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Funding for post-secondary students with disabilities in Canada is an under-studied yet pressing policy issue that affects up to 15% of students currently enrolled in post-secondary institutions across the country reflecting, at the same time, trends in educational accommodations occurring on a global scale. This article presents new data and combines these findings with a qualitative policy review to expose how funding levels in Canada have remained static over a 20-year period as a result of changes to key funding programs. We show how access to these insufficient funding programs is based on application processes that are shaped by the careful management of knowledge and information, underpinned by a desire to keep spending low. We then analyze the implications of these funding practices for disabled students and situate their effects within the neoliberal cultural project that eschews transparency while increasing individualization and self-responsibilization -- encouraging disabled students to embody market rationalities as a way of maintaining their presence in academia.

Medical discourse currently dominates as the defining framework for madness in educational praxis. Consequently, ideas rooted in a mental health/illness binary abound in higher learning, as both curriculum content and through institutional procedures that reinforce structures of normalcy. While madness, then, is included in university spaces, this inclusion proceeds in ways that continue to pathologize madness and disenfranchise mad people. This paper offers Mad Studies as an alternative entry point for engaging with madness in higher education, arguing that centring madness in pedagogical praxis has the potential to interrupt hegemonic ways of knowing, being, and learning. We illustrate how this disruption is facilitated by examining particular aspects of pedagogical praxis mobilized in Mad Studies, including building curriculum alongside mad community, centring madness in course design and student assessment, and the practice of mad positivity. Ultimately, this approach provides a metacurriculum of unlearning, challenging students to consider how their engagement with madness in the classroom, and beyond, has the potential to disrupt sanist systems of oppression and the normalcy they reconstitute.

Funding for post-secondary students with disabilities in Canada is an under-studied yet pressing policy issue that affects up to 15% of students currently enrolled in post-secondary institutions across the country reflecting, at the same time, trends in educational accommodations occurring on a global scale. This article presents new data and combines these findings with a qualitative policy review to expose how funding levels in Canada have remained static over a 20-year period as a result of changes to key funding programs. We show how access to these insufficient funding programs is based on application processes that are shaped by the careful management of knowledge and information, underpinned by a desire to keep spending low. We then analyze the implications of these funding practices for disabled students and situate their effects within the neoliberal cultural project that eschews transparency while increasing individualization and self-responsibilization – encouraging disabled students to embody market rationalities as a way of maintaining their presence in academia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we present oral narratives focusing on schooling experiences of Canadians who lived with polio as children between 1940 and 1959. We argue that disabled students with polio received an education about the differences ascribed to them by individuals in authority (teachers, principals), by other young people, and through the dominant negative discourses of polio and normalizing, ableist practices of schooling. Using narrative accounts from participants’ interviews, we analyze their school experiences of difference: inaccessible physical and temporal spaces, bullying at school, exclusion from classes, and negotiating youth culture related to shoes, clothes and friendships. However, participants were not passive and they discussed how, along with families, they negotiated and occasionally defied normalizing processes. This research gives voice to a generation of disabled English-speaking Canadians, whose stories about school have not been heard before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]