Abstract
In a recent themed issue of Journal of Teacher Education (JTE 63.4) about issues of disability, diversity, and teacher education, guest editors Marleen Pugach, Linda Blanton, and Lani Florian (2012) invite readers to participate in “honest, difficult, and much needed dialogue across the many diversity constituencies in teacher education” (p. 235). In this commentary, I extend the dialogue begun in this special themed issue by considering the affordances of a Disability Studies in Education (DSE) perspective for understanding the intersectional nature of diversity, disability, and the social, cultural, and political production of educational inequities.
The guest editors of JTE 63.4 are to be commended for gathering and presenting a collection of voices that seek to position identifications of “disability” alongside other markers of diversity in a conversation about preparing teachers to foster educational equity. Collectively, the articles represent an important first step toward disrupting the process of ability profiling (Collins, 2003, 2013), that is, the process of educationally marginalizing or segregating students based on perceived differences in race, ethnicity, linguistic repertoire, social class, gender, and dis/ability. However, the articles in this issue also illustrate that the disciplinary discourses we bring to bear in identifying, locating, and responding to perceived differences and dis/abilities shape the voices that are heard and, subsequently, the understandings that are created.
In this commentary, I draw on research in DSE to clarify some of what is obscured by the disciplinary lenses represented in JTE 63.4. I begin with a brief overview of the articles in JTE 63.4 and the foundations of DSE. I then move to more deeply explicate a DSE perspective on two important concepts, disability labels as a social and political response to difference and personal narrative as decolonizing methodology. After introducing a DSE perspective on each of these points, I contrast it with those represented in JTE 63.4. I conclude with a discussion of the perspectives that a DSE lens affords relative to teacher education and educational equity that are not otherwise addressed in the special issue.
A Brief Overview of the Articles in JTE 63.4
The authors of the five centerpiece articles in JTE 63.4 each foreground different aspects of the complex relationship between diversity and disability in teacher education. The issue begins with Marilyn Cochran-Smith and Curt Dudley-Marling (2012) presenting an overview of the “issues that divide” general and special teacher educators, including the disciplinary roots of general and special education, deficit perspectives on difference (which they locate within special education), and access to the general curriculum for all students. The authors also discuss those areas where connection seems possible, including teacher inquiry within preparation programs.
Two of the remaining four centerpiece articles explicate specifically situated perspectives on diversity and disability in teacher education. In “The 21st Century Teacher: A Cultural Perspective,” Robert Rueda and Jamy Stillman (2012) foreground issues of cultural (in)congruence between teachers and students and argue that teachers must become “informed observers of all students” (p. 250). In “Complex Relationships Between Multicultural Education and Special Education: An African American Perspective,” Jacqueline Jordan Irvine (2012) calls attention to the disproportionate representation of students of color in general and of African American boys in particular in special education. She argues for an approach that would prepare all teachers to enact culturally relevant pedagogy as means of disrupting the deficit thinking that shapes overrepresentation.
The other two centerpiece articles, “Preparing Teachers to Work in Inclusive Classrooms: Key Lessons for the Professional Development of Teacher Educators from Scotland’s Inclusive Practice Project” by Lani Florian (2012) and “Enacting Diversity in Dual Certification Programs” by Marleen C. Pugach and Linda P. Blanton (2012), each report on studies of teacher education programs. Florian reports on the Inclusive Practice Project (IPP), a program funded by the Scottish government that aims to prepare teachers for classrooms with “increasing cultural, linguistic, and developmental diversity” (p. 275). Pugach and Blanton discuss findings from a content analysis of the documents associated with three different teacher preparation programs designed to integrate requirements for general and special elementary teacher candidates so that students earn both credentials simultaneously.
As I noted earlier, the articles represent an important first step toward broadening the conversation(s) in teacher education to include “disability” alongside other forms of student diversity. A DSE lens, however, can help us move beyond this first step on the journey toward educational equity.
A Brief Overview of DSE
Disability Studies (DS) is an interdisciplinary orientation to educational theory, research, and practice that works from a social and cultural model of disability and challenges the medical (or deficit) model to “normalize difference” (Baglieri & Knopf, 2004). DSE draws from this broad and interdisciplinary field to apply a DS lens to educational concerns (e.g., see discussions in Baglieri & Shapiro, 2012; Connor, Gabel, Gallagher, & Morton, 2008; Danforth & Gabel, 2006; Ferguson & Nusbaum, 2012; Ferri, 2008; Gabel, 2005; Valle & Connor, 2011). DSE asserts the need to consider “ability” and “disability” as distributed across people, forms of literacy, discourses, symbolic and physical tools, and so on, and argues for an examination of the institutional and cultural practices of school that shape dis/ability. In this commentary, I focus on two aspects of DSE that I believe are particularly salient for expanding the conversation across the articles in JTE 63.4, that is, disability labels as a social and political response to difference and personal narrative as decolonizing methodology.
