Intersectional Disruptor: A Special Educator of Color Living and Teaching in the Intersections

Abstract

Scholars argue that teaching for disability and racial justice in education must be intersectional to jointly disrupt the marginalizing processes that occur at the nexus of ableism and racism. It has been suggested that special educators of color can play a key role in addressing inequity and disproportionality in special education. Yet, special educators of color are perpetually underrepresented in the workforce. At the same time, special education research remains overwhelmingly silent on the unique experiences and contributions of educators of color, particularly Black women. This qualitative case study employs DisCrit Classroom Ecology and Positioning Theory as a conceptual framework to explore how Sarah, a Black special educator, drew on her life histories to enact transformative teacher resistance. Implications will be offered for how special education teacher preparation programs can center the crucial role of Black educators in special education.

Keywords

intersectionality Disability Critical Race Theory DisCrit Classroom Ecology

A Working Definition of Ableism (Lewis, 2021)

A system that places value on people’s bodies and minds based on societally constructed ideas of normality, intelligence, excellence, desirability, and productivity. These constructed ideas are deeply rooted in anti-Blackness, eugenics, misogyny, colonialism, imperialism, and capitalism.

This form of systemic oppression leads to people and society determining who is valuable and worthy, based on a person’s language, appearance, religion, and/or their ability to satisfactorily [re]produce, excel and “behave.”

You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism.

“You do not have to be disabled to experience ableism” is the last line of Talila “TL” Lewis’s working definition of ableism. This statement is not meant to detract from the oppression experienced by the disability community writ large but rather to highlight the nefarious ways in which ableism is deployed to justify and maintain racist systems. The entanglement of ableism and racism in education research can be seen in multiple data points including the over-representation of racially minoritized students in special education (e.g., Sullivan & Artiles, 2011; Sullivan & Bal, 2013), increased likelihood of segregated placements (Blanchett et al., 2009) and harsher disciplinary policies (Gregory et al., 2010; Skiba et al., 2014). This research reveals the material consequences of Lewis’ (2021) definition inscribed within schooling and special education practices where ableism justifies racist practices that attempt to strip minoritized students of access, belonging, and educational justice.

Due to these inequities, scholars argue that teaching for disability and racial justice in education must be intersectional to jointly disrupt the marginalizing processes that occur at the nexus of ableism and racism (Annamma, 2018; Artiles, 2013; Leonardo & Broderick, 2011). Intersectionality describes the ways in which systems of oppression work together to produce unique consequences for those at the intersections of multiple marginalized identities (Crenshaw, 1991). It has been suggested that special educators of color (e.g., Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Middle Eastern) can play a key role in addressing inequity and disproportionality in special education (Rocha & Hawes, 2009). Yet, special education research remains overwhelming silent on the contributions of educators of color, particularly Black women (Boveda & McCray, 2020) This qualitative case study (Yin, 2014) employs DisCrit Resistance Classroom Ecology (Annamma & Morrison, 2018) and Positioning Theory (Davies & Harre, 1990) as a conceptual framework to explore how Sarah, a Black special educator, enacted forms of transformative teacher resistance (Annamma & Morrison, 2018).

Before we proceed, we first want to clarify some of the language choices we make throughout the manuscript. Like Naraian (2017), we alternate between person first (i.e., student with a disability) and identity-first language (i.e., disabled student). In doing so, we seek to respect the diverse ways in which the individuals in the disability community identify themselves (e.g., Liebowitz, 2015). We will also use the word “minoritized” and not “minority” to refer to historically marginalized groups in order to highlight the ways in which power relations actively advantage and marginalized certain groups based on long-standing social hierarchies (McCarty, 2002). When we refer to “multiply-marginalized” communities, we refer to groups that experience multiple, intersecting forms of oppression (i.e., Black, disabled students). Finally, we have chosen to not capitalize “white” or “whiteness” in this article as not to participate in the historical privileging of this racial category and its history of dominance (Gotanda, 1991).

Literature Review

The extant literature on the contributions of special educators of color in reducing inequity and improving outcomes for multiply minoritized students (e.g., student with a disability and Black) is limited but emerging. It is clear that there is a significant shortage of racially minoritized special educators (Billingsley et al., 2019). This underrepresentation is especially concerning given the inverse is true with the overrepresentation of students of color receiving special education services. In 2011, only 18% of special educators nationally were teachers of color while 47% of all students receiving special education services were students of color (Bettini et al., 2018). This incongruence is significant because, as key stakeholders in decision-making processes, researchers argue that teachers of color may help address disproportionate rates of special education referrals, gifted placements, and discipline practices. There is evidence to suggest that the race of educators making key decisions appears to be a significant factor in predicting special education referral rates (Fish, 2019; Woodson & Harris, 2018) and gifted placements by race (Grissom & Redding, 2016).

