Charity and Social Exclusion in Taiwanese Education System for Disabled Students

Under Special Education Act, no school is allowed to reject students with disabilities in Taiwan. Nevertheless, lack of accessible environment and assistants for disabled students are still common. To overcome the deficiency, Schools usually encourage parent, mostly mothers, to support their children’s care needs in school or ask classmates to be the “little angels” to support disabled students. This paper uses institutional ethnography to explore the social organizations of Taiwanese education system for disabled students and the experience of disabled students and. This paper will demonstrate that charity model in Taiwanese education institutions construct disabled students as “dependent” and “inferior.” The discourse of charity will further marginalize and exclude disabled students in the regular classroom.