Disability Labels as a Social and Political Response to Difference
A foundational and central concept of DSE is the understanding that disability is a socially and politically constructed response to perceived difference. Whereas a medical model locates dis/ability within individuals and proceeds to “diagnose” and “treat” the “problem,” DSE works from a social model that examines the cultural affordances and constraints as well as the sociopolitical interests that contribute to shaping a difference into a disability. As McDermott and Varenne (1995) write,
It is one kind of problem to have a behavioral range different from social expectations; it is another kind of problem to be in a culture in which that difference is used by others for degradation. The second problem is by far the worse. (p. 330)
While McDermott and Varenne (1995) focus specifically on the response to behavioral differences in this instance, much work in DSE considers deficit responses to other forms of perceived differences. DSE seeks to identify and disrupt the deficit ideologies and discourses that shape the process of otherizing people whose behaviors, bodies, ethnicities, or linguistic repertoires are perceived as “different from social expectations.” DSE examines how ableism and racism work in concomitant ways to mark some students as “less than” others and perpetuate educational segregation and unequal opportunity.
For example, scholarship in DS documents the historical link between identifications of race and ethnicity and those of disability. In The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public, Susan Schweik (2009) traces the history of laws that prohibited the public appearance of disability and the ways in which the discourse around these laws became conflated with discourses around anti-immigration in the early 1900s. Similarly, Douglas Baynton (2001) argues that disability categories have been used to justify oppression and connects this argument to historical debates about who had the right to citizenship in the United States. Disability, Baynton argues, has been used historically to marginalize, segregate, and disempower people marked as “different”:
[N]ot only has it been considered justifiable to treat disabled people unequally, but the concept of disability has been used to justify discrimination against other groups by attributing disability to them . . . When categories of citizenship were questioned, challenged, and disrupted, disability was called on to clarify and define who deserved, and who was deservedly excluded from, citizenship. (p. 33)
During the same time period, the marker of disability was similarly called upon to label and segregate students from groups socially and culturally positioned as different due to perceived ethnicity, socioeconomic class, or immigrant status (Collins & Dutro, 2013; Erevelles, 2005; Ferri, 2008; Ferri & Connor, 2005, 2006). As Beth Ferri (2008) asserts, this practice increased after the 1954 passing of Brown v. Board of Education.
[S]pecial education, like tracking and gifted/talented programs, functioned as a way to subvert desegregation orders after Brown—creating a way to segregate students within schools once it was impossible to segregate them between schools (Ferri and Connor, 2006). (p. 419)
DSE thus calls attention to the use of disability labels as a response to perceived difference, as a means to maintain the location of power within some groups and exclude others. In doing so, DSE does not maintain that no embodied, cognitive, socioeconomic, cultural, behavioral, and/or linguistic differences exist between and among people. It does, however, ask us to consider how such differences are made to matter in school contexts.
While none of the articles in JTE 63.4 take up the historical relationship between immigration policy, disability, and political power (i.e., citizenship in country or classroom) that is documented by DSE scholars, Cochran-Smith and Dudley-Marling come the closest. They position themselves as teacher educators who are informed by sociocultural and social justice orientations to learning and teaching. They acknowledge that much of their work is influenced by and consistent with scholarship in DSE, and pose the following question:
What is there about the ways we organize our schools, school curricula, testing . . . that contributes to widespread failure among students of color, students living in poverty, and students with disabilities? For teacher educators like us, the problem of disability is a social justice issue that calls for careful examination of systemic and structural issues as well as thoughtful consideration of how individuals and groups relate within sociocultural contexts. (Cochran-Smith & Dudley-Marling, 2012, p. 240)
A DSE perspective extends this stance by repositioning our understandings of what the authors term the problem of disability. DSE argues that it is not the human differences that are commonly termed “disabilities” that are the problem. Rather, the problem lies in the culturally and historically situated exclusionary responses to such differences. To understand and interrupt this process, we need to look more broadly than issues of cultural congruence and culturally responsive pedagogy. We need to examine the larger societal responses to difference and the complicated ways in which these responses intersect with power and privilege on interpersonal, institutional, and political levels.
