Pedagogical Strategies for Engaging with Disability Narratives in Contemporary Literature: Towards an Inclusive Classroom

The paper navigates through the issues of teaching disability narratives in literature, focusing on the complex and challenging ways these texts operate to dismantle ableist stereotypes, foster inclusivity, and encourage critical engagement. The study explores the possibility of transformation through disability literature that has the potential to reshape students’ perceptions of disability beyond the traditional view that holds disability as a form of deficiency. This paper contextualizes disability within larger social and cultural frameworks through case studies and pedagogical strategies that attend to some of the key challenges such as institutional resistance, ableism, and issues of accessibility. The paper looks into the role of Universal Design for Learning (UDL) in making literature accessible to diverse learners and calls for the need to avoid tokenism by integrating disability into broader discussions of identity and intersectionality. The present study, in the final analysis, emphasizes the need for inclusive curricula that represent a diversity of human experiences, which in turn, provides students with the critical skills they need to navigate the evolution of representations of disability in literature and society.