Outside the “Family of Malcontents”: Reflections on an Early Career of Creative Discontent

• In Event: Of Life Real and Unreal: An Ethics of the Heart

Abstract

I remember so acutely the moment I decided to apply to doctoral programs. I was working as a consultant and was attending an IEP meeting with a family who, for six years, had tried (unsuccessfully) to move their son from a segregated classroom into general education. At this point they were fighting to keep him from being moved to a highly segregated, county program for students with intellectual disability. I was sitting in a meeting with approximately 20 attendees—multiple district and county administrators, teachers, lawyers, parent advocates, parents, and me. Four different tape-recorders were recording, and at one point during the meeting I tried the tactic of citing research-based outcomes for individuals with disabilities who were educated in separate facilities, in terms of life satisfaction and access to employment, communities, and relationships. I then looked the student’s current teacher in the eye and asked if he would make the same decision for his child—to move him to a segregated facility—if he knew these would be the outcomes of his decision. The teacher looked me in the eye and said “yes.” It was at that moment that I realized that the way I of thought of the world and the place of disability within it was distinctly different than his. It was not just a matter of inclusive education or not. But was a more profound difference about who I was, at my epistemological core.
In this paper I use Lous Heshusius’s (1989) notion of “paradigm-as-metaphor” to trace my entrance into doctoral work and, more recently, academia through a number of vignettes that represent various points of my professional development. Her “paradigm-as-metaphor” considered the ways in which we view, understand, and experience the world. This allowed me to articulate the questions that drove me to pursue doctoral work, as well as gave me the words to describe ways of experiencing the world that separate me (and thus my thinking, writing, approach to teaching, and ultimately who I am) from many of my colleagues in the special education department in which I teach.
Finally, I will use Heshusius’s (2004) discussion of “the inevitable struggle with the self,” which is as a referent in all of my teacher education courses. Examples drawn from an observational assessment assignment and from anonymous student evaluations will support the difficulty in understanding ones’ own self-other construction as experienced by the teachers in my class. That is, the inability to “self-forget” often collides with the ability to relinquish the desire to “get it right” in an assignment tied to observational work. As an untenured faculty member at a university that relies heavily on a (flawed) system of student evaluation for the tenure and promotion process, engaging teachers in this “struggle” is a potentially risky venture, as the difficulty and discomfort of teachers is evident in evaluations from many of the students.

Author

• Emily A. Nusbaum, University of Colorado - Colorado Springs