Creating more dangerous safe-spaces: A performative remedy for classroom solipsists?

Abstract

“I worry more and more that we are creating an atmosphere where our students can remain in their own little worlds.” Although I cannot remember my exact turn-of-phrase, this approximates what I scribbled down on my notecard and tacked on the wall during our unit on Individual Differences and Classroom Diversity. It was nearing the end of the semester and each of us were instructed to prepare for a lively discussion of one chapter from Price’s (2011) Mad at School. Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life. My comment, casually hanging next to several others under the heading “Doubts/Questions,” was in fact more sharply directed toward some suggestions in the article we had read and not toward my colleagues, who were co-participants in the course and fellow associate instructors – I didn’t dare to think any of my compatriots would be guilty of such a thing. Price, in her chapter titled “Presence, Participation, and Resistance in Kairotic Space,” attempts to push back against what she deems overly “rationalist” assumptions in both theory and praxis as they relate to classroom accommodations. The claim is that we, as educators and theorists, tend to only consider formal accommodations for students with various disabilities ...