In this chapter, we sketch key issues in the history of thinking about disability, notably the social and medical models, and we show how different ways of thinking can lead to dramatically different educational arrangements and outcomes. Citizenship issues in the context of disability and education are embodied concerns and cannot be separated from other questions about disability and citizenship.
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Notes
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The question of terminology is central to many debates about disability. Proponents of the social model in Great Britain favour the use of the term “disabled people/persons” because, as they argue, these are people who are disabled through social exclusionary and discriminatory processes. In the USA and elsewhere, “persons with disabilities” is preferred, as there is an objection to seeing the disability as defining the person as a whole. In this chapter, we choose to use the term from the social model which emphasizes social exclusion of whole persons, but we recognize that there are cogent arguments in favour of other terms as well. It is not possible in this field to use a term to which some people will not object. See Swartz (2010), for a discussion of these questions.
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Lourens, H., McKinney, E.L., Swartz, L. (2016). Disability and Education: More than Just Access. In: Peterson, A., Hattam, R., Zembylas, M., Arthur, J. (eds) The Palgrave International Handbook of Education for Citizenship and Social Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51507-0_6
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