Working at the Intersections of Disability Studies and Special Education

• In Event: Boundary Brokers at the Intersections of Disability Studies in Education and Special Education: Toward a More Radical Conceptualization and Enactment of Inclusive Education

Abstract

I am a disabled disability studies scholar who teaches primarily in a special education teacher preparation department. My disability (Autism) is apparently one of the ones most of interest to many of my students, who may have worries about being able to work with us, or be excited about the prospect. They are often surprised (and, to their credit, delighted) that “one of their kids” can grow up to be a professor.

As a disabled person, it can be difficult for me to hear some of the cure-based or clinically othering special education narratives, but I don’t believe that these must be all there is to special education. This is why it is important for me to locate myself in both fields, and work for change.

My research interests of culture and standpoint epistemology give me a way to focus myself as a good teacher of prospective special educators. Rather than stay repelled by the ways some special educators speak about us without us, I became empowered by my students to share with them what I know and how I know it, and trouble the received meanings of “expertise.” By being acceptable as an “expert” in the old way of having-studied, I was given a golden platform to introduce a more disability-studies idea of expertise, that of phenomenological knowledge.

Prior to having these experiences with teaching pre-service teachers, I tried to focus on methodology and keep myself out of the research picture as much as possible, worried about being discredited. But because of their respect for the knowledge I had by being an actual Autistic myself, these pre-service teachers opened up my scholarship and made it possible for me to shift my research interests to disability studies. I am grateful to them, and no amount of blowback from the kinds of colleagues who do not like or respect disability studies will force me to abandon these pre-service special educators.

Fortunately, many of my colleagues who identify more as special educators in my place of employment are also interested in disability studies, even those who are not disabled. As a result of this experience, I have come to believe that having disabled people interested in disability studies located in special education departments is essential to both fields.

For pre-service teachers to see disabled people (whom they might process as “grown up special ed kids”) in positions of success and expertise changes heightens their expectations, improving the lives of the children who in turn become their students. We improve special education with our presence and our voices. Meanwhile, we can be the practical vanguard of disability studies, and no-one can rightly say we are only theoretical and do not have any bearing on “real life,” the way they unfortunately do sometimes say about cultural studies fields on the whole.

In short, I think the cooperative nexus of disability studies and special education serves to ground theoretical disability studies in praxis while potentially making special education truer and more relevant.

Author

• Elizabeth J. Grace, National Louis University