Introduction
In this paper, I draw on Critical Disability Studies (CDS) to explore how deficit-based and inclusive understandings of student disabilities are enacted in practice. Questions about whether and how schools can be inclusive of more students are continuously raised across media, research, policy, and practice spheres. The concept of inclusive education firmly entered the educational policy scene with the UNESCO congress held in Salamanca in 1994 and the resulting Salamanca Statement (Ainscow et al. 2019). That statement contests special education’s segregationist policies and unequivocally positions inclusive education as the path towards more just and effective educational systems.
Before Salamanca, the special education sector faced criticism from activists and scholars for reinforcing a deficit-based understanding of disability (Allan 2010). The special education sector was, and is, seen as upholding the medical model of disability (Brantlinger 1997; Hamre 2018). Actions based on that way of framing disability entail compensatory measures aimed at ‘normalising’ the individual student for assimilation in mainstream schooling (Goodley 2018). However, making disability into an individual ‘problem’ places the blame for exclusion on the student and naturalises the associated stigma (Tomlinson 2017). In contrast, inclusive education became linked to the contextual understanding of disability advocated in the social model, which was influential in shaping the portrayal of inclusive education in the Salamanca Statement and subsequent international policies, such as the Sustainable Development Goals.
Just as the social model challenged the medical model, Graham and Slee (2008) have noted that the original intent of inclusive education was to radically challenge the dominant individualistic narrative of special education. In this challenge lies a call for an expansion of the understanding of what a ‘normal’ student in public schools is and should be (Florian 2019). Inclusive education addresses learning communities at large and places the responsibility for all students’ participation at the institutional level rather than on the individual student. Such an approach highlights the contextual factors that construct the conditions for participation in learning situations (Hansen et al. 2020). As noted by Naraian (2021), an understanding of inclusive education based on the social model is heavily informed by the scholarly tradition in disability studies, which has continuously highlighted the fundamental ontological, epistemological, and methodological differences between special and inclusive education.
However, the medical model of disability remains pervasive in research on inclusive education as well as in practice, leading to continuing segregation and pathologisation of student differences (Graham and Slee 2008; Nilholm 2021; Reeves et al. 2022). Danish inclusion and special education researcher Lotte Hedegaard-Sørensen (2021) has suggested that there is a theory-practice gap in inclusive education, as teacher education is mainly based on prescriptive theories with limited grounding in practice. According to Hedegaard-Sørensen (2021), this gap between theory and practice leads to a lack of nuanced understanding among school staff about the differences between deficiency-based and inclusive perspectives. The distinction between these approaches is, however, important, as they have very diverse consequences for how schools act when faced with disability (Aas 2022).
With CDS, disability can be seen as a disruption of what is considered ‘normal’, as difference challenges the boundaries of normality (Erevelles 2019; Goodley 2014). Building on this, the understanding of disability I work with here considers students who are ‘out of sync with [their] environment, both the physical and attitudinal environment’ (Garland-Thomson 2002, 20). I am therefore adapting a broad conception of disability as the perceived failure to live up to normative expectations in the school setting, whether those expectations are directed towards bodily appearance, capacities, or behaviours. With this understanding, I am wielding CDS as a discursive tool that is uniquely positioned to shed light on the processes whereby bodies become categorised and made problematic. In line with the current theoretical developments within CDS, I am directing my gaze away from specific subjects and lived realities and towards the processes that construct disability as a social phenomenon (Minich 2016).
In keeping with these considerations, this paper explores how deficiency-oriented and contextual understandings of disability are enacted in Danish schools, highlighting their implications for inclusive education. To bridge the gap between theory and practice in inclusive education, I argue that we need a clearer, empirically grounded understanding of the contrast between individual-oriented, deficit-based approaches and contextual, inclusive education strategies. Drawing on CDS as an analytical framework, this paper provides researchers and practitioners with a framework for critically examining how schools construct and negotiate the boundaries of inclusion in everyday practice. Through this distinction, the analysis exposes how pedagogical practice is often co-opted by special education logics, resulting in a lack of critical engagement with the structural and institutional mechanisms that shape inclusion and exclusion. The DisSchool concept is operationalised as an analytical lens to empirically distinguish between deficit-based and inclusive logics in everyday school practice. This approach offers a practice-near framework that renders visible the structural forces shaping inclusion and exclusion and traces how disability disrupts normative schooling logics—sometimes reproducing and sometimes reconfiguring educational practices.
