Dr Karen Watson

Over past decades in early childhood education, there has been an emerging critique of developmental discourses. Despite this, the universality of child development theory persists and along with it, expectations of a linear progression via prescribed stages and ages. Developmentalism produces a normal in the classroom that sanctions comparisons, positioning any difference to the normal as problematic. In this paper, using observation and conversation data from a larger poststructural ethnographic study of three inclusive early childhood classrooms in Australia, the effects of developmental discourses on the classroom and on inclusive practice are examined. Providing an alternative view of inclusion, the paper focuses on the operations of the normal, exposing the exclusionary effects of developmental discourses on children, and among children. As children negotiate difference in the classroom, they draw on sanctioned developmental understandings in coming to know themselves and others. Interrupting the power and authority of these discourses and the way they produce certain ways of being and becoming could provide some promise for inclusive practices.

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.