CONTROVERSIES ABOUT THE IDEA OF INCLUSION: WHEN APPEARANCE AND ESSENCE DO NOT COINCIDE

Political history teaches us that human rights are in a constant process of transformation, comprising civilizational progress and regression. Because they denote the products of human conquests, there is no linearity or evolutionism in this field in permanent dispute. Therefore, achieving a given right as an operative principle of social interactions requires constant vigilance, especially when it materializes the desires of non-hegemonic groups.

No matter how much some rights are not substantiated in practice, since they remain distant from everyday relations in terms of applicability, this does not make them secondary in terms of historical importance. As ^{Bobbio (2001}) pointed out, the right’s existence brings with it the corollary of duty; therefore, directly or indirectly, it impacts the lineage of public policies and how society views a given phenomenon or relationship. It is not by chance that countless rights won by minority groups are constantly being attacked by hegemonic sectors, whose raison d'être lies in the destructuring of the possibilities for these groups to participate equally in society; in this eagerness, the normative lines on which affirmative texts were composed are blurred as if they carried privileges and not the guarantee of universality and equality. Consequently, we have witnessed, contemporarily, the daily questioning of integrative policies in a regressive movement, which seeks to protect interests and narrow the possibilities of occupation of various social geographies.

Under this scrutiny, we must consider the suspicion of the right to school inclusion of students with disabilities in the regular education network, a postulate made angular in the making of a fairer and more accessible society but which has been challenged as representative of a policy that would materialize failure in its originally intended goals. A clear example of this position is Presidential Decree no. 10.502 of September 30, 2020, which establishes the “National Policy for Special Education: Equitable, Inclusive and with Lifelong Learning” (PNEE-2020) (^{BRASIL, 2020}).

This theme will be the subject of analysis of this article, which is configured from a process of integrative literature review that analyzes the national educational scenario regarding the presence of students with disabilities in regular schools from the data of the National Institute of Educational Studies and Research Anísio Teixeira (INEP), highlighting the evolution of the numbers presented and projecting the challenges to be faced based on the literary clipping named as the social model of disability, analytical scope on which we build our postulates and weave confrontations with the assumptions mentioned by the infra-constitutional document.

Preliminarily, the mentioned Decree has important concerns when it stresses the need to promote education of excellence to Special Education students in an equitable, inclusive system, with lifelong learning and without the practice of any form of discrimination or prejudice. We undeniably have an objective of any educational system that prizes itself for quality since to think of the school space as disconnected from learning problems is an illogical contradiction.

Nevertheless, it does not seem to us a minimally reasonable alternative to link a given concern, which is legitimate, as linked in terms of achievement to a concatenated expansion of specialized schools, understanding these as institutions intended for the care of students who supposedly would not benefit when included in regular inclusive schools. Given these elements, it is necessary to ask: what is the understanding of inclusion behind the words of Decree 10.502 of September 30, 2020?

As it seems, the presidential document understands inclusion as merely placing students with disabilities in the classroom without requiring subsequent physical, attitudinal, didactic, and curricular alterations and adaptations. This is Ariadne’s thread through which the normative lines of the new educational policy are unveiled (currently suspended by a decision of the Federal Superior Court), which erects a series of ideational propositions that, because they start from a false assumption, inevitably present sterile, mistaken and counterproductive solutions.

That being said, it is cardinal to stress that there are no situations in which a student does not benefit when included in regular schools. If they do not benefit, it is because they are not included. Inclusion is parity of participation and denotes an organic movement of censorship and contestation of any formal or tacit exclusion, as well as the inclusion of something or someone other than on equal terms or opportunities. In the school universe, a given principle arises from the conjunction of access and permanence in a particular institution linked to the appropriation of knowledge accumulated by humankind. Opening the school walls to everyone is a fundamental part of this process. However, it is far from synthesizing what is desired regarding the proposed principle. It is evident, thus, that the infra-constitutional document made a mistake when it started from the presence of the student with a disability in regular classrooms as an inclusive act that covers all the constitutive dimensions of the philosophical assumption.

That educational policies must be transformed and rethought to evaluate their impact and project better results is beyond doubt. That the educational practices and tasks must be restructured to allow everything to be taught to everyone is also unequivocal. Nevertheless, its course must be rooted in the principles of inclusion, an assumption that cannot be given up and whose abandonment will undoubtedly result in a new range of exclusions and marginalizations experienced by people with disabilities.

In addition to these elements, which are the most harmful in the attempt to implement the new Special Education policy by the Federal Government, another important aspect of being considered is the fact that Decree 10.502 of September 30, 2020 commits an additional mistake by linking the idea of Inclusive Education as solely and exclusively relating to the target audience of Special Education, disregarding the historical genesis of the emergence of the concept of school inclusion in Brazil. In a country marked by inequality that, until a few decades ago, saw the school space as occupied almost exclusively by hegemonic groups of the population, the idea of inclusion, from the beginning, thwarted the entry of blacks, poor people, women, people with disabilities, and indigenous people, in short, those who had nothing beyond the permission, at most, to sell their labor force.

Therefore, the audience of inclusion is each and every Brazilian in the most diverse spaces and social contexts. Therefore, the understanding that this collectivity is subsumed to people with disabilities denotes a scar-made stigma because they were the last to enter the regular classrooms. This compound tacitly echoes until today with expressions such as inclusion students, included, among others. In this interactive universe, the last impression was recorded in the memory of school relations. Hence, the mistaken association of people with disabilities as summarizing the totality of subjects affected by inclusive educational policies is an element that does not hold when referencing empirical facts.

Although our schools and regular classrooms are covered with such contradictions, there is a visible change in the way these geographies have behaved in relation to the difference expressed by disability. Historical advances in the occupation of regular school spaces by people with disabilities are undeniable since the enactment, in 2008, of the National Policy for Special Education from the Perspective of Inclusive Education (^{BRASIL, 2008}). We call such an act occupation because we understand that it is a historical achievement fermented by the emergence of social activist movements of people with disabilities through intense struggles and not a derivative of the hegemonic groups. Therefore, the need to rebel against any assumption that admits the possibility of regression to this empowerment, as proclaimed by Decree 10.502 of September 30, 2020.