In the following sections, I will provide some context by describing inclusive education’s development as a practice and as a field of research, with a specific focus on Denmark, the context of this study. In what follows, I begin by describing the methods and materials used in this study and then go on to elaborate on the specific critical disability approach used in the paper. In the analytical section, I examine empirical examples from interviews and fieldwork in Danish schools, using the concept of DisSchool (cf. Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2015) as an analytical lens to explore how dis/ability disrupts normative school practices.
Diversity Management in Schools in the Era of Inclusion
Schools are social arenas where the clash of being a different child plays out constantly for disabled children (Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2015). Schools privilege individual performance and competitiveness on predefined parameters of educational success, which raises the hoop with regard to what can be considered ‘a normal student’ (Slee et al. 2019; Ydesen et al. 2022). Fendler and Muzaffar (2008) have illustrated how schools are organised to cater to students falling within the normal distribution of a bell curve, making average the target group for education. With this point of departure, normal comes to equal ‘good’, and digression from normal becomes inherently negative (Annamma et al. 2013). The normative expectations embedded in schooling thereby translate to ableist assumptions, which become key components of the disability machinery, effectively working to disable children in everyday practices (Goodley 2018). Indeed, it has been argued that the very structure of schooling serves to single out, categorise, and label certain students as deviant (Erevelles 2011; Tomlinson 2012).
In Denmark, critiques of the stigmatising and segregationist policies of special education inspired a reform in 1993, which entailed a shift away from the differentiation of students to instead focus on differentiated approaches to teaching in mainstream schools (Holloway and Hamre 2018). In the following year, Denmark ratified the Salamanca Statement, solidifying intentions to provide better access to mainstream schooling for all children. Inclusive education became a household term in a Danish context with a law in 2012 that set an explicit goal of less segregation of students with ‘special needs’. Soon after this came a school reform where inclusive education was made into a key objective (Hamre 2018).
In the last decade, research has become increasingly focused on the how of inclusive education, which includes the identification of barriers for its realisation in practice. Hansen et al. (2025), for example, have noted how deficiency approaches to disability continue to be deeply submerged in the routines and structures of Danish schools. Moreover, research has shown that a deficit perception of students lowers both teachers’ sense of responsibility for the students along with their expectations regarding their academic performance (Aas 2022; Rubie-Davies and Rosenthal 2016). On that note, Danish researchers Hedegaard-Sørensen and Grumløse (2017) have found that inclusion is often seen as an extra task for teachers to complete rather than as a fundamental part of teaching and learning. By naturalising teaching directed at the average student according to bell curve principles, this compartmentalisation intensifies ableist assumptions about students’ participation in the classroom. As Titchkosky (2019) has argued in a different context, inclusivity thus becomes an afterthought rather than an integrated priority. Several Danish studies have furthermore pointed to the clash between the persistent focus on academic performance and testing and the objectives of inclusive education (Hamre 2018; Larsen et al. 2019; Ydesen et al. 2022). These inconsistencies in the implementation of inclusive policies have led some researchers to suggest that much of the research and practice carried out under an inclusive education umbrella today is simply a matter of special education frameworks in disguise (e.g., Erevelles 2011; Nilholm 2021; Slee et al. 2019). As Erevelles (2011, 2157) has argued:
[E]ven if students enjoy spatial inclusion, ideologies present in the school curriculum serve to unwittingly construct certain student subjectivities as deviant, disturbing, and dangerous, thereby justifying their exclusion.
In an era of schooling characterised by accountability and international comparison, the organisation of schools becomes geared towards fulfilling expectations in terms of measurable academic performance rather than ‘soft’, rights-based agendas such as inclusion.