Other research shows explicit commitments to racial justice by special educators of color. For example, Scott and Alexander (2019) found that Black male special educators felt motivated to join the special education profession due, in part, to their own histories with academic and social injustice in schools. These experiences also motivated them to reduce negative stereotypes about Black boys within education systems. The participants in another study demonstrated perseverance in their commitments to disability and racial justice even when it placed them within precarious positions within their organizations (Scott et al., 2020).

At the same time, special educators of color represent a wide variety of intersectional experiences and backgrounds that cannot be fully captured in the limited scope of literature available. Other studies contradict the findings above and justify the use of caution in making simplistic generalizations about their contributions to educational equity for multiply marginalized students. For example, kindergartners with disabilities in one study did not experience a benefit from having a teacher of their own race (Gottfried et al., 2019). In another, Boveda and Aronson (2019) found that pre-service special educators of color held unexamined forms of anti-Blackness, colorism, linguistic discrimination and deficit thinking related to socioeconomic status. Given these contradictions and limited scope, it is clear that more research is needed to better understand the multifaceted motivations and choices of special educators of color in relation to equity as well as the structural factors that mediate this work.

Study Purpose and Significance

Given that racism and ableism work in tandem to produce unique forms of oppression, we argue that it is important to hone in on the ways that special educators of color understand this interaction, and how it is brought to bear through their practice. This addresses an existing gap in the research about special educators of color, where explicit attention to ableism remains elusive. The purpose of this qualitative case study then is to explore how Sarah, an abled, Black special educator, drew on her own understandings of racism and ableism to enact intersectional forms of resistance in her work with multiply marginalized students.

Conceptual Framework

Our conceptual framework brings together DisCrit Classroom Ecology (Annamma & Morrison, 2018) and positioning theory (Davies & Harre, 1990). We explore the interconnections between these theories by investigating Sarah’s positioning as a Black, female special educator and her use of critical and intersectional pedagogies as informed by her own understandings of the intersections between racism and ableism.

Positioning Theory

Positioning theory helps us to understand how discursive practices, or “the ways in which people actively produce social and psychological realities” (Davies & Harre, 1990, p. 5), “position” individuals within sociocultural contexts. In this way, social identity is both constructed and learned through social encounters. To fully understand positioning practices, social identities must be understood in relation to their proximity to power both in specific contexts but also at a global level. In this article, we explored discursive events throughout Sarah’s life history, during her interviews and video-recorded interactions with students. Undergirding this analysis is the understanding that racism and ableism operate as an intersecting system of power (Annamma et al., 2013) and how Sarah’s social identities (i.e., Black, female, nondisabled) are positioned within such a system.

DisCrit Classroom Ecology

We used DisCrit Classroom Ecology (Annamma & Morrison, 2018) as a theoretical tool to investigate Sarah’s pedagogical practices as a means for disrupting racist and ableist social processes. DisCrit Classroom Ecology builds on Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit), which names the intricate interconnections between racism and ableism and how they work together to naturalize dominant conceptions of normalcy in academic and behavioral standards. DisCrit Classroom Ecology invites educators to consider the experiences of multiply minoritized students not as disabled or racialized but as both simultaneously and allow the fullness of those identities to inform our pedagogy. It does so by translating the theoretical tenets of DisCrit into a theory of teaching and learning that can be operationalized by educators. According to Annamma and Morrison (2018), this theory of teaching and learning encompasses three components: (a) DisCrit Curriculum, (b) DisCrit Pedagogy, and (c) DisCrit Solidarity, which are all underscored by a fourth component (d) DisCrit Resistance. DisCrit Resistance rejects deficit-based beliefs about multiply minoritized students that pervade school systems and work to violently pathologize, surveil and control them. With DisCrit resistance as a guiding principle, DisCrit curriculum actively centers a historicized understanding of structural oppression and its connections to students’ present-day experiences. DisCrit Pedagogy recognizes and cultivates multiply minoritized students’ unique gifts, strengths, and interests in the classroom. The third component, DisCrit Solidarity, means working with multiply minoritized students to strategize how to use their resistance strategies to dismantle structural oppressions. DisCrit Classroom Ecology helped us to identify the ways Sarah employed critical and intersectional teaching and capacity to engage in transformative resistance.

Method

A case study is the analytical approach we used in this qualitative investigation (Yin, 2014). A case study is an empirical inquiry that explores a specific phenomenon within authentic, localized contexts. We chose a case study because the methodology enables the researcher to explore the interplay between the phenomenon, or “case,” and the contextual conditions in which it occurs. Our case interrogates the ways in which Sarah’s social positioning around racism and ableism informed her use of DisCrit Classroom Ecology. This method allowed us to animate DisCrit Classroom Ecology theory within the messiness and complexity of teaching and learning. The following research question guided this inquiry:

Research Question 1 (RQ1): How does Sarah’s social positioning as a Black special educator inform the way she constructs DisCrit Classroom Ecologies?