The spatial empowerment we are talking about here is not politically correct verbiage but can be verified from official data from national education. By accessing the Basic Education Statistics of Brazil (^{INEP, 2008}, ²⁰⁰⁹, ²⁰²¹) we realize how the presence of students with disabilities has become a constant in regular schools. In 2008 (^{INEP, 2009}), Brazil had 695,699 students enrolled in Special Education. Of these, 375,775 were enrolled in Common Classes and 319,924 in Exclusive or Special Classes. At this point, it is worth noting that, for the first time in our history, the number of students with disabilities enrolled in Common Classes (375,775; 54%) exceeded the number enrolled in Special Classes (319.924; 46%), a fact that highlights the fundamental impact of the new Special Education Policy, since the 2007 educational census (^{INEP, 2008}) highlighted that among the 654,606 students with disabilities enrolled in the various levels of education, 306,136 (46.8%) were enrolled in Regular Classes and 348,470 (53.2%) in Special Classes. Such a transition should indeed be celebrated as symptomatic of the change in the relationship operated by schools concerning the phenomenon of disability, although this change would become even more acute.

So much so that, if we compare the data from 2008, the first year of the implementation of the National Policy for Special Education from the Inclusive Perspective, with the numbers from 2020, the latest information available in INEP’s database, we will see important changes in the Brazilian educational map. Such changes begin with a decrease in the number of students enrolled (47,295,294 in 2020 versus 53,232,868 in 2008). Nonetheless, in this space, we are particularly interested in the growth in enrollments of the so-called target public of special education (1,308,900, 2.77% of the total number of students in 2020, against 695,699, 1.31% of the total students in 2008), numbers related undoubtedly to the intensification of the identification of this public, as well as to the continuous inclusive processes marked by national and international public policies, highlighting the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) occurred in 2006, of which Brazil is a signatory, including its Optional Protocol, since 2007 and whose content was added to the national system through Decree No. 6949 of August 25, 2009 (^{BRASIL, 2009}).

In addition to these findings, the most exciting data in the Educational Census of 2020 (INEP, 2021) concerning those of 2008, when observed from the perspective of Special Education, concerns the massive preponderance of enrollments of students with disabilities in regular classes (1,152,875) compared to Special Classes (156,025), since 88.08% of students with disabilities in 2020 were enrolled in the regular education system, which is absolutely significant and summarizes the growth of an inclusive social project. Such data can be better visualized in Table 1 below:

That being said, it is undeniable that people with disabilities have started to be present in regular school spaces. This occupation has the power to restructure the totality of the recognition components of this social geography because, in the case of the person with a disability, their presence never goes unnoticed given that the referred experience is seen as a synecdoche of the extra normative conditions from modernity on. To use the allegory of ^{Murphy (1987}), disability is the most visible of all social invisibilities.

From this angle, the presence of people with disabilities in regular school spaces cannot be understood as something trivial, as it affects the transformation of social interactions manifested in this universe and overflows its effects to other contexts. In this perspective, the statement by ^{Abberley (1987}) regains meaning when he highlights the interaction with people with disabilities as a cardinal mechanism in improving the understanding of the phenomenon and the very interaction established with them.

Besides the attitudinal gains that help combat prejudice and discrimination, we can assert some other important elements that the presence of people with disabilities brings to the school community, which range from necessary structural changes to didactic modifications that can benefit everyone when thought of in terms of universal learning design. As an example, we can cite the construction of relief models, which enhance the appropriation of knowledge of both relief and spatial concepts not only for students with visual impairment but, yes, for all students who have difficulties in understanding these features, sometimes too abstract, as ^{Almeida et al. (2020}) pointed out.

Now, if it were not for the presence of students with disabilities in regular classrooms, it is very likely that these elements would not develop at the speed that we have seen. This is surely one of the most perverse elements that the history of exclusion and discrimination represented in the period of institutionalization brought to society as a whole, for, in addition to bordering the person with a disability to interdiction, preventing them from participating in social life and narrowing their development potentialities (socially engineered), it concomitantly blocked to the general collective the advantages made possible by living with the otherness expressed by disability; this experience destabilizes stable notions of accommodation. The difference expressed by disability engenders thinking about tools, mechanisms, and artifices by which we can transform nature and communicative relations in ways that broaden the possibilities for social justice, so it is an innovative and deeply revolutionary experience.

Not coincidentally, numerous studies have demonstrated the positive aspects that the presence of students with disabilities generates throughout the school community, among which we should mention the works of ^{Mantoan (2014}), ^{Salend and Garrick-Duhaney (1999}), ^{Villa and Thousand (2005}), and ^{Katz and Mirenda (2002}), among others.

This finding adds another point of criticism to Decree 10,502 of September 30, 2020 and its projected defense of the return of specialized institutions as a promising path in Special Education. In addition to the elements described herein, which are more than enough to implode the invalid arguments contained in the infra-constitutional document, it is also worth criticizing the tacit argument expressed in the aforementioned legal text that children with disabilities are not learning the desired content when inserted into regular classrooms.

This statement, which forms the background of the document alluded to, does not find any theoretical support; if not, let us see: if the problem of the meager learning manifested by students with disabilities in regular classrooms was even if their insertion in regular spaces would it be inductive to think that when there was the predominance of these subjects in specialized institutions they learned? To us, nothing seems falser than this thesis. In fact, it is well known the welfare and medical nature of the programmatic essence of some of these institutions and the not-very-encouraging results from the pedagogical point of view.