However, as argued by Hansen et al. (2020), for inclusive ideals to be integrated in practice, teachers, educators, and school leadership must continuously examine their understanding of difference. Without such reflection, there is a risk of diversity becoming positioned as a threat rather than as a precondition of social practices in school. In this paper, I aim to illuminate deficit-based and inclusive understandings as they are made manifest in the everyday thinking and practice of Danish schools. In so doing, I seek to facilitate a discussion about what deficit-based understandings can look like and where potentials for more inclusive, structurally anchored practices arise. I argue that posing these concepts—deficit-based and inclusive—as binary opposites can sharpen conceptual clarity, which, in turn, can assist practitioners in evaluating the inclusivity of everyday practices. The next section outlines how I use the CDS-inspired concept of the DisSchool as an analytical vehicle to contain this dichotomy and how it supports the overarching aim of bridging the gap between theory and practice in inclusive education research.
Theoretical Underpinnings: Approaching the DisSchool
Approaching inclusive education with CDS builds on a critique of the historical and ongoing pathologisation of students who are unable to live up to the strict normative expectations of our current society (Goodley 2018; Slee et al. 2019). In this work, I follow Minich’s (2016) articulation of CDS as a methodology that centres the production of disability as the subject of study, thereby interrogating the normative logics shaping inclusive efforts in schools (Minich 2016). As Schalk (2017) further argues, CDS as methodology is not dependent on a fixed object of analysis; instead, this allows for it to function as an ‘approach to studying power, privilege and oppression of bodily and mental norms which is not dependent upon the presence of disabled people, yet is informed by social perspectives, practices and concerns about disability’. Taking such an approach means that this study’s contribution lies in its analysis of the systems and practices that construct disability in schools rather than in its representation of disabled subject positions.
In their conceptual work on inclusive education, Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2015) introduce the notion of the DisSchool to capture how disability disrupts normative expectations in schooling. They argue that adding a ‘dis’ has the potential to disrupt the status quo, challenging and reshaping conventional thinking. Therefore, placing ‘dis’ alongside ‘school’ allows us to explore what it means to reimagine school with disability. Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2015) describe two types of moments: those where disability provokes educational responses that prompt reorganisation in a more inclusive direction, and those where maintaining ableist structures is prioritised, leading to marginalisation and exclusion. The concept of the DisSchool thus challenges us to look for moments when schools push the boundaries of acceptable otherness, allowing differences to shape their practices. In this article, I develop slightly on the concept by posing DisSchool, emphasising the ‘dis’, as the reorganisation of school practice supported by a structural and contextual understanding of disability, broadening participatory opportunities for all students. A DisSchool, emphasising the ‘school’, on the other hand, signifies moments where educational practice is guided by individual and deficiency-based understandings of disability, placing problems and finding their solutions in compensatory or exclusionary measures targeting single students.
The imagining of a DisSchool stems from the work for a broader paradigm shift towards equity and justice in education, aligning with CDS’s critical focus on disrupting ableist frameworks and fostering environments that accommodate diverse ways of being and learning (Connor 2020; Goodley and Runswick-Cole 2015). Following the above considerations, this paper builds on an understanding of disability as a framework for interpreting human differences by measuring them against an articulated norm and thereby assigning them value (Garland-Thomson 2002). In this way, CDS, when applied to the study of (inclusive) education, allows for an exploration of ‘whose bodies and minds are valued or permitted to thrive, whose aren’t and by what means’ (Jarman and Kafer 2014, 2). While recognising that there are different views on inclusive education policies in the disability (research) community (Kermit et al. 2014; Masuku and Marumolo 2024), this article engages in the conversation on how to create change in a more inclusive direction in general schooling.
In sum, I understand the DisSchool as a result of deficiency-based pedagogical methods or interventions that address perceived problems through compensatory measures directed at individual students. In contrast, the DisSchool is characterised by contextual, inclusive initiatives that operate at the structural level, making learning environments more accessible to all students regardless of their individual characteristics. The concept of the DisSchool will therefore be used as an analytical lens to discuss how, in response to the disruption posed by disability, schools in my empirical material have transformed and reoriented their practices. Even though Goodley and Runswick-Cole (2015) have dropped the slash in their conception of the term ‘DisSchool’, Goodley (2018, 7–8) later argued that he was ‘happy to keep the split term’ using a slash, as it ‘attends to the very definite ways in which humanity works through and against preferred and othered, claimed and abandoned, majoritarian and minoritarian positions’. Following this argument, with the exception of the DisSchool label, I use dis/ability and dis/abled as the preferred terminology from this point on.