Participant and Setting

As a child, Sarah attended mostly white, affluent schools where she faced discrimination due to racism and classism. Although Sarah identified as nondisabled, she did report experiencing racist and ableist systems of oppression during her high school years. For instance, after being involved in an altercation with another student, Sarah faced suspension and was stripped of her place in the school’s National Honors Society—an honor bestowed on her due to her excellent academic record. From this experience, Sarah understood that as a Black woman, her access to the spoils associated with ability privilege like membership in the National Honor Society proved fragile and at the whim of those with power in a White Supremacist system. In an effort to avoid the hostile environment of her early schooling, Sarah actively sought out a Historically Black College where she pursued accounting and thrived. After graduating she worked as an accountant in rural Iowa where again she felt like an outsider in mostly white spaces. She found a connection with a Sudanese refugee with a disability who she tutored after work. Similar to her own high school experience, she witnessed her tutee facing rampant racism and ableism from her mostly white teachers. At this point, Sarah decided to make a career shift and pursue a degree in special education. Her inspiration to seek out a new path was informed by the need to fill in the gaps in her understanding about the type of oppressions her tutee faced.

Sarah fit the inclusion criteria for this study because (a) she attended the University of the Prairie’s Master’s in Special Education program, (b) she was <2 years out from her graduation, and (c) she demonstrated a commitment to inclusive education. Author 1 reviewed course documents including mission statements, course descriptions, syllabi, etc. from the program. The program was framed by a sociocultural perspective of disability that understood race as a social construct informed by macro and microsocial systems. As a teacher candidate, Sarah was exposed to Disability Studies readings, as well as intersectional theory. Although Sarah did not have formal instruction on DisCrit Classroom Ecologies, she did receive formal instruction on the theories that undergird it. In this article, DisCrit Classroom Ecologies is a theoretical lens that the authors used to analyze Sarah’s practice and not an evaluation of Sarah’s learning from her teacher preparation program.

Practice context

Sarah taught in a suburban middle school just outside a moderately sized mid-western city. At the time of this study, the school had 600 students in Grades 6 to 8. The student body included mostly students of color with 60% Black students and 12% Hispanic students. Seventy-one percent of the student body qualified for free and reduced lunch. Graduation rates for students in the district with Individualized Education Programs were 10% less than the district-wide average of 80%. Sarah and her principal stated that community members often perceived their school district as inferior to other neighboring districts with more white and affluent student bodies. Sarah taught in a self-contained classroom for students identified as having disabilities that primarily affect their behavior. She taught two groups of students that she shared with another special educator in the same setting. The majority of students in her class were Black or biracial with Emotional Disturbance labels (n = 9). White students were a minority in the class (n=3) and had labels of Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Data Collection Procedures

Data were collected by Author 1 over a 5-month period and drew on a number of data collection methods including three 1-hour phenomenological interviews, a 1-hour video recording, and two 1-hour participant observations with ethnographic fieldnotes. Phenomenological interviewing (Seidman, 2006) involves a three-part in-depth interview technique where each interview is designed with a specific purpose. The first interview explores participant’s lived experiences, the second investigates how they make meaning of those experiences, and the third is used to understand how that meaning affects the way that they carry out everyday practices. Prior to the first interview, Author 1 conducted the first participant observation using ethnographic fieldnotes (Emerson et al., 2011). She observed a single class period for the purpose of establishing pertinent information about the participant’s practice context. Field notes recorded contextual details such as daily classroom routines such as the number of students served, subjects they covered, daily schedule, etc. Author 1 also recorded observations around Sarah’s interactions with students. Author 1 augmented these observations by adding my own reflections, questions, and evolving interpretations of the data. These emerging interpretations were then used to construct the interview guide for the first interview. During the second participant observation, Author 1 video-recorded a lesson along with taking ethnographic fieldnotes (Emerson et al., 2011). Before the second interview, Author 1 conducted an initial round of analysis of the video. Using the conceptual framework as a guide, the researcher selected five clips that exemplified emerging themes in the findings that Author 1 then showed to the participant during the second interview. Video is particularly useful for investigating identity construction because “it reveals identity in action, it can provide an integrated approach to identity formation” (Tochon, 2007, p. 58). Video served as a recall mechanism during the interview to open up lived experiences for deeper understanding and reflection (Tochon, 2007).