Nevertheless, if it is a fact that there is a learning deficit for children with disabilities in regular schools, and we agree on this, does the ordinary character of these institutions cause it? Would it not be more prudent to think about the transformation of some pedagogical practices that have created an almost parallel universe in terms of curriculum for students with disabilities compared to other students? Going further, are other students learning what is expected for their stage of development, or do they also have gaps in the appropriation of knowledge designed as necessary to be assimilated?

Data from the Relatório Brasil no PISA 2018 [Brazil in PISA 2018 Report] (INEP, 2020b) allow us to assert that there is a generalized learning problem in Brazil. Social and educational exclusion affects a much larger audience than people with disabilities, which asserts the need to create a national pact for learning that involves everyone and is seen as an architectural assumption of what we call Inclusive Education, taking this as an education that incorporates all bodies in a fabric that promotes expansive learning. Once the moment of access to the school institution is overcome, the reorganization of didactic and pedagogical activities that allow students to appropriate the knowledge historically accumulated by mankind, a principle that shapes the school institutions and that marks its specificity in space and time, becomes urgent.

We must think Inclusive Education from this commitment to learning since it is fanciful to glimpse any form of social inclusion in a literate context studded with technological innovations without appropriating this knowledge. If inclusion is parity in participation, it denotes success in the school universe regarding the appropriation of the curriculum designed through programmatic content.

This federal educational pact involves not the separation of students with disabilities from regular classrooms, as proposed by Decree 10,502, of September 30, 2020, but rather the re-signification of the very understanding of the category of disability to promote its disassociation from assumptions derived from the medical field and the setting of a new national challenge in terms of public policies, which places as a first necessity the treatment with knowledge and makes all the necessary efforts and transformations for its appropriation to all students.

Expressing these elements, the focus herein lies in presenting contributions to Special Education that allow us to think about the relationships involving its target audience from the perspectives inaugurated by the understanding that is conventionally called the social model of disability. In this attempt, in addition to giving a new meaning to the disability phenomenon, a task of the utmost importance, it is essential to lean on the proposition of inclusion as an ontological principle and not a spatial binomial, which manifests a right derived from long struggles perpetrated in the social field, therefore, not permanent and in need of daily vigilance so that it remains on the rise and guides the construction of progressive public policies concerned with the reduction of social inequalities.

DOES THE DEFINITION OF DISABILITY MATTER? THE VERB BECOMES FLESH

We know from the feminist experience that the way we name and interpret a given phenomenon decisively influences the interactions built about it. The struggles in the field of meanings never cease to produce impacts on the construction of meanings, and should be considered active fragments in the composition of the world. To re-signify the interpretation of the world is a part of its transformation. For this reason, this issue has been angular by the social movements of people with disabilities since the 1960s in the late twentieth century through the fight against any and all forms of definition that depersonalize their subjects. Imploding the concept of disability in vogue at the time, nominated by the clinical spectrum for another formulation that would take into account the opinion expressed by people with disabilities, was one of the primary tasks of the activism highlighted and made the epicenter of the desired empowerment to redefine public policies. But, after all, what does disability mean?

The answer to this question is not usually one of the easiest, and it holds several understandings. Suppose disability as a concept linked to the meeting of physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychological impediments only materialized in the 18th century and was originally linked to a supposed inability to perform work activities efficiently. In that case, it is undeniable, as ^{Groce (1999}) has portrayed, that the existence of impediments has always been part of the history of people. There is no human society that does not have a complex system of beliefs and practices regarding disability. Each and every society builds explanations about why some individuals are considered disabled and others are not, as well as highlighting how these individuals should be treated, including the definition of appropriate roles for these subjects and which rights and responsibilities are granted or denied.

The search for a uniform and universal definition of what disability means is doomed to failure, since each society and culture define it through its own projective lens. However, in modernity, which disenchanted the medieval world by conjuring up its precepts as false and irrational, we observe in terms of trend an attempt to redefine a given situation from a set of generalizations endorsed by medical knowledge. Since then, disability has been propagandized in antithesis to the concept of norm and its interventions designed to recover the lost function or condition, what was classically called normalization. From this viewpoint, disability emerged as a product of individual maladjustment, and its interventions were transported to the private field. These are the characteristic conditions of what was established as the individual/medical model of disability.

Despite the multiple understandings and vertices that encompass the issue of disability, it is clear, as ^{Hahn (2002}) points out, that its subjects are plagued by high unemployment, poverty, housing, inadequate transportation, and the segregation of public spaces. The World Report on Disability (^{WHO, 2011}) reported that over a billion people worldwide live with some form of disability, who, compared to any other minority group, have the worst health prospects, lowest economic participation, low educational attainment, and high poverty rates. The explanations for such occurrences must be sought not in natural designs or supposed functional limitations but in the presence of barriers that hinder access to rights considered fundamental and components of social being.

One of these barriers lies in poor quality education, whose existence is noticeable by the configuration of a distinct and diminished curriculum for people with disabilities compared to other students. This condition hinders their development possibilities and makes it impossible for them to assume basic social functions. An interpretation of disability supports this assumption as a deficit and, although contested in several fields, it still seems to be the dominant perspective in the school universe, hence the need to contest it.

That being said, the understanding of the concept of disability has changed substantially since the 1970s. Revolutionary changes in medicine and technology have enabled health professionals to understand and treat people with disabilities in ways that were unimaginable just a short time ago. However, the most substantial change in the understanding of disability took place outside the arenas of clinical services. It was linked to the evidence that the lives of people with disabilities were more limited by social, cultural, attitudinal, and economic dictates than by physical, sensory, psychological, or intellectual impediments. This discovery had a decolonizing impact similar to that experienced by black people when Black Power was consolidated, and the category of gender was appropriated by women.

Thus, the universal idea of disability is broken, and with it, the understanding of limitation is an intrinsic condition to the phenomenon. Under this baton, the supposed cause-effect relationship expressed in the vertex impediment/disability ceases to be understood as synonymous. As ^{Scheer and Groce (1988}) point out, valued and devalued human attributes are configured in the collective imagination based on qualities defined as important by each particular society. In contexts emphasizing physical strength and resistance as fundamental attributes, people with physical disabilities will face several resistances, such as in warrior communities. In spaces that overvalue skills related to intellectual effort and the ability to use technology, the fact that someone is a wheelchair user may not be limiting.