Methods and Materials
In this paper, I draw on empirical material from a qualitative study of inclusive education in Danish schools. I refer to interviews as well as ethnographic material produced between December 2021 and February 2024. The interviews were conducted with six school principals and two assistant principals. There were nine interviews with eight teachers, as well as with three municipal coordinators. Two of the interviews were conducted with the teacher of the class in which I was also a participant observer. The teacher informants primarily taught 1st–3rd grade students, while one teacher worked primarily with secondary school students. The interviews were semi-structured, qualitative interviews that followed similar interview guidelines but allowed for flexibility in the lines of questioning (Kvale and Brinkmann 2015). The interviews were transcribed, and quotes included in this paper were translated into English by the author.
The ethnographic material derives from an intermittent ethnography in one mainstream primary school classroom, spanning 30 days (around 120 hours) of participant observation over the course of one year, with children between the ages of eight and ten years. The extended period of fieldwork allowed me to build familiarity with teachers and students and to sharpen my focus over time (Jeffrey and Troman, 2004). The principal at the school acted as an initial gatekeeper; however, the teachers were asked to consent to my presence, both initially and continuously, as we arranged each visit. The primary class that I observed was not selected due to the students’ characteristics. I had no prior knowledge of their backgrounds or dispositions. It was a mainstream class of 24 students, containing minoritised students in terms of ethnicity, socio-economic status, ability and race, but most students were white, Danish-speaking, non-dis/abled and lived in the affluent district where the school is situated.
Rather than seeking a fixed or ideal model of inclusion, this project aimed to locate inclusive education empirically by examining how its meaning is negotiated in everyday school practice. It therefore adopts a broad definition of inclusion, grounded in the understanding that inclusion is not merely about access for specific groups but a dynamic process concerning the placement, participation, and achievement of all students in school (Ainscow 2024; Haug 2017). This understanding resonates with the CDS perspective adopted here, posing dis/ability as a contingent and socially produced marker of difference emerging in moments where bodies and behaviours are rendered ‘out of sync’ with dominant educational norms (Garland-Thomson 2002, 20). In this view, all children are potentially subject to disabling processes, although some are more persistently marginalised. Inclusion, then, is not a stable outcome but an ongoing negotiation of normativity and difference in school practices.
During fieldwork, the overarching empirical focus was on how schools adapted (or not) their practices in encounters with learner diversity. I approached my observations with a commitment to staying attuned to moments of disruption, contradiction, or ambiguity—those instances where school practices seemed to falter, bend, or shift in response to difference. In doing so, I was guided by my operationalisation of the concept of the DisSchool, translating Goodley and Runswick-Cole’s (2015) distinction into an analytical framework grounded in the contrast between deficit-based and contextual logics. This framework allows for an analysis of how inclusion is constructed in practice—not just in formal policy terms, but through the small, situated decisions and adaptations that constitute school life. Interviews and fieldnotes were coded through a combination of open and theoretical coding, aided by Nvivo (Cohen et al. 2007). The analysis moved between inductive themes emerging from close readings of the materials and a DisSchool-informed focus on moments where dis/ability acted to provoke either reinforcement of current practices or their reconfiguration in more inclusive directions.
This study adheres to the ethical standards set out in the Danish Code of Conduct for Research Integrity (Ministry of Higher Education and Science, 2014). As is common in Denmark, no formal ethics board approval was required for this type of research, but all participants (and their legal guardians) provided informed consent, and ethical considerations, including confidentiality, researcher reflexivity, and informed voluntary participation, were carefully followed throughout the study. Additionally, no personal details of individual children are included in this paper. Details in quotes used in the article that might have conflicted with the anonymity of the participants have been removed or altered.
A Productive Disruption
The following analysis presents five empirical examples that illustrate how schools respond to moments where normative expectations are disrupted by student difference. Guided by the concept of the DisSchool and the analytical distinction between deficit-based and contextual logics of dis/ability, each example explores how such disruptions either reinforce existing educational structures or provoke a reconfiguration of practice in more inclusive directions. The analysis moves across multiple institutional levels—from school leadership and organisational procedures to classroom practices and student-teacher interactions—reflecting the layered and situated nature of inclusive education. Taken together, the examples demonstrate how inclusive or deficit-based reasoning becomes manifest in practice and how these logics are embedded not only in pedagogical responses but also in the structures and routines of schooling.