Data Analysis Procedures

Using Dedoose software, we used a thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) to analyze our data. We constructed and refined our themes through four rounds of coding: (a) generating initial codes, (b) searching for themes, (c) reviewing themes, and (d) defining and naming themes. Our analysis used a process of inductive and deductive coding drawing on our conceptual framework (Ravitch & Riggan, 2012) while also incorporating a “bottom up” approach (Erickson, 1996) allowing our understanding of the literature to be challenged by the data. During the initial coding phase, we also used a process of open coding (Strauss & Corbin, 1994) identifying patterns across Sarah’s teaching practices that emerged over time creating new codes when applicable. Following individual coding, we met as a research team to seek consensus by selecting a randomized group of coded sections to review together. Through this process, we reorganized codes when necessary or created new codes if new phenomena emerged that were not captured in our initial round of codes. When we faced disagreement, we worked together as a research team to come to an agreement through discussion and referencing the literature. To establish themes, we used comparative methods (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) to find commonalities across our inductive and deductive codes. In this way, we were able to surface the authentic strategies Sarah used and connect them to our conceptual framework. At this point, we realized that DisCrit resistance needed to be a standalone theme because of the robustness of the code and its foundational relationship to Sarah’s strategies. We generated two overarching themes: (a) Positional Maneuverings: DisCrit Resistance as Embracing Complexity and Nuance and (b) DisCrit Classroom Ecology: Resistance Strategies and Applications. We then created three subthemes under the second theme to define specific resistance approaches Sarah utilized to animate the theoretical framing. Finally, we selected specific units of data that most exemplified each of the themes and subthemes.

Researcher Positionality

We identify as a white, nondisabled teacher educator (Siuty & Beneke, 2020) and Black/biracial, nondisabled graduate student and teacher candidate (Author2). We both consider ourselves to be inclusive educators committed to antioppressive teaching practices that challenge the status quo. We addressed the imbalance in the social and institutional power dynamics in our working relationship by explicitly identifying our own individual expertise that we brought to this project. Author 1’s expertise included research methodology and intersectional theory. Author 2 also held expertise in intersectional theory both as a theoretical tool and also her lived experience as a Black/biracial special educator who currently worked in the classroom. An example of this check on power dynamics occurred when we discussed our decision to focus on Sarah’s experience as a Black special educator in this investigation. Author 1 questioned whether to include white educators in a multicase study design as to offer an opportunity for comparative analysis. Author 2 resisted this suggestion by pointing out that, by including white teachers, we would be complicit in processes that (re)affirm whiteness as natural and the bar to which all other ways of teaching and learning should be measured (Burciaga & Kohli, 2018). Consequently, we chose to investigate Sarah’s experiences because we believe it is important to decenter the white experience and to provide empirical data that teacher preparation programs can use to better meet the needs of teacher candidates of color (Souto-Manning & Cheruvu, 2016).

At the same time, we want to warn against reading this work as a suggestion that Black educators alone can and should carry the work of abolishing oppressive schooling practices. We recognized that racially minoritized teachers, particularly Black women, are often tasked with the extraordinary task of dismantling the racist systems that white educators constructed all while contending with a gauntlet of oppressive structures themselves (Lisle-Johnson & Kohli, 2020). For these reasons, in our analysis, we do not hold DisCrit Classroom Ecologies as a goal meant to be checked off an antioppressive teaching checklist. Rather we use theory to contextualize Sarah’s decision-making processes by understanding the affordances and constraints of her school site. In doing so, we hope that readers in positions of power can start to identify points within educational systems where they can take responsibility to dismantle the oppressive structures that support ableism and racism and impede the essential work of racially minoritized educators.

Trustworthiness

In addition to the steps described in the data analysis and researcher positionality sections to build trustworthiness, we also followed the guidelines for trustworthiness and credibility in qualitative special education research (Trainor & Graue, 2014). The research methods included embedded member checks where Author 1 brought the preliminary analysis of the data to each interview so that Sarah could offer input and refinement into the analysis process. For our analysis, we sought disconfirming evidence using both multiple data sources and using iterative deductive and inductive coding procedures informed by relevant theory (Yin, 2014). For our analysis, we triangulated data across multiple sources such as interview transcripts, video recordings, and fieldnotes. We also reviewed randomized selections of codes together so that we could reorganize and refine them until we reached consensus. In addition, we used Dedoose to store and analyze the data, which along with the analytic memos served as an audit trail of how the data analysis evolved over time.

Findings

In this section, we address the research question with two themes. The first theme, Positional Maneuverings: DisCrit Resistance as Embracing Complexity and Nuance, explores how Sarah’s social positionings coconstructed a specific understanding of how ableism and racism operate together and also a nuanced approach to resisting deficit-based thinking. The second theme, DisCrit Classroom Ecology: Resistance Strategies and Applications, investigates the ways in which Sarah constructed DisCrit Classroom Ecologies within her teaching practice as an act of resistance to entrenched forms of intersecting systemic oppressions.