Therefore, it is not true that an impediment will necessarily lead to a concomitant exclusion correlated to its field of inference. The metric equation that makes up this score is not unanimous, and it includes variations as a result of the compensations arising from this relationship and the valuation of certain attributes by society. The different ways in which a given collectivity relates to disability are related both to the characteristic and extent of the impairment and to the social interpretation of disability, whose grammar interferes in the expectation of the place occupied by the person with a disability in society and, even, in the willingness to provide resources for these individuals in terms of clinical care and rehabilitation, support and schooling, the building of accessible infrastructures and the creation of legal mechanisms for anti-discrimination.

It will be argued that such a twist occurs more in the theoretical field and does not cover the customary spheres through which people relate and continue to understand disability as a medical derivative and not a product of history. Nevertheless, this statement proves to be quite fragile since the idea that medical definitions of disability are exclusively clinical and laboratory does not resist empirical facts and can be unfurled without much effort.

Just to use a well-known example, in 1973, the American Psychiatric Association (APA) decided to abandon the understanding of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder by removing it from its well-known Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) (^{SILVERSTEIN, 2009}). Since then, homosexuality has moved from the field of etiological inaccuracies to the prairies of human differences, and overnight, hundreds of thousands of people are no longer considered disabled.

Something analogous occurred in the same year when the American Association on Mental Disability disregarded the category borderline mental retardation from its classification system of intellectual capacity. With this, the boundary of mental retardation diagnosis went from an IQ level of 85 to 70 and, by the stroke of a pen, thousands of people with disabilities suddenly returned to normality (^{BRAY, 2003}). Such elements highlight how medical definitions are also par excellence, historical and structured from interferences beyond their analytical scope. They are political derivatives and not neutral.

Once such relations are exposed, it is evident that disability is a product of society, and only then can it be understood. More than a thing, disability is an idea that is transmuted from given historical conditions that are dynamic, contingent, and affected by external compounds that fluctuate over time; therefore, the objectivist description imposed by the medical lenses is not the best way to understand it, as it is static and configured from an absolute that only exists in the realm of abstractions.

Taking hold of these contradictions and driven by activist conquests, Disability Studies took disability as a form of social oppression woven from the construction of barriers that hindered full social participation and were established beyond and parallel to biological impediments. For ^{Abberley (1987}), stating that people with disabilities are oppressed involves explaining some elements. At an empirical level, it means arguing that people with disabilities can be regarded as a group whose members are in an inferior position to other members of society because they are people with disabilities. It also involves asserting that these disadvantages are dialectically related to a set of ideologies that justify and perpetuate this situation, forging a compound that is neither natural nor inevitable.

Based on this assumption and from the appropriation of the angular distinction made by ^{Rubin (1986}) between sex and gender, the social model theorists erect a powerful distinction between impairment and disability, taking the former as related to the medical/biological sphere and the latter as pertaining to the field of social production of asymmetries and inequalities, a product of historical restrictions.

The distinction exposed had a direct effect in terms of public policies and functioned as a powder keg in the implosion of preconceived ideas of disability as a personal tragedy. Its massive and extensive impact contributed to shaping frameworks that questioned overt institutional discrimination against people with disabilities. In the words of ^{Oliver (1990}), how reassuring was the shift in the understanding of the limitations and difficulties experienced by people with disabilities as products of an unjust society rather than individual failures or subjective limits? Moreover, how transformative was not the impact of the thesis that many restrictions experienced by people with disabilities could cease to exist from a radical transformation of society in all its dimensions? The psychological, aesthetic, and political impacts of this stance are all too evident in the fissures in a structure that seemed compact. Nevertheless, it did not take long for this conceptualization to be put on hold.

The differentiation established between impairment and disability, whose achievement was built in an unprecedented way from the contrastive opposition between nature and culture outlined by the thought of Lévi-Strauss (1982), was soon contested for understanding that it clouded the body as an agency in the production of disability, which ended up seconding real conditions such as pain and limitations which could not be explained only through the prism of social production, the reasoning expressed in its most incisive form by ^{Shakespeare and Watson (2001}). It is thus contested what has been shown as a cornerstone of social studies on disability, namely, the breaking of any causal link between bodies with impairments and the social situation of people with disabilities by understanding that a given structure promotes the disappearance of the body, which is a constituent part of the experiences of discrimination, prejudice and restrictions highlighted to people with disabilities.

However, as ^{Thomas (2004}) points out, this was a small price to be paid by Disability Studies on the long path towards questioning the oppressions engendered in the sense of naturalizing asymmetries and narrowing possibilities of social participation. Hence, it is imperative to broaden the contributions manifested by the social model theorists to promote a relational definition of disability, which continues to focus on the products of social exclusion and dialogue with very real phenomena of some disabilities, including the presence of pain and the existence of real restrictions that will cause activity limitation independent of the transformations operated in a given environment.

The cardinal challenge lies in scrutinizing the social privations experienced by people with disabilities as products of environmental, physical, political, economic, and cultural barriers without disregarding the intrinsic character of some impediments that have repercussions both in what concerns the restriction of activities and the access to opportunities, even when all efforts are made to build a more accessible context. This is the complex task that surrounds us, namely, to evidence the social without taking it as a structure in opposition to the biological, even because these spheres, although independent, are related continuously and interfere with each other, including in the very configuration of disability. This dialectic character in the understanding of disability is exactly what is missing in Decree 10,502, of September 30, 2020, which understands the highlighted experience through a lens permeated by overly clinical characters, not by chance; its guiding compass starts in an unprecedented manner from the assumption that was correcting precedes educating, the main ethical gap present in the infra-constitutional document which takes the concept of inclusion not from the transformation of social geographies. Thus, a fixed and predetermined concept of disability is created, which goes against the historical achievements of the people who live this experience.

