Disability and Representation in the School Curriculum: A Study of NCERT English Textbooks up to the Middle School Level

Background/purpose. By representing the diverse experiential and affective realities of disabled people and exemplifying the possibility of their synergetic and symbiotic relationships with non-disabled individuals, textbooks can function as tools of sensitization to address prejudiced attitudes that hinder the achievement of inclusive education goals. Considering such potential of textbooks, this paper studies the nature and scope of representations of disability and disabled people in textbooks for English (from Class I to VIII) prescribed in the NCERT syllabus of India. Materials/methods. This article begins with a macro analysis to locate and bracket textbook portions that involve verbal and visual depictions of disabled individuals and disability. It will help determine how much space textbooks allocate to disabled people's experiences and emotions, and how well they depict these experiences. In the second phase, microanalysis, the representations will be qualitatively evaluated at the contextual, rhetorical, and thematic levels to determine whether they accurately depict the diverse life experiences of disabled people or are simply opportunistic, metaphorical devices or narrative crutches used to elicit a cathartic response in a different storyline. Results. It finds out that these textbooks have failed to accommodate much space for such representations and lack consistency; the representations also fail to exhibit heterogeneity because of oversimplifying disability experiences through clichéd verbo-visual tropes that symbolize impairments. Conclusion. In conclusion, this paper provides several recommendations to help Indian educators and textbook editors mainstream disability in standard school textbooks, making those representations more inclusive of diverse groups.