Positional Maneuverings: DisCrit Resistance as Embracing Complexity and Nuance

DisCrit resistance is the foundation of DisCrit Classroom Ecology and underscores the other three elements (Annamma & Morrison, 2018). It is a commitment to rejecting deficit ideologies about multiply minoritized students. As a Black woman committed to disability and racial justice, Sarah often found herself being positioned as the disruptor in both Black and white spaces. In her Black family, she confronted lingering suspicions about the medical field due to the historical weaponization of ableism at the hands of doctors toward Black people (Hoberman, 2012). In particular, she argued to destigmatize mental illness and medication as a treatment for her cousin with schizophrenia, “I’m not making [cousin’s disability] up. There is nothing wrong. [His] brain is functioning differently but you have to realize that some people do the medicine” (Sarah, Interview 1). Sarah urged her family to recognize her cousin’s disability and to accept medication as a legitimate treatment option. At the same time, she also asserted that her cousin’s mind is not inherently inferior to someone without schizophrenia. This positioning carried into her discussions with Black families as a special educator:

. . . it is scary how much [the student’s] mom is against it. Like, ‘He’s not crazy. He just needs a whooping.’ No. There is maybe something really going on in his brain . . . You have to be okay with that [medication] sometimes. And that’s really hard too . . . that’s a big thing in the African American community.

Sarah’s response to this parent took into account the legitimate trepidation that Black people experience when accepting advice from the medical community. At the same time, she also advocated for the recognition of the student’s neurodiversity as an equally legitimate disability to physical disabilities. Historically, the existence of physical disabilities has been considered more legitimate than invisible disabilities that affect mental health (Sins Invalid, 2019). As a result, there is relatively less stigma attached to the treatments associated with physical disabilities. Sarah attempted to mitigate this inequity while also being cognizant of the history of ableist violence inflicted by the medical community and school systems on Black people.

Sarah often found herself in predominantly white education spaces where she felt compelled to use her understanding of intersectionality to resist unethical disability labeling practices. She specifically discussed the pathologization processes of Black children and their families, wherein students’ ways of being are medicalized for the purposes of control by dominant groups (Annamma, 2018). Speaking to her colleagues Sarah recalls asking, “How much of the social history are you applying to diagnose them? They had a rough social history that doesn’t equal ED [emotionally disturbed].” Sarah critiqued the ways in which her colleagues stereotyped and pathologized Black families and experiences. She recognized that due to systemic racism, Black families may contend with many “rough” challenges such as poverty or incarceration. Yet she resisted her colleagues’ willingness to place that pathology within her students rather than on the racist and ableist systems that created the circumstances under which students of color and their families persisted.

Another way that Sarah showed resistance was by demanding that her teaching and her students be taken seriously and held to high academic standards. Through subtle messaging like not conducting teaching observations with the same frequency and rigor of her general education colleagues, the school’s administration positioned her and her students as less capable than their general education counterparts:

I feel like a lot of times from people higher up like they don’t come check and see what me and my partner are doing. Like really? Do you think we are doing the right thing? And so that bothers me but I don’t want the kids to have that like, “Oh in there [self-contained room] we . . . do nothing!”

Sarah believed that the administration’s lack of attention to her teaching reveals a devaluation of her students’ capacity to learn and, consequently, her work as a special educator. She resisted this positioning of both herself and her students by actively curating and implementing appropriate instructional activities every day, “Well, I’m focused on the academics and if I have engaging lessons and they are learning then some of these behaviors will go away. Like teachers shouldn’t be so behavior focused that there are no academics.” An example of this is when Sarah conducted a science lesson about different types of waves during participant observation. Sarah felt committed to providing access to the general education curriculum even though her students took science in her self-contained room. She used the same book and curriculum as her general education colleagues but used Universal Design for Learning to present the information in a variety of ways to create access for her students. Ultimately, she hoped that her students could attend science labs with their general education peers. Although the criterion to join was rooted in dominant behavioral expectations, Sarah wanted her students to be comfortable with the curriculum once they graduated to the inclusive setting. Sarah’s students already faced exclusion based on dominant expectations around behavior. She resisted further marginalizing them by strategically giving them access to the general education curriculum. She valued their intellect and potential while the administration undermined their abilities. In this way, she is resisting deficit-based assumptions about her multiply marginalized students.

DisCrit resistance requires transformative teacher resistance that “explicitly repudiates the common deficit-oriented tropes about Students of Color that sediment bias” (Annamma & Morrison, 2018, p. 73). Sarah demonstrated a nimbleness in her resistance tactics depending on the context of the interactions. She contextualized Black families’ suspicion of medical diagnosis and treatment in her disability advocacy. She combatted her colleagues’ bias by refusing to rely on problematic stereotypes about Black families to pathologize their children. This analysis of Sarah’s resistance revealed her intersectional understanding of the ways ableism and racism interact and an ability to animate resistance methods that encapsulated the complexity of compounding oppressions.

DisCrit Classroom Ecology: Resistance Strategies and Applications

In this section, we answer the research question by analyzing three resistance strategies Sarah used in her classroom to enact a DisCrit Classroom Ecology. Rather than seeking purity in theoretical alignment, we contextualize her methods within the dynamic and contentious nature of her practice site. Throughout this section, we recognize the ways in which Sarah draws on the tools afforded to her through her practice site to enact DisCrit Classroom Ecologies.

