Between Closed Doors: cracks and gaps to think about inclusive processes in Education

Abstract

In this work, the right to education for children with disabilities is tensioned, guaranteed in legal documents, with the narratives of mothers of children diagnosed with the autism spectrum and their struggles to enroll children in school. It was perceived that the interpretations that exist in the law, such as “preferably in the regular school system”, leave the responsibility to other educational institutions, which often create barriers to enrolling the children. In the mothers' narratives, closed doors are recurrent, but they insist, finding cracks and gaps to inhabit the school. Mothers whose life stories are made invisible face long struggles for an inclusive education. Narratives are used as a methodological resource, inspired by Benjamin, Portelli and Certeau, and the dimension of the happening from Deleuze's point of view, for the production of new machinations. Special Education in Brazil is marked by medicalization, and the most devastating effects of this medicalizing culture are perceived in the speeches of teachers who present themselves as incapable of teaching children with disabilities. It is urgent that the school of this time consider differences as a condition of existence of each one.