Decolonizing Ableist Pedagogy

Abstract

How can someone born without a privileged language and not educated in a privileged educational institution engage in decolonization? This is a very relevant question for most people who live in the context of the global South. This paper proposes a constructive imagination to decolonize ableist pedagogy through feminist disability analysis. I argue that colonial pedagogy is inherently ableist. This paper is situated in an anti-ableist and anti-patriarchal framework, unveiling the normate culture and patriarchal-colonial logic. However, the main source of analysis and epistemological tool is my body and experience as an Indonesian woman living with a disability. In trying to decolonize pedagogy, the experience of the body becomes more important than forming a new abstract theory of decoloniality. This paper proposes decolonizing ableist pedagogy as a communal work which requires examining colonial language and the binary thinking of body and mind through delinking the colonial space and crippling the colonial time. Based on this awareness, the decolonialization of ableist pedagogy is as imperative as the decolonialization of church mission.