The Greenhouse
The so-called ‘middle form’ is a concept that has become increasingly popular in Denmark during the last decade (Tegtmejer and Jørgensen 2022). In short, a middle form is an alternative organisation of educational provisions that is physically located in a mainstream school but is designed for students labelled with ‘special educational needs’. As reflected by the name, it is typically used as a middle ground between general and special education, a way of providing special educational support in a mainstream setting. In their analysis of middle forms in Denmark, Tegtmejer and Jørgensen (2022) show that the establishment of a middle form is perceived as more flexible and less time- and resource-consuming than one-on-one support or moving a student to a special needs school. Furthermore, they highlight that the decision to go in for this type of educational provision is often based on financial considerations, as alternatives to it are significantly more expensive.
In an interview with a school principal, we talked about a middle form that they called the ‘Greenhouse’. The initiative for the Greenhouse came from teachers and leadership at the school, who felt that some children would be better accommodated in a learning framework apart from the mainstream classroom. The Greenhouse became a hub where there were professionals working specifically with students considered to be in need of special educational support. Students who were identified as suitable for the Greenhouse came there on a regular, pre-determined basis. The principal describes the process as follows:
Our Greenhouse is a middle form that started—well honestly it was completely random. It started because there was a need. We had some children (…) for whom being in the classroom hurt so much… it was too hard for them, but also for the rest of the class. Now we don’t like kicking anybody out. Nobody is made better off by that. We wanted to construct an alternative [to full-time mainstream schooling] that was anchored in the general classroom but that would have help from what became the Greenhouse.
With the Greenhouse, the school attempted to ameliorate the disruption created by some students’ failure to live up to normative classroom expectations. The purported dis/ability of these students ends up provoking a change at the school, construed as a relief of pressure on both the dis/abled students themselves and on the other students in those classrooms. The rationale for the Greenhouse is that mainstream classrooms are not equipped to handle certain students and/or that certain students are better off in different settings than in mainstream classrooms, at least some of the time. By saying, ‘We don’t like kicking anybody out here’, the principal suggests that if it were not for the Greenhouse, these students would have to be segregated further outside of the mainstream, presumably by being moved to a special school. This middle form is therefore seen as inclusive by comparison. The Greenhouse emerges as a physical space designed for students who fail to live up to the expectations of the classroom. This reflects an emphasis on the school side of the DisSchool concept, as the response preserves existing classroom norms rather than reconfiguring them. The dis/abled become segregated from the abled, and the classroom practices and expectations that caused some students to ‘hurt’ remain unchallenged. The well-intentioned care that the principal shows for the ‘hurting’ children can be traced back to a conception of these children as fundamentally different in ways that cannot be managed within the frameworks of the general education classroom. By reducing these students to moveable pawns, the educational routines of their class stay untouched, and business as usual can continue without them. The deficiency-logic constitutes them as the problem, and when they are moved, the problem disappears. Adopting an inclusionary logic would instead force a critical questioning of this response and demand an exploration of the community and educational practices in the classroom.
Later in the interview, the principal tells me that their goal is for students to spend most of their time in the general classroom, together with educational support teachers anchored in the Greenhouse. Depending on how this support is activated as a resource for the students, there is thus some inclusive potential in this format. A structural approach could still involve a segregation into different educational forms, at least temporarily, but importantly, such new forms would be implemented alongside efforts to strengthen and reimagine the mainstream classroom as the place for an inclusive community. In this way, dis/ability could prompt a critical questioning of what are seen as normal practices in that classroom, allowing the Dis to become definitional for the School, rather than being positioned in opposition to it.