Personal Narrative as Decolonizing Methodology
A second important aspect of DSE is the attention that is given to documenting and learning from the voices and stories of people whose lives and ways of knowing have been pathologized by the dominant disability-as-medical-deficit model. Rather than privileging clinical or expert knowledge, DSE scholarship makes an effort to recognize, include, and learn from the experiences of people who have been positioned in special education categories or labeled as having a disability. DSE scholarship also makes an effort to include the voices of parents who have had to navigate “special” educational and medical systems on behalf of their child(ren).
One argument for centering and responding to the stories of individuals who have been labeled as having a disability lies in the potential decolonizing effects of such scholarship. In Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness, Fiona Kumari Campbell (2009) describes the colonizing effects of deficit discourses:
From the moment a child is born, he/she emerges into a world where he/she receives messages that to be disabled is to be less than, a world where disability may be tolerated but in the final instance is inherently negative. We are all, regardless of our status, shaped and formed by the politics of ableism. (p. 17)
Social psychologist Claude Steele (2010) describes this colonizing effect as a type of “identity contingence,” that is, a constraint on an individual’s behavior because of his or her membership in a particular social group. Stereotype threat is a particularly dangerous form of identity contingency because of the ways in which it limits human potential. The knowledge that one’s behavior may be read as confirming a stereotype creates “a threat in the air” that subsequently constrains one’s behavior and choices (Steele, 2010, p. 5).
In depicting learners’ and parents’/caregivers’ perspectives on living with a disability label, the centering of personal narratives offers marginalized children a way to “talk back” or “counter” the stories of deficit and/or deprivation told about them. In this manner, personal narratives may address and diffuse the “threat in the air.” As Beth Ferri (2011) argues,
[M]emoirs should not be seen as counter to theory or politics, but should be understood as a form of social action for their ability to talk back to dominant scripts and point to a more embodied form of social critique. (p. 2279)
It is telling, then, that none of the authors in JTE 63.4 included the voices of those who have personally experienced the positioning effects of disability labels. In an educational system that pushes for homogeneity and actively works to sustain “the myth of the normal child” (Baglieri, Bejoian, Broderick, Connor, & Valle, 2011, p. 2122), DSE argues that the inclusion of narratives of personal experience will help teachers (and teacher educators) shift our questions from “Do you really belong here?” to “How do we support your belonging here?” (Kliewer, 2008, p. 47).
Beth Ferri’s (2008) thematic analysis of studies that included the personal narratives of individuals who had been positioned in special education categories in school provides a good starting place for teachers and teacher educators seeking to learn from the voices of such students. The authors of the narratives in the studies Ferri analyzed identified as members of various races, ethnicities, genders, and social classes and had been assigned an array of disability labels, including learning disabled, autistic, and emotionally disturbed. By making visible the connections across the personal narratives of this diverse group of students and former students, Ferri provides a wealth of expertise for teacher educators seeking to support teacher candidates’ development of inclusive habits of mind and practice.
Final Thoughts
Twelve years ago, Linda Ware (2001) posed the question, “Dare we do disability studies?” within the pages of this journal. Ware argued that teacher educators should take up a cultural lens on disability, one that would encourage conversations across disciplinary boundaries:
Turf wars and age-old disputes about professional credentials for educating students with special needs remain unresolved and serve to silence more important conversations about disability as a political and discursive entity. (p. 120)
In this commentary, I’ve taken up Ware’s suggestion by illustrating the affordances of a DSE perspective for extending the conversation about disability, diversity, and educational equity. DSE offers a perspective that (a) views notions of “ability” and “disability” as socioculturally constructed and enacted in ways that are intimately entwined with the construction of other social identities and subject positions and (b) asks teachers and teacher educators to consider the personal perspectives of those who have experienced the positioning effects of disability labels in school. These two themes within DSE scholarship and theory extend the arguments presented in JTE 63.4 by providing an understanding of the intersectional nature of diversity, disability, and the social, cultural, and political production of educational inequities.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Author Biography
Kathleen M. Collins is an assistant professor of language, culture, and society and codirector of the Center for Disability Studies at Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, United States. Her program of research aims to identify and interrupt deficit discourses surrounding children who are positioned as struggling with traditional school literacies. Much of her work does this by providing counter stories depicting children’s capabilities in multimodal instructional contexts. Her research has appeared in English Journal; Language Arts; Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools; Learning Disabilities Quarterly; Research in the Teaching of English; Teachers College Record; Urban Education; and Young Children. She is the recipient of the 2012 Ellen Brantlinger Junior Scholar Award for outstanding work within disability studies in education.