Paper short abstract

This paper examines how in Italian inclusive education, the medicalization of diversity contributes to an ever-expanding definition of "disability". Such processes of classification reveal the risk that school becomes entangled in a “sieve” that reproduces broader social polarization.

Paper long abstract

Over the years, educational institutions in Italy have undergone significant transformations, moving from the closure of segregated classrooms in 1977 to the contemporary framework of inclusive education. Within this trajectory, certain milestones have been particularly significant: 1992 institutionalized the integration of students labeled as “handicapped”; 2010, extended recognition to students with “specific learning disorders”; and, more recently, the introduction of a category as “students with socio-economic-cultural, and linguistic disadvantages”. All these are currently subsumed under the broad umbrella of “students with special educational needs.”

The continuous enlargement of this category reflects a progressive widening of the definition of “special needs,” while reinforcing the normative construction of a shrinking group of students presumed to have “normal/no needs.” This process seems polarizing those positioned as “dis-abled” or “dis-advantaged” and those constructed as “abled”

The use of the prefix dis- to designate a growing number of students, whether formally diagnosed or not, to medicalize them in relation to a “mainstream” category.

Within this “paradox of recognition,” access to rights and educational equity appears to depend on belonging to this increasingly populated category of dis-, rather than remaining within the shrinking group of “normal” students where the inclusion is not grounded in the subject’s capacity to act upon and transform the educational context and, through this process.

This paper argues that such processes of polarization risk entangling schools in the role of a “sieve,” one that mirrors and reinforces external social segregation while further reproducing poles of “abled” and “disabled.”