Heartspace
The next empirical example comes from my fieldwork with a primary school class and focuses on students’ use of an alternative recess activity called ‘Heartspace’. This referred to a designated area within the school’s aftercare section, offering a quieter and calmer environment for students who find recess in the schoolyard challenging. It was specifically designed for students who needed a more relaxed break. The students who received permission from their teacher to use this space could bring one friend with them. The following quote is taken from my field notes on a typical Tuesday in the classroom:
After the lunch break the students come into the classroom again for a Danish lesson. The teacher starts with an announcement about Heartspace. She says that there are a lot of children using Heartspace during recess right now. Up until now the rule has been that you are allowed to bring one friend there if you wish. But that will no longer be allowed as there is not enough room for all of the students currently. But, she adds, as there are a lot of you who go there regularly, you can still go with somebody from the class.
A couple of weeks later, I interviewed another teacher, who talked about his experience with the class. In the quote below, he uses the examples of pause cards and the situation with Heartspace to describe how they worked with individual pedagogical accommodations in the classroom. Pause cards are laminated cards that some students are awarded by the teachers based on perceived need. If accepted by the teacher, the card can be traded in for a ten-minute individual break during lessons. The teacher says:
There was a time where…there were eight students in our class who had their own pause cards and nine who attended Heartspace during breaks. And they all brought a friend so basically the whole class was there. That’s when the coordinator came to me and said what the heck are you doing? It had gone completely amok, it had to stop.
The teacher describes a classroom environment where individual accommodations have been increasingly added until a point is reached where two-thirds of the students were regularly in some kind of exceptional situation. In the case of Heartspace, the school recognised that a self-managed recess held at the same time as all the other classes was not inclusive of all students and therefore created an alternative aimed at a small minority. However, it quickly became clear that many more students were drawn to Heartspace than it had been designed to accommodate. In response, the school restricted access by disallowing students to bring friends and limiting the number of students eligible for Heartspace. The prevailing message was that Heartspace was meant for only a few. Similarly, when eight out of the twenty-four students in the class have a regular need for more breaks than was expected and planned, that need is constructed as a dis/ability. Instead, with a DisSchool perspective, it could be seen as a symptom of ableist structures in the learning environment. The example reflects an orientation that seeks to minimise the influence of the Dis on the School, as the institutional response works to preserve existing structures rather than heeding dis/ability’s provocation to reimagine the conditions that produce exclusion. These ableist structures are obscured by deficiency logics that insist on placing the ‘problem’ within the students themselves. Students could have many different reasons to seek out Heartspace, but from a structural perspective, they point in the same direction. By viewing these students’ attraction to Heartspace as an opportunity to support diverse forms of participation during recess, the school could shift away from framing such needs as deficiencies. The issue, then, is not with the students seeking the calmer, adapted environment of Heartspace over outdoor recess. For a DisSchool to emerge, the institutional response would have to address the root cause of the need for alternatives like Heartspace and implement broader changes that promote participation for all students. Rather than adhering to a deficiency logic, such a response would allow dis/ability to act as a tool for questioning current practices and prompt the imagining of a more inclusive environment for everyone.
What Problems are you Experiencing with the Child?
Many of my interviewees expressed frustration with the surrounding factors that made the path of structural changes much more costly or difficult to adopt. Sometimes what made broader classroom changes harder to prioritise was the extra workload involved in navigating parental expectations of diagnoses and funding designated specifically for segregated one-on-one time with a special educator. Other times the administrative routines at schools are at odds with the very processes of change they are trying to implement. As part of my ethnography at a mainstream school, I sat in on meetings where all teachers of a grade sat with school leadership and school psychologists to discuss students who were garnering attention academically and/or socially. These meetings were generally characterised by concern as well as optimism for the students’ development. Sharing and discussing issues in the different classrooms made it possible for teachers to better support each other and the students across classroom communities. However, the meetings were organised around a listing of issues pertaining to each student. Teachers went through their lists of names and recounted test scores or behavioural incidents, followed by short discussions where the professionals shared their experiences with the child. The format did not allow time for a more in-depth analysis of the pedagogical climate in the contexts where these experiences took place. Instead, most discussions remained focused on the individual student, thus framing them as the beginning and endpoint of the perceived issues. With a DisSchool lens, this meeting format thus reflects an emphasis on the School, contributing to the preservation of existing institutional structures. Rather than engaging with the norms, routines and pedagogical approaches that act to reinforce and co-construct dis/ability in the school, the problem is placed with individual children and made into a matter of personal deficiencies.