An impediment is a prerequisite for the appearance of some disabilities. However, it will not necessarily unfold as an objective reflection of this condition since, beyond this factor, the conjunction of a given situation as materializing a disability suffers active interference from material and spiritual components produced in society. Examples of how the existence of disabilities is linked to the prevalence of wars, the lack of basic sanitation, malnutrition, hunger, educational barriers, and the precarious medical care available attest to the dialectical character of this relationship. Therefore, it is not surprising the close relationship detected between poverty and disability (WHO, 2011), to the extent that the deprivation of means, resources, and institutions has a decisive effect in the consubstantiation of impairment in disability.

^{Meekosha (2011}) estimated that over 85% of the major conflicts since World War II have occurred in poor countries, including imperialist wars waged by the US and its allies and post-colonial civil wars that arose in Africa, Latin America, and the breakup of the Soviet Union; these conflicts alone produced over six million children with disabilities in the period between 1986 and 1996. ^{Abberley (1987}) points out that 6,000 children go blind each year in Tamil Nadu due to a lack of vitamin-A, an easily treatable deficiency. ^{Staples (2005}), analyzing poor communities in South India, presents perverse effects generated by leprosy when not treated correctly and at the right time, which highlight various physical impediments that limit, to a large extent, bodily functions. ^{França (2015}) directly links the existence of a significant number of people with disabilities in Brazil as derived from the effects of malnutrition, insufficient or non-existent prenatal care, and infectious/parasitic diseases linked to the lack of sanitation and minimum conditions of dignity.

Beyond these more visible causal relationships, we cannot forget the incalculable damages resulting from situations involving collective isolation or unavailability of some social skill due to not using cultural tools and mechanisms that compensate for the effects of disability. What disadvantage is produced in a deaf person who has not mastered Sign Language or in a blind person who has not learned to use Braille? What misfortunes are produced by the absence of orthoses, prostheses, and other accessibility resources that limit the possibilities of social interaction in schools or other spaces for lack of resources or effectively inclusive public policies?

All these issues point to the need to build a more robust concept of disability that considers the preponderance of relationships engendered from the perspective of social production in all dimensions. They also highlight the need to think of the necessary spatial, attitudinal, pedagogical, and communicative transformations as supplanting the incessant clinical search for transformation by normalization of the bodies of people with disabilities. Corroborating ^{Thomas (2004}), disability only comes into play when the activity limitations experienced by people with disabilities are socially imposed, that is, when they are social in origin. This means that it is entirely possible to recognize disabilities and chronic diseases directly cause some restraints of activity; however, if these restrictions are not socially imposed, they do not constitute a disability, as this is produced through several hierarchical regimes configured in the history of each people and culture.

Fighting against this regime of asymmetries and oppression produces a perverse effect: capacitism, which is considered a social disposition in the creation of a generalized system of discrimination and exclusion that oppresses people with physical, sensory, psychological, or cognitive impairments is one of the most cardinal tasks of social studies and educational systems that aim at the ideation of a fair, supportive and accessible society. To this end, as a first element, we highlight the need to institutionally transfigure the understanding of disability in schools on bases other than those derived from the medical field, aiming to break with narrow notions of normality, challenging stereotypes and prejudices, and providing alternative representations of people with disabilities as learning subjects. Secondly, we assert the indispensable character of starting from the assumption that a fair and inclusive society presupposes as a cornerstone that the transformation of spaces, interactions, and pedagogical practices supersedes the desire for the transformation of bodies and functionalities, in addition to being frontally opposed to the accommodation of differences in reclusive geographies, as subliminally suggested by Decree 10,502, of September 30, 2020, which reminisces relationships that seemed to be overcome.

RE-SIGNIFYING DISABILITY: ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN SPECIAL EDUCATION AND REGULAR EDUCATION

If we consider that since the seventeenth century and, more solidly, from the eighteenth century on, societies have generally interpreted difference as deviation and have assigned separate spaces to such subjects with a view to the intended normalization configured in the search for the identical body operated by modernity, it is expected that these normative characteristics will pervade the formatting of public policies aimed at groups thus defined.

Therefore, it is not surprising that throughout its history, the field of Special Education, greatly influenced by the preponderance of medical and experimental knowledge, has stood as a parallel space in relation to regular education and disconnected from its ordinary curricular composition, since it is directed to a body considered as different. According to ^{Ferreira (1995}), Special Education was consolidated as an epistemological field from the understanding of disability as a pre-established condition intrinsic to a given corporeality that needed to be repaired so that its subjects could participate in life in society, clearly showing the role played by the idea of normalization in the making of the discipline itself.

Meanwhile, the Special Education teacher’s training process itself reflected these contradictions by appearing to be a space reserved for those who aimed to work only with disabled students. In other words, a space of clinical projections detached from pedagogical ideas committed to transforming society, since it was linked to functionalist assumptions that repair preceded education, a constituent that denotes the focal point of practices that have social adjustment as their telos.

The pedagogical apartness at the genesis and development of the Special Education field made it so that, although theoretically located in a similar general plan of action, it did not dialogue directly with regular education, keeping a distance like parallel straight lines that hindered its crossing. Such characteristic is directly related to the preponderance that the medical knowledge has played in the configuration of the mentioned area and evidences the scar derived from the understanding of disability as a deficit deriving from absence, loss, or functional-body/cognitive limitation; this assumption has a great impact until current times.

