Inclusive Education: “I’m Complicated So It’s Complicated”—Intersectionality and Advocacy Across Differences

• In Event: Understanding the Power of Analytical Shifts in Intersectional Scholarship: A Focus on Race, as Well as on Class, Gender, Religion, Sexuality, Dis/ability, and Family Configuration

Abstract

Inclusive education is an educational model that affirms, as a right, every child’s full access to the general education classroom, no matter the extent to which any child may need modifications, adaptations, or support to learn in this classroom (Sapon-Shevin, 2007). The research on inclusive education that this paper discusses is intentionally intersectional in examining the ways in which dis/ability, family configuration, and race reciprocally inform each other, at the same time prioritizing the issue of dis/ability, and locating race as the tertiary research concern.
Purposes and objectives. In seriously considering the ways in which the intersections of dis/ability, family configuration, and race complicate understandings of inclusive education, the question of and how best to advocate with and for students with multiple marginalized identities becomes immensely complicated and seemingly impossible to adequately answer. The research at focus in this paper engages this question, first from an historical vantage point in seeking to make it more manageable, and, second, in the context of everyday life in school communities in identifying a durable strategy for realizing the advocacy goal.
Framework, modes of inquiry and data sources. The concept of advocacy in the inclusive education arena has been limited by its failure to take into account intersectionality. Through secondary data analysis, a grounded theory emerges about the role that intersectionality-informed allyship can play in improving educational inclusion for students with different abilities, especially those from non-traditional families and/or who are of color, that takes into account the complex deficit orientations in schools that particularly negative impact the students at the junction of these multiple identities.
Drawing connections between anti-oppression and inclusion advocacy points of entry into research, this paper analyzes historic and continuing tension between and across dis/ability, family, and race. These linkages beg scholars and activists alike to more deeply consider how discrete prejudices become inter-tangled and, thereby, confound assumptions about capacity (physical, developmental, and psychological) with those related to sexuality and race, among others. In so doing, these prejudices are reified as causal or deterministic (Ferri and Connor, 2006).
This paper examines attempts to “fix” differences, rather than address one’s own and others’ limited, dangerous, and damaging responses to perceived differences and putative disabilities. This examination is undertaken intersectionally to reveal deeper understandings of oppression, concomitant with explicating the manners in which advocacy and related ally-building can mitigate oppression.
Conclusions and significance. There are both significant parallels and distinctions in terms of how dis/ability, family configuration and race have been responded to within the hegemonic context prevalent in most school settings, past and present. It is vitally important for all educators to engage inclusive education with sophisticated understanding of how the misinterpretation of non-dominant cultural values and practices intensifies, even if inadvertently, non-dominant group oppression (Pugach & Seidl, 1998). Understanding intersectionality enables better allyship within, as well as across, categories of difference, thereby holding the greatest promise for meaningfully improving educational outcomes for all students, but especially for students whose identities have led them to be multiply marginalized.

Author

• Mara Sapon-Shevin, Syracuse University