Resistance strategy 1: Challenging pedagogies that emphasize order and compliance

Sarah’s teaching practices challenged the prevailing classroom management systems in her school setting, which emphasized student compliance and maintaining classroom order. Sarah believed that schools should impart skills that students can use in their everyday lives rather than conforming to hegemonic standards of behavior. She discussed pushing back when general educators who complained that her students stood up to get a pencil they dropped or asked to use the restroom during class time, “But I taught them the skill of knowing when something's appropriate and not appropriate . . . Yet, you want them to comply in school ‘cause this is how you want your school to look but in the real world, are these skills going to be beneficial?” In this example, Sarah resisted the notion that her students’ actions represented a threat to classroom order. She believed in their capacity to make rational decisions and their actions reflected processes of considered choice-making rather than defiance and disruption. This belief influenced Sarah’s decision-making around her own pedagogy in that she eschewed the behaviorist-oriented systems that dominant special education practices to use what she calls social/emotional learning methods:

I have kinda changed my views on operant conditioning and using that rewards and stuff like that. I’ve changed my views. . .Now I’m more looking at social/emotional learning because I, again, I don’t want to teach you to comply.

By social/emotional learning, Sarah meant approaches that honored students’ interests, perspectives, and outside lives. She gave the example of watching CNN Student Life in the morning and talking with students about their views of current events before jumping into academic content. In seeking connection over compliance, Sarah decentered herself as classroom monitor and redistributed power to her students to make their own choices with her guidance.

This resistance strategy incorporated both DisCrit Pedagogy and DisCrit Solidarity. DisCrit Pedagogy affirms and centers the unique capacities of the students in the classroom. Sarah made a pedagogical decision to resist the dominant behaviorist perspectives that practice a top-down behavior management approach. Instead, she worked alongside students to develop decision-making practices to shape their own behavior in ways that aligned with their needs and desires. This is also an act of DisCrit Solidarity because her students can use these skills as a blueprint for navigating a variety of social settings including the general education classroom but also in real-world applications.

Resistance strategy 2: Disrupting patterns of school-based trauma and exclusion

Sarah often expressed frustration at her colleagues’ actions that restricted her students’ ability to make choices about their own bodies. She believed it was important for students to be afforded the same freedoms as adults who can respond to their needs when necessary, “The teachers [say] that you can’t use the bathroom but if I need to use the bathroom, I tell the IA [Instructional Assistant], ‘I’m going to go use the bathroom real quick . . .’ . . . like that’s not real life to me.” Importantly, she noted that these restrictive policies often served as an incubator for tensions that often resulted in a cycle of student outburst and imposed restriction and exclusion:

he’s [a Black student in her teaching video] being transitioned to a school called Newberg. I was at his IEP meeting Friday. Um for more severe behaviors and. . .so there was a lot more of that happening and so a break needed to be built in.

Sarah recognized a pattern emerging when students did not have the freedom to attend to the needs of their bodies such as using the restroom or taking a pause from classwork, they responded by having emotional outbursts. The school used these emotional outbursts as justification for even more control by sending them to more restrictive settings. Using her classroom as a point of disruption, Sarah instituted daily breaks at the end of each class period. In these breaks, students could choose a variety of activities. Video analysis demonstrated Sarah providing students with snacks and allowing one student to shop for Chance the Rapper hats on her computer during one of these breaks. Another student called his mother during this time to remind her to bring the Chrome book he forgot at home. All the while, Sarah and the students shared jokes and talked about a difficult situation with another teacher. These breaks gave students the autonomy to pursue their interests, attend to personal needs, and build their relationships with Sarah. Resisting the pressure to use every second toward academic instruction, Sarah disrupted a dysfunctional cycle of control and exclusion by making pedagogical decisions that reflected her students’ needs.

Sarah’s second resistance strategy also represented DisCrit Pedagogy and DisCrit Solidarity. Once again, Sarah’s pedagogical decisions did not require that her students change but rather that she designed her classroom in alignment with their needs. She moved the pathology out of the student and into a relentless system that does not give space for rest. It is DisCrit Solidarity in that this shift in her pedagogy disrupted cycles of school-based trauma where as a result of students’ needs not being met, they experience emotional outbursts, which lead to more restrictive placements. Sarah actively taught her students to respond to their mental and physical needs rather than ignoring them to the point of burnout. In this way, she normalized self-care strategies for maintaining equilibrium as valid and necessary parts of teaching and learning.