Even if this essentially biological definition of disability proves to be false under any hypothesis analyzed, since it is incomplete and sparse, its effect is comprehensive given the hegemonic understanding in school spaces and in popular knowledge itself, which daily visualize in disability the synonymous expression of the absence of some organ or function. As William ^{Thomas (1970}, p.245) reminds us, “if people define certain situations as real, they are real in their consequences.” In this sense, the interpretation of disability from eminently biological parameters entails, in the school field, practices and actions that end up transmuting the supposed clinical to the school environment. On this understanding lies the constitutive root of the projected distance between Special Education and regular Education, hence the need to overcome it if we understand, as ^{Ferreira (1995}) has foreshadowed, that the great challenge of Special Education is that the special does not distance itself from education, since Special Education is, above all, education. Such understanding does not deny the specificity of Special Education and the often unique needs of its subjects, which demand various curricular adjustments and support, but assumes as a starting point that its adjective (special) can only become a concept when referred to the noun (education). The distinction mirrored in the field of Special Education in relation to regular education reflects, in a way, the dissonances in the way disability is seen, the central problem of its mismatch.

As ^{Oliver (1990}) points out, if disability is seen as a tragedy derived from the absence of some biological function, the intervention aimed at these subjects focuses almost solely and exclusively on correcting this function for later social reintegration. The act’s focus is linked to the change of the subject in functional terms. Alternatively, suppose disability is perceived as social oppression. In that case, people start to be seen as collective victims of prejudice and asymmetries established by a society insensitive to their needs, reasoning that is the basis of the social model. The core of the intervention then becomes linked to the idealization of mechanisms that transform the structures that hinder participation in parity terms. Therefore, the change in the understanding of the phenomenon reflects on how we will work with it and produces as a secondary consequence the transfiguration of new public policies, which directly impact people’s lives.

However, according to ^{Connor (2014}), this theoretical model still has little penetration in the educational field, which emphasizes the need to expand its appropriation to general school contexts in order to strengthen the understanding of inclusion and contest, as ^{Linton (1998}) reports, the only clinical interpretation of disability, which, in the school field, ended up transforming students into patients, whose raison d'être has commuted to a pedagogical practice that reduces the student with a disability to their deficit, besides directing to them a solitary service, separated in projective terms from the rest of the other students.

As an example of this practice, we can cite the mistaken idea of not working with abstract concepts with children with intellectual disabilities due to a preconceived understanding that they do not have the necessary skills to perform analytical tasks. If teachers take this construct as a regime of truth, they will probably end up depriving these children of contact with higher-level thinking. They will narrow the possibilities for development for these students, and if they are faced with similar problems, later on, they will be less successful in solving them.

From this perspective, Special Education has tended to narrow the learner’s potential by starting from the premise that learning can only develop according to a certain stage of biological development. If this development is hindered, teaching will be adjusted in terms of reduced expectations, a process that, most of the time, has brought the student enslavement to the present time by promoting the chaining of learning to what is already known. If this is the case, what is the need for a school for this student? It is evident that school is important in weaving friendship relations, forming bonds, and social insertion; however, its characteristic element and that which confers specificity in historical time resides in the appropriation by the students of systematized knowledge, something that cannot be leased by any other sphere.

Hence the need to radically reverse this logic. Recovering the seminal precept of Vygotsky (2019) that learning precedes development is necessary. The impact of this concept is incalculable in the sense of visualizing the disabled student as a subject of possibilities that are not limited to their deficit or limitation, as presupposed by medical knowledge. If learning leverages development, it makes no sense to have any programmatic reduction in terms of curricula, as this would hinder their formative possibilities. Challenging the understanding of disability as a personal tragedy and biological deficit characteristic of the medical-clinical interpretation and valuing learning as a mechanism to promote development is the analytical framework from which we must start in order to design a Special Education that enriches regular education by announcing a new terrain of pedagogical potentialities and possibilities. This is the starting point to which we bind ourselves and is directly related to the understanding that Special Education will benefit from appropriating a socio-historical understanding of disability. A hopeful understanding that is absent in Decree 10,502 of September 30, 2020, and therefore, the blatantly pessimistic character of the infra-constitutional document about the benefits of inclusion, as it is tied to an immobile logic of the concept of disability.

Hence, we should question whether instilling in the actors belonging to the school universe the idea that disability is a social construction that borders on the absurd, since the everyday imaginary understands it from latent physiological aspects. After all, how to deny that some people cannot walk, hear, see, or speak? Well, this is not what we question when we assert the social-historical aspect of disability. The object of the inquiry here exposed refers to the meaning we attribute these impediments. Are they perceived as captivity that imprisons the subject in their deficit, or are they taken under the perspective of a land of possibilities that allows the appearance of new collateral ways of development? We affiliate ourselves with the last sentence.

The social model of disability may work as an important support to this task by stating as the main aspiration of its propositions the need to change the environment and the asymmetrical structures that make up society, and not the bodily functionalities expressed by people with disabilities. In the meantime, disability is no longer treated as something permanent or universal in space and time and starts to denote a historically materialized construction that only finds its meaning in specific cultural contexts as a result of a bad interaction between the individual and the social structures, which hinder the performance of a given social function. Under this logic, visual impairment, for instance, is configured as a deficiency in relation to the functioning of text reading when Braille or screen readers with voice synthesizers are not used in the case of virtual messages.

Therefore, overcoming disability is not related to the organic compensation of some impediment but to cultural complementation that allows, in the case of schools, to fulfill their role of teaching everything to everyone and, as ^{Saviani (2003}) states, to produce directly and intentionally, in each individual the humanity historically and collectively engendered by men as a whole.

The objective of any and every educational act resides in recognizing the cultural contributions that need to be appropriated to endow the species with the humanity that configures the gender and, subsequently, in the evidence of the most adequate ways to achieve this intent. Such ingenuity configures an endless dialectical process, since the human being is a being that overcomes itself. When we think of the educational universe, and more specifically of the target audience of Special Education, the tools used to accomplish this task include the use of Braille, Sign Language, alternative communication, and the most diverse accessibility resources, as they are what will allow students with disabilities to assimilate the achievements projected in the human gender.

