Posiciones y posicionamientos de los profesores de Inglés hacia los alumnos con diversidad funcional: un estudio narrativo

Abstract

This study has addressed and challenged the discourses and practices surrounding human rights, inclusive policies, and norms that support a positivist and the deficit-based view of students with disabilities in their EFL education, influencing the pedagogical practices, social reality, and decision making of English language teachers. This research departs from a critical disability interpretative framework. In this study, three main constructs were identified: human rights-based deficitarian representation(s), political disability discourse(s), and English language teachers’ positions and positionings. These constructs highlight the diffuse terminology and understanding of inclusive education; likewise, the discursively political conditions under students with functional diversity are legitimized, and the multiple positions and positionings of English language teachers. The participants were Colombian English language teachers-in-service who were beneficiaries, informants, participants, and co-interpreters of the present inquiry. The data were collected through written narratives, and semi-structured interviews. The findings suggest that teachers normalize and simultaneously denaturalize deficitarian representations through human rights models (i.e., social, medical, and moral models) that reproduce Western images of disabilities. Those images are materialized through positivist and neoliberal language enacted by standardizing norms and policies.