Resistance strategy 3: Teaching radical self-love

Since Sarah’s class was composed of students labeled with Emotional Behavioral Disorders, her administration required that she teach a social skills class each day. Sarah took a nontraditional approach to this social skills class. Instead of teaching students how to conform to dominant behavioral norms, she reinforced strategies that teach self-love. Radical self-love comes from Black feminist thought and posits that for those whom society ignores or discards, the act of loving oneself constitutes radical defiance (hooks, 1995). While bell hooks (1995) specifically addresses loving Blackness, showing appreciation for bodies deemed disabled is also a radical act. This is not to conflate the social processes that construct and oppress Blackness and disability as one and the same. Instead, we aim to draw connections between strategies for loving oneself as resistance across multiple historically minoritized social identities:

Well, we do activities about the labels that people the stereotypes and all the things that people think about you like, you’re disabled or you’re lazy because you are in here or you don’t care about anything. So those are all your negative labels. All the stuff people think about you and then tearing them off okay. We are going to replace all the bad things people say about you with something that’s positive.

In this example, Sarah taught students coping mechanisms for discrimination that they will experience due to their disability label. In doing so, she gave her students tools to replace negative stereotypes that others may place on them with statements of positive self-affirmation. She even augments this discussion by incorporating the book, Wonder by R. J.Palacio (2012). In this book, the main character August was born with Treacher Collins syndrome and a cleft palate. At school, he routinely endured ableist taunts about his physical appearance from his classmates. During one observation, Sarah read an excerpt where August’s doctor gave him a hearing aid attached to a large headband that would keep them in place because he does not have an outer ear. In this excerpt, August bemoans the anticipated jeers that he will face once he wears the headphones to school. When I asked Sarah why she chose to read this book with her students, she answered:

Our kids stand out because you are in middle school and you stay in the same room all day. So, I mean he [August] stands out physically but you stand out socially and kids know that. So yeah that’s why I picked the book.

Strategies for promoting radical self-love from Black feminism involve promoting and honoring images of Black womanhood because they are often hidden, ignored, or belittled (hooks, 1995). In a similar way, Sarah’s choice of book and related discussion showed resistance to the overwhelming centering of abled narratives at the expense of disabled voices. She offered a counter curriculum wherein the experiences of people with disabilities, like her students, are normalized and actively explored. Moreover, Sarah supported her students in making connections between their own lived experiences and those of the character. In an education system where disability is often positioned as an anathema, Sarah’s actions demonstrate a dramatic departure from the status quo.

In cultivating radical self-love, Sarah brought DisCrit curriculum and solidarity to bear in her classroom. Like August the main character in the book, her students encounter social stigma because they spend most of their day in a separate classroom and their intersecting social identities are marginalized. Sarah chose to feature a person with disabilities in her book of choice to recognize the similarities in their experiences, which is a feature of DisCrit curriculum. Teaching radical self-love is also an example of DisCrit solidarity because it cultivated her students’ self-acceptance as a counter to the ableist rhetoric that they experience on a daily basis. At the same time, August is a white character. Therefore, Sarah’s students of color may relate to his experiences with disabilities but not the privileges associated with his whiteness. Even though the book falls shy of addressing the intersectionality of their experiences, Sarah’s radical self-love approach to her social skills class flips the traditional script from one where disability is something to be remediated to an identity that should be embraced.

Discussion

We began this article with a working definition of ableism by TL Lewis that asserted that due to the intersections between racism and ableism, one does not have to identify as disabled in order to experience ableism. Rooted in this premise, we wanted to explore how one special educator of color taught from intersections between ableism and racism. Using Positioning Theory and DisCrit Classroom Ecologies together as a conceptual framework, we established how working and living at the intersections of race and ability, Sarah understood the nuances that existed in the overlaps between racism and ableism. Consequently, her teaching practice strove to strategically undermine these nuanced processes by acting as an intersectional disruptor who drew on her experiences to challenge interlocking systems of oppression.

Sarah operated as an intersectional disruptor in both Black and white spaces. With students’ Black families and as well as her own, Sarah challenged ableist assumptions around mental illness by legitimizing mental health treatment and validating neurodiversity as something to be approached with care and respect rather than fear and control. In white spaces, Sarah witnessed the ways ableism gets weaponized against multiply marginalized students as a means to control and deny access. To counteract these processes, she encouraged her white colleagues to confront their bias in identifying students of color with disabilities to minimize disproportionate representation and pushed the administration to value her students’ academic abilities in the same way as their nondisabled peers. As an intersectional disruptor, Sarah used her shifting positionality, whether it be within the intimate spaces of her family or with a team of colleagues, to advocate for disabled people of color with those with proximity to power.