The use of complementary mechanisms and additional resources spend unequal economic investment among students. However, they should never be taken under the perspective of privilege because they refer to the conquest of a right available to others, a matter of justice. Therefore, the path suggested here seeks to fight against exclusions expressed in cultural, social, political, and educational environments, which prevent people with disabilities from accessing what is available to others. It is a path that conjugates the verb to hope as hope and not for waiting, to use a Freirean maxim.

In the school universe, the exclusions highlighted can be experienced both through inaccessible physical environments, as well as restrictions in teaching-learning relationships, in the management of assessments, in program content, in school organization, in the role of the community, in interpersonal relationships and expectations generated for each student. As ^{Barton (2001}) asserts, it is preambular to analyze how schools produce given disabling barriers that transfigure into various injustices.

Removing such barriers by fighting institutional capacitism is essential for schools to effectively play a decisive role in shaping a democratic society, fair and permeated by equal relationships, aiming, in short, that the impediments, possibly manifested, do not become disabilities. Therefore, any relationship developed in the school universe must start from the premise that all students are capable of learning and that inclusion, beyond the shared presence in the same physical space, only becomes concrete when concatenated to the appropriations of the projected school curriculum, a key element in the production of subjects that not only adapt to the structures of the world, but that seeks to transform them to their own shape.

We are still far from this inclusion taken from the perspective of learning when we refer to the target audience of Special Education, since compared to their non-disabled peers, they have the highest dropout rates, the greatest age/grade distortions in schools, a lower likelihood of attending college, a higher rate of unemployment or underemployment than any other minority group, and a higher incarceration rate (^{CONNOR, 2014}). Together, these data signal the need for change in educational practices and policies to help transform these alarming findings.

^{Ashby (2012}) highlights as a key element to this goal the question of how the macro and micro school structure can be changed so that students with disabilities can successfully appropriate knowledge necessary for their education as historical subjects. What tools can we use to appropriate the same knowledge based on different interventions? How can we adapt a class so that the child with a disability can support and be supported in accomplishing their tasks? How can we carry out activities that are accessible to everyone? What technological and assistive resources can be used in the classroom? If a student needs more time for each class task and activity, how can this be supported within an ordinary classroom setting? What can we learn from people with disabilities, and how can they enrich our understanding of society and human differences?

The last point highlighted above highlights, as fundamental in the configuration of libertarian relations in school spaces, that it is possible to listen to people with disabilities as agent promoters of their history. This is one of the most important issues for the social model of disability and any activist group: no one builds something about someone without the presence of this subject. Recalling the famous phrase proclaimed by Charlton (2000), “nothing about us without us,” becomes almost mandatory in this historical interstice.

By utilizing the voices, experiences, and perspectives of people with disabilities to guide a counter-narrative to the dominant deficit discourse, educators can begin to reevaluate and reconsider rather than devalue the concept of disability (^{CONNOR, 2014}). The presence of people with disabilities in schools can be direct or indirect. Directly, when someone from the community or the student himself highlights to other students in the classroom the experiences, limits, and possibilities of living with a given disability, and indirectly when the teacher addresses as a class topic people with disabilities in the fields of arts, science, sports, literature, among others.

As an example, we could think of an art class in which the works of Frida Kahlo were discussed as an object of study for the meeting. Frida is known to be one of the most commercialized figures in the contemporary world and is considered to be a symbol of female empowerment. What few authors highlight is the fact that Frida was physically handicapped. It would be very interesting to think about how disability interfered in the production of the artist’s work.

How is her disability projected in paintings? Which of her works can only be understood from this condition, such as the autobiography “The Broken Column of 1944?” How do her paintings share her own bodily experience and the discriminations she experienced? Besides presenting Frida, a class proposed on such a basis surely brings in the germ of establishing a closer relationship with disability, which is fundamental in combating its estrangement. Schools reproduce society in their interactions and produce relations, hence the need for them to be fair, democratic, and inclusive in all their dimensions, since this will catalyze the macrocosm in which it is located. Not by chance, the need to value the difference expressed by disability as a generator of original learning opportunities, configuring positive aesthetic powers over it and not only grammars of impossibilities.

Assuming that it is a cardinal principle of teaching activity to make the curriculum accessible to all students, which implies building diverse didactic architectures when necessary, we have that this relationship should refer both to access, accessibility, and the encounter with the difference as a component of human wealth that surrounds us. In this sense, the educational equality to which we are referring concerns the appropriation of similar contents in the most diverse students (curricular access) and not the same didactics applicable to all, whose equality, in the beginning, materializes an inequality in the result.

This is precisely the goal proposed by ^{Ferguson (2001}) when addressing the learning conditions of students targeted by Special Education when he proposes the incorporation of the dictates of the social model in the general curriculum, intending that this becomes an effective inclusive space of inclusion and justice: make people with disabilities come into the classroom to talk about their experiences; induce students to research accessibility; create activities for students to write stories about disability; propose tasks in which children interview people with disabilities; construct essays on prejudice, as well as discuss events such as racism, sexism, religious intolerance, homophobia, and ableism; initiate the use of sign language; allow everyone to interact with Braille; set assignments that deal with the history of notable people who had disabilities, and challenge students to create accessibility resources as a contribution to the general population.

These actions can potentially integrate diversity into the curricular content as a component of its gnosiological architecture without considering it as a foreign or additive element dislocated from current actions. With this, it is sought to challenge prejudice in the most diverse forms by projecting positive interpretations of disability as an essential component of humanity and promoting an empowered and activist culture. The idea of bringing the issue of disability as an element of the curriculum is based on the principle that the curriculum contains the portion of human experiences culturally considered valuable in a given historical period. That disability is one of these fruitful and significant experiences of knowledge, overcoming, and transfiguration, which occupies an irreplaceable function in the social fabric. An orderly world in its interactions subtracted from the contact with people with disabilities would invariably be less developed, poorer, and marred in its possibilities of becoming.

