Tom Skrtic: The Intellectual Tradition of a Discontent

• In Event: 35.052 - Beyond the Nod to Justice in Disability Studies in Education: A Symposium Revisiting the Scholarship of Thomas M. Skrtic

Abstract

As the first generation of special education scholars who claim Disability Studies in Education as our intellectual home, many of us cut our intellectual teeth, if you will, on the dissident voices of scholars such as Lous Heshusius, Robert Bogdan, Steve Taylor, Ellen Brantlinger, Douglas Biklen, and Thomas Skrtic. Their collective works sowed the seeds of what we now claim as the field of DSE. Working in an academic milieu that was not buoyed by the infrastructure of special interest groups, like-minded journal editors, supportive external reviewers, and but a handful of colleagues, scholars like Tom Skrtic bravely took aim at the most foundational aspects of the field of special education: from its knowledge base and worldview to its fundamental beliefs about students and, indeed, itself. In this paper we show how Skrtic’s early writing laid a solid foundation that informs critically engaged DSE scholars and the field as a whole.

Like the fashion forward emperor of Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale, special education has long insisted that its science is objective and valid, that its services are rational and beneficial to students and their families, and its view of disability as real and inherent. While scholars in other fields, including the hard sciences, began to question epistemological truth claims, one special education researcher after another stubbornly insisted on the veracity of its “Truths”-- parading its questionable scientific finery even as resistant and insistent voices, like Skrtic, dared to counter, “"But he hasn't got anything on!" Playing a subversive game of Jenga, Skrtic then proceeded to carefully excise one block after another and in doing so he provocatively undermined many of the field’s foundational assumptions and its taken-for-granted ways of knowing.

Arguing convincingly, that disability was the outcome of institutional practices, rather than neurobiology—Skrtic’s early work clearly resonates with the social model of disability. In Focus on Exceptional Children (1986), Skrtic challenges special education to listen to the mounting theoretical criticisms being leveled at the field’s core assumptions about the nature of disability, about the field’s notion of itself as a helping profession, and about its dogged faith in incremental improvement and progress.

“The Special Education Paradox: Equity as a Way to Excellence” (1991), further illustrates why many reforms within special education end up reproducing rather than disrupting the status quo. Skrtic points the way forward, compelling us to move beyond a narrow focus on special education practice and its underlying assumptions that undergird such practices. He illustrates the value of theoretical critique and of reading/engaging widely—drawing exhaustively both inside and outside his own field of study. Finally, he points to alternative models for organizing the field as an adhocracy rather than a professional bureaucracy—creating productive opportunities for creative problem solving, reinvention, collaboration and shared responsibility and accountability.

These and another other insights from Skirtic can serve as both a conceptual and methodological model for critiquing a range of current practices—as his penetrating and unsettling work informs the development and growth of disability studies in education.

Authors

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University

• David J. Connor, Hunter College - CUNY