Disability and Higher Education by Tim Corcoran

Disability and Higher Education by Tim Corcoran

This book encourages higher education administrators and educators to think in new ways about how to work inclusively with disabled students and examines the way inherent requirements are used in universities to ensure the integrity of their academic courses.

With the aim of influencing change in higher education policy and practice, the authors explain how inherent requirements, as they are currently deployed, lead to marginalisation and discrimination. Moving away from medicalised, deficit-based views, they introduce cutting-edge theories as alternate ways of knowing and engaging with difference in order to advance inclusive higher education policy and practice.

This indispensable resource is a key reference for higher education researchers, administrators and educators.

“In this original analysis, Corcoran and Whitburn foreground disability as an opportunity to reconsider how realities are made and remade - as well as constituted and reconstituted - in an higher education context where matters of exclusion, design, policy and power continue to matterPhilosophical, theoretical and political, this text provides a much-needed theoretical shot in the arm to inclusive education scholarship.”

Professor Dan Goodley, School of Education, University of Sheffield, UK

“How to go on? This animates Tim Corcoran’s and Ben Whitburn’s quest to open the possibility of equitable and inclusive higher education. Their answer lies in methodically working the space between theory and practice as a risky pathway where educators learn to pursue a fuller future by affirming embodied differences. This book is for any reader searching for what lies beyond identity politics for disabled people in education. For Corcoran and Whitburn this search includes “enacthink” -- purposefully enacting thinking by addressing the plurality of our social relations to better make the worlds of higher education.”

Professor Tanya Titchkosky, Department of Social Justice Education, OISE of the University of Toronto, Canada

“This is a much-needed book that takes on inclusivity within professional preparation. Guiding the reader gently and capably through multiple theoretical orientations, whether pragmatism, constructionism, materialisms, or posthumanisms, the authors offer helpful frames to lead educators out of the restrictive conceptions of capacity that underlie the enforcement of professional competencies within higher education. Readers will find that through “resonant pluralism” and “attunement”, the charge for inclusive education can be expanded to encompass the varied and complex ecologies that make up higher education practice. We are returned repeatedly to the relationalities inherent within professional learning and to an ethical orientation that continually evokes them to disrupt norms of teaching and learning. Teacher educators, in particular, will find this book immensely provocative and useful.”

Professor Srikala Naraian, Professor of Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, USA

Tim Corcoran is Associate Professor (Inclusive Education), School of Education, Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia.

Ben Whitburn is Associate Professor (Education), Southampton Education School, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.