Such incursions demand reformulation of the school’s pedagogical structure and teaching didactics, forcing its actors to transform habits and crystallized practices. However, such challenges must be thought of in institutional terms and not as solitary tasks that are the sole and exclusive responsibility of the classroom teacher. The reformulation goes through the teacher but will not occur if it is attributed to the teacher without support.

According to ^{Connor (2014}), good school practices have shown that complex issues in the school universe are best solved when shared cooperatively. It was precisely from this understanding that the idea of Collaborative Teaching branched out as a strategy to set up a network of relationships in which the Special Education Teacher and the regular classroom teacher exchange shared experiences to propose diversified activities so that everyone can appropriate the intended contents. A de jure and de facto inclusion. Collaborative Teaching, although recent in Brazil, is starting to gain important space in terms of educational policies. So much so that the São Paulo State Government, which has the largest educational network in the country, in its Special Education Policy, defined as one of its guidelines the:

Effectiveness of collaborative teaching for articulation between specialized teachers and regular classroom teachers. Special Education services will be conducted in such a way as to put collaborative teaching into effect, promoting times and spaces for coordination between specialized teachers and regular classroom teachers to improve strategies to develop students’ potentialities, prepare teaching materials based on the principles of the UDL, and the availability of teaching, accessibility, and assistive technology resources in regular classrooms (^{SÃO PAULO, 2021}, p.55).

In addition to the proposal of Collaborative Teaching, the Special Education Policy of the State of São Paulo links the Universal Design of Learning (UDL) as a structuring principle of pedagogical relations, understanding this, consistent with the Brazilian Law of Inclusion (BRASIL, 2015), as the design of products, environments, programs, and services to be used by all people, without the need for adaptation or specific design, including assistive technology resources. For ^{Gabel and Connor (2009}), the UDL, a concept that has gained strength in the academic field from the first decade of the 21st century, allows us to think broadly and fluidly about learning opportunities regarding how students can interact with the curriculum in the classroom, in addition, sentences as mistaken the educational practices and arrangements that position Special Education teachers as occupying distinct and separate roles in inclusive schools concerning teachers of regular classrooms, which strengthens the affective and collaborative bonds in the classroom. Such position strikes as a battering ram the provisions of Decree 10,502, of September 30, 2020, insofar as it points to the strength of inclusion as related precisely to the joint, collective, and shared resolution of school difficulties presented by students in common spaces, aiming for all to enjoy the solutions found, which certainly does not occur when we consider the possibility of referring certain subjects to separate spaces. Schools should solve their learning problems inside their classrooms and not by the practice of so-called referrals, whose raison d'être is to transfer responsibility, whether to the family, a psychologist, a doctor, or another institution.

The referential concept of UDL is based on the assumption that accessibility must be guaranteed as a basic principle of the educational task, from the design to the use of materials and equipment, in order to benefit all students in the regular classroom through inclusive practices “to provide services and support aimed at eliminating or overcoming barriers, which may be architectural, communication and information, technological, attitudinal, or any other barriers in the school environment” (^{SÃO PAULO, 2021}, p.55).

Practices such as Collaborative Teaching and UDL, plus other accessibility tools and resources, aim to ensure that everyone is guaranteed the same learning opportunities and can achieve full social participation in the multiplicity of social dimensions, signaling a commitment both for inclusive learning and for a fair, democratic and egalitarian world. A change that demands an understanding of the category of disability diametrically opposed to the one expressed by the individual model of clinical predominance (which immobilizes and reduces such subjects to their impairments), a historical approach that considers the phenomenon in terms of social production and sees in disability an experience that generates new gnosiological compositions that increase the possibilities of human development. In order to transform the educational results and the levels of learning captured in our students, the first step is undoubtedly to believe in the potential of each of our students, regardless of their class, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, or whether they have a disability or not.

CONCLUDING REMARKS

This article has taken as its founding premise the idea that Inclusive Education is established beyond the mechanisms that ensure physical access to a system unchanged in terms of provisions and practices. By inclusion, we mean the removal of any and all barriers that prevent or hinder access to learning for students, together with the creation of mechanisms that enhance the development of each subject, actions that transfigure broad goals of equity, participation, and freedom, fundamental to the construction of a truly democratic society.

Such attempts demand the appropriation of knowledge historically produced by humanity, which is the main activity of school education. Its function is to lead its actors to spaces beyond personal experiences by presenting interactions that could not be acquired in other geographies. By successfully performing this function, schools contribute in a decisive way to constructing a more just society that projects parity horizons in terms of recognition, redistribution, and social representation. By broadening the cultural universe beyond the everyday routine, it is possible to develop a more accurate understanding of reality that investigates how the phenomena became what they are and outlines the overcoming of the current state of affairs as a project in development. Under this scrutiny, school knowledge becomes powerful in searching for the fulfillment of the unfulfilled promises of equality and freedom conjured by modernity.

Inclusion is part of this ethical project to think of a better tomorrow than the present one by designing a society enriched by the interaction between the differences expressed by humanity under a moral grammar based on assumptions of respect, solidarity, and sharing. Inclusive education, besides being an end in itself, given its objectivity and specificity, is also a means to an end, that of establishing an inclusive society. In this sense, it is not possible to allow any regression in terms of educational policies that put the inclusion principle in jeopardy, as proposed by the new Special Education policy when assuming that students with disabilities may not benefit when included in regular institutions, since the lenses of history have already highlighted that the sheltering in specialized spaces resulted in institutionalization and depersonalization of people with disabilities, diminished as a subject of rights, ideas, and desires. Educational outcomes and practices must be improved, without a doubt, and learning has been shown to be mostly flawed is also undisputed. Nevertheless, the need for educational transformation in our country must be tied to structural, attitudinal, and pedagogical changes that reverberate the old maxim of teaching everything to everyone, but never doing without doing it in the same spatial geography. This is the challenge ahead, and its complexity demands a national educational pact for learning.

Preprint

https://preprints.scielo.org/index.php/scielo/preprint/view/3051