Who decides how education is decolonised? Learning from confusion in a UK special school

Abstract (English)

At Wilson School, a UK metropolitan secondary school for children aged 11-18 with severe learning difficulties, the students used less language and more touch than I was used to. Working as a teaching assistant, I was often confused about what could and should be done. Less words (spoken, signed, typed or symbolled) meant I was unsure what students felt, wanted, or understood. More touch meant teachers were already violating UK taboos about physical contact between adolescents and adults, especially outside of the family. Yet on reflection, my confusion, although often troubling, seemed to offer more space to learn from the students than my previous experience of working as a teaching assistant in a high achieving, strict, mainstream London secondary academy. There, a didactic and assimilationist epistemology was well established and tightly controlled. I knew exactly what I was supposed to be doing: making the neurodiverse students behave and achieve like their neurotypical peers. Thus the segregation of students in special schools offers decolonising potential as well as posing a disabling threat. Anthropology has played a key role in documenting the relationship between disability and race in eugenic evolutionary hierarchies of intelligence. Yet destabilising these hierarchies in the academy today, especially in the UK, has proved difficult. Inspired by my students, I wonder what it would mean to invite them into the university. Could their inclusion destabilise what it means to learn and do anthropology? If not, what does this tell us about the discipline and the university? Who decides how education will be decolonised?