Another example of organisational structures being a hindrance in themselves involves the pedagogical note [in Danish: pædagogisk notat]. The pedagogical note is a centrally designed document template used by school professionals when there is social and/or academic concern for a child at the school. The document contains both a description of the problem and a plan for dealing with it. In the following example, a school principal describes how the document constrains his inclusive ambitions:
But when we say inclusion, we make the children into the problem. And that’s because we talk about including the individual child and there is no focus on the learning environment, or the community, and I could… I mean we see it when we fill out the pedagogical note where the first question is: what problems are you experiencing with the child?
When actions start with the individual rather than the community, the structural change potential of inclusive education becomes invisible. In what is supposedly an inclusive education framework—as it is the stated policy strategy of the municipality where this school is located —official pedagogical tools meant to help address classroom issues force attention onto the individual and their deficits and thereby contribute to the obscuring of disabling structural conditions of schooling. Even though this principal is attentive to the fact that both the problem and the solution should be found at the structural level rather than with the individual student, the language and layout of the supporting professional documents actively work to undermine this position. This reflects a strong emphasis on the School side of the DisSchool concept, as dis/ability is constructed as an individual problem to be managed rather than a situated and structurally dependent phenomenon. In this way, the example highlights how deficit-based perspectives have permeated the structures of schooling in ways that derail inclusive thinking in practice.
Integrating Students’ Perspectives
In both my fieldwork and the interview material that I constructed, there were also examples of structural approaches to dis/ability. In one such example, the students were allowed to directly inform the rearrangement of the learning practice in a way that made it more inclusive of different forms of participation. One of the teachers that I interviewed talks about a 5th grade class where he teaches mathematics. He has experienced some problems with motivating the students to work throughout the entire lesson block of 45 to 90 minutes. There is especially a group of boys in this class who he has experienced as passive and easily distracted during the lesson. The teacher says:
I did an interview with the kids in that class and asked them how we should do it (…). And I told them that I had learned that you can concentrate around 25 to 30 minutes. So I suggest that we do that and then take a break and come back. They said that they wanted to try that. So now I always talk about what we’re going to do, blah blah, and then we work for 25 minutes and when it [the timer] beeps you can just go outside for a break. But I want you to work! And they sit focused and work. Even the boys who weren’t doing anything before. Because they know when the break is coming. How long they are in purgatory for. And then they can endure.
The struggle of some students to meet academic expectations and conform to school norms of ideal behaviour sparked the teacher’s curiosity, leading him to involve the students in creating a new lesson model. Their conversation resulted in the development of a new practice that, even if seemingly simple, managed to open new routes to participation for some students. By breaking the lesson into smaller segments, where students focus on specific assignments for a set amount of time, the individual problem-solving segment of the lesson became more structured and easier to approach for the students. The teacher observed that, although this approach was prompted by the struggles of a few students, it had a positive impact on the entire class. In this example, the Dis is allowed to inform and reconfigure the School, as the disruption posed by some students’ failure to meet the teacher’s normative expectations became the catalyst for structural changes that benefited all. Rather than addressing dis/ability as individual deficiency, it is used to guide the reorganisation of school practice, illustrating the inclusive potential that emerges when a school responds structurally to difference.
Being Supported Together
In an interview with a principal, we discuss how he has developed his understanding of inclusive education over time. Previously, when some students were failing to live up to normative academic standards through traditional teaching in the classroom, a support teacher would get called in during specific lessons to work with that student individually, often in a different room. Such an action is symptomatic of a deficiency approach, as it attempts to remedy perceived dis/ability with compensatory teaching. However, analysing their practice, the school realised that such an approach did not work as intended. Their objective had been for the educational support to ‘fix’ the students who would thereafter be able to return to the general classroom. But, as the principal said, ‘there was no connection between the work that the support teacher was doing and what the rest of the class was doing’, which meant that a student who started working with a support teacher in segregation from the rest of the class in the 3rd grade, most likely kept on doing so throughout the rest of their school experience. In the quote below, the principal describes the new practice that the school developed around educational support:
We have initiated a pilot project where the support teacher takes their teaching into the classroom. The regular teacher takes a group of students, and one group works independently, and the support teacher takes on a third group. And then they rotate. And now this student [in need of support] is not alone anymore and gets to experience that other students also need help and that it is ok to ask questions. It’s made an enormous difference for these kids not being made different by being pulled out of class and instead being able to stay with the others.