Sarah’s teaching also embodied her commitment to intersectional disruptor. First, her practices affirmed the inherent wholeness of multiply minoritized bodies. Oppressive systems often fail to recognize the complexity of multiply minoritized lives. Identities are often flattened and generalized based on static stereotypes omitting their unique histories, thoughts, and emotions. In contrast, Sarah’s teaching practices assumed wholeness while locating the pathology within a system committed to violently forcing compliance. Constructs of order and control are rooted in normative standards of behavior that center white and abled ways of being (Bornstein, 2017). Sarah understood that these normative standards do not serve her students because they require that they deny the fullness of themselves. Instead, she sought guidance from her students to teach them the behaviors that would serve them in “the real world” or in other spaces authentic and meaningful to their lives. She also actively cultivated strategies of self-love that students could use to counter negative messaging about their bodies and abilities. In school systems where Blackness and disability are assumed to be broken, dysfunctional and even dangerous, to accept multiply minoritized bodies as a whole is a radical act of solidarity and disruption

Sarah’s work helped to counter the capitalist assumptions within the education system that are simultaneously racist and ableist. Capitalist notions of productivity in the United States have a history in the exploitation of Black labor for the benefit of white business owners (Marable, 2015). Schooling rooted in capitalist values can perpetuate these inequities for multiply minoritized students by privileging a culture of relentless production and then sending students into a workforce that reproduces the same cycles of exploitation. She understood that enforcing normative standards of productivity proved literally dangerous for multiply minoritized students and even resulted in more restrictive placements outside of the school. In response, she instituted a system of regular physical and mental breaks as a tactic of harm mitigation. These actions represented an act of solidarity with her students because it rejected the capitalist system designed to undervalue their worth and justify their oppression.

Implications for Future Research

Sarah’s work as an intersectional disruptor is encouraging; however, this study only represents a single case. Teachers of color include a multifaceted number of individuals and communities with multiple intersecting identities, experiences, and histories. As such, more research is necessary to better understand the contributions of teachers of color as well as the specific supports and instruction they need to support their development as educators. First, we recommend that researchers should not only investigate how to recruit teachers of color but also how to restructure their programs in ways that honor and sustain their wisdom and insight (Souto-Manning & Cheruvu, 2016). Indeed, our findings suggest that teachers of color may offer insight into the ways in which white culture gets manifested in special education processes (Kozleski & Proffitt, 2020). Potential inquiries can explore the role of educators of color in providing cultural context to the utility of certain interventions, interacting with families when discussing special education services, and addressing the inherent bias in the special education referral process among other contributions. For this to happen, researchers will need to view teacher candidate identity from an intersectional lens using methods that provide for a situated understanding of how teacher candidates understand and develop their identities through learning to teach (Artiles, 2019). In sum, more research is needed to fully understand the potential of teacher candidates of color as intersectional disruptors in special education.

Future research also needs to provide insight into the ways that educators of color can be supported in unlearning internalized forms of oppression (Boveda & Aronson, 2019; Jackson & Knight-Manuel, 2019). Cherry-McDaniels (2019) points out that by being positioned as an arbiter of an oppressive system, even teachers of color can perpetuate systemic oppression. Studying how teacher candidates of color explore intersectionality and how it relates to their own personal histories and identities can provide mediated opportunities for them to make connections between their own experiences and those of their students. Presently, teacher preparation programs and teacher education research do not provide substantive inquiries into the ways in which teacher candidates grapple with the multifaceted implications of intersectional oppression (Pugach et al., 2019). When teacher candidates are not challenged to contextualize their students disabled identities within the larger constellation of identities that they hold, they most likely will develop inadequate approaches to addressing their needs (Pugach et al., 2021; Young, 2016). The findings in this study demonstrate how failing to address intersectionality with teacher candidates of color may present a missed opportunity to harness their lived experiences as a means to disrupt dual processes of ableism and racism.

Finally, it should be noted again that Sarah identified as an abled, Black woman. Future research should also highlight the contributions of disabled teachers of color and the unique perspectives that their intersectional experience brings to their teaching. There is evidence that disabled teacher candidates can provide insight into the ways in which ableism operates in schools while also challenging dominant understandings of competence and ability (e.g., Siuty & Beneke, 2020; Anderson, 2006; Pritchard, 2010). Although, less is known about the ways in which race mediates their understandings of ability or how disabled teachers of color draw on their historical resources in their teaching practices. Future research should explore the ways in which disabled teachers of color draw on the resources afforded to them through their lived experience to build DisCrit Classroom Ecologies and act in solidarity with multiply marginalized students.

Footnotes

Author note

Alexis Atwood is now affilitated to Portland Public Schools, OR, USA

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) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was conducted with support from the University of Kansas, School of Education and Human Sciences Graduate Student funds.

ORCID iD

Molly Baustien Siuty

Author Biographies

Molly Baustien Siuty, PhD, is an assistant professor of inclusive teacher education in the Curriculum and Instruction Department at Portland State University. Her research focuses on critical and intersectional approaches to inclusive teacher preparation. She explores the ways in which inclusive teacher preparation can be a tool for disrupting dominant ideologies that construct “normalcy” in urban school systems. Prior to pursuing her graduate studies, she taught special education in New York City.

Alexis Atwood, M.Ed, is a graduate of the Portland State University Secondary Dual Educator Program with a license in Special Education and Health Education. Prior to starting graduate studies, she worked as a school success advocate with a community partner program that served academic priority students in the Portland Public School District. She is currently employed as a special education teacher in Portland Public School District.

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