Disabling experiences and inclusive school: reframing the debate in Portugal

ABSTRACT This article aims to problematise the discourses of inclusive education by analysing the experiences of disabled people in the Portuguese regular school system. Individual interviews and focus group, held in different areas of the country, exposed the main debates, contradictions and continuities between policies and practices coming from irreconcilable paradigms. These barriers to learning and participation were traced at the organizational, curricular, and pedagogical levels, and at the socialization with peers, suggesting a political, temporal and contextual transversality of an individualizing and disabling gaze, with immediate and long-term discriminatory, segregating and excluding effects on the lives of disabled people. These experiences could be the basis for recognizing the ubiquity of exclusion in school as we know it, and for creating solidarity and democratic educational communities where these barriers are systematically denatured and eliminated.