The Educational Costs of Chrono-Curriculum and Academic Chrono-Politics on the Schooling of Disabled College Students in Kenya

Abstract

A college education is vital because it exposes students to worldwide experiences fundamental for productive citizenship. However, it is elusive to most disabled citizens because of the clash of school time and disability and colleges’ obsession with efficiency. Guided by the historical, biological, and social construction of disability as a human flaw, this qualitative study contextualizes the findings within the frame of crip time, chrono-curriculum, and academic chrono-politics to reveal that disability is the basis of academic oppression and, therefore, the disempowerment of disabled college learners in Kenya. Education costs manifest in individual impairment/disability, lack of accommodations, inaccessible infrastructure, lost time, defensive unsupportive faculty and administrators, mythologies of disability, and poverty and insecurity. Since universities’ ableist chrono-curriculum and academic chrono-politics are educationally `costly to disabled students, the reformation of universities is needed to foster faculty disability awareness and commitment to disability rights and empowerment of disabled students.