Thinking with the notion of the DisSchool, the actions described here reflect a shift towards a structural, rather than individual, understanding of dis/ability. Instead of placing the burden on individual students to ‘catch up’—a goal that the principal noted was rarely achieved—the responsibility for meeting diverse educational needs is transferred to the organisation of teaching itself. Diversity is not merely managed but integrated into the pedagogical model.
In this new approach, a student’s inability to meet traditional academic norms does not result in exclusion from the community. Instead, the community reorganises itself to accommodate differences in learners’ abilities, reducing the stigma often associated with exclusion. This example reflects a practice in which the Dis has forced the reconfiguration of the School, redefining dis/ability as a constructive provocation rather than a disruption to contain. By expanding the definition of what constitutes ‘normal’ academic performance, the range of what is considered academic success is broadened for all students. In embracing, rather than resisting, these differences, the potential of a DisSchool can be discerned.
Discussion
The empirical examples highlight the potential for transformative change when disability is embraced as a structural rather than an individual challenge. They also highlight the limitations of education confined to traditional, deficit-based models. The persistence of practices that isolate and stigmatise students labelled with ‘special needs’ reveals the deep-rooted influence of ableist norms within the educational system. The concept of the DisSchool offers a critical lens through which to analyse and push against these norms, advocating a school environment where difference is not only tolerated but becomes the foundation of educational practice. By utilising the dual potential of the DisSchool concept to distinguish between deficit-based and contextual, inclusive approaches, this analysis sheds light on how special education logics continue to colonise inclusive education rhetoric, often limiting its transformative potential. The distinction between moments where the School side of the binary stands firm to preserve normative and ableist practices and moments where the Dis challenges and reconfigures them has provided a concrete tool for tracing how inclusion is both enabled and limited in practice. The findings emphasise the need for a deeper engagement with the structural and institutional mechanisms that sustain ableist norms in schools. This paper thus makes a case for interrogating and disrupting the boundaries of ableist normality within schools, emphasising that inclusion cannot be achieved merely through policy shifts but requires a fundamental rethinking of the norms and practices that define educational participation. By using CDS not just to critique exclusion but to expose how inclusion is constructed and constrained, this study offers a framework for reimagining inclusive educational practices.
My analysis should not be read as implying that school practitioners are unaware that individual, deficiency-oriented understandings often dominate their practice or that they always fail to notice possibilities for more inclusive transformations. Instead, the analysis highlights the contrasting premises of deficiency-oriented and structural understandings through their practical applications and the ways in which they are mobilised and come to organise educational practices. Although the framing seemingly suggests it, individually aimed adaptations are not always wrong or grounded in deficit understandings. However, following the argument of Whitburn and Thomas (2021), unless individual adaptations coincide with deeper structural changes and/or are firmly rooted in the wishes and needs of the students themselves, they are symbolic and simplistic solutions to complex and contextually dependent problems.
It is important to recognise that in the everyday practices of teaching and learning in Danish schools, analytical distance can be hard to achieve, and it is not easy to separate and distinguish deficit-based actions from inclusion-oriented ones as they unfold. As noted by Hansen et al. (2020), for classroom practices to become more inclusive, all surrounding practices must change so as to allow for that transformation. Practitioners need time and resources to recognise and question deficit-based routines and actions. This, in turn, requires a political impetus to create the conditions for school environments where inclusive education is prioritised. Enabling a structural gaze on how schools contribute to the construction of dis/ability in the classroom requires a structural approach on all fronts.
In conclusion, this paper contributes to bridging the gap between theory and practice in inclusive education by applying a CDS approach to examine how deficiency-based and structural understandings of dis/ability are articulated in everyday school practice. In so doing, the paper makes a case for critically interrogating and disrupting the boundaries of ableist normality within schools and for allowing dis/ability to lead the way towards more inclusive learning environments for all.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the editors and other authors in this issue for their generous feedback on previous versions of this paper.
Competing Interests
The author has no competing interests to declare.