Being/Preparing Boundary Crossers: Reflections on Recognizing, Dismantling, and Re-Creating the Rules of Special Education

• In Event: Consilience-ing, Self-Study-ing, Radical Love-ing at the Boundaries of Disability Studies in Education and (Special) Education

Abstract

The demands of teaching have drastically changed in the last decade, particularly related to educating students labeled with disability. As faculty teaching in special education licensure programs, we face the challenge of teaching university students about “realities” of the field of special education, while simultaneously proposing new “realities” and teaching strategies to prepare university students to be agents of change. This paper examines how we, as teacher preparation faculty, critically reframe disability and prepare our students to meet, navigate, and negotiate the competing and intersecting demands of teaching. In addition, how do we prepare our undergraduate students to be change agents within school and classroom communities, knowing the competing demands placed on teachers?

To explore these questions, we employ two conceptual frames. First, Disability Studies in Education (DSE) offers an alternative to the traditional view of disability as a deficit in need of remediation. From a DSE framework, disability is understood as socially constructed and emphasis is placed on how we construct classrooms in ways that “disable” students and how we might construct them differently. Second, the concept of boundary crossing (Akkerman & Bakker, 2011) provides an analytical tool to understand how we, as teacher preparation faculty intersect and interact within and across the preservice undergraduate classroom and the K-12 classroom as we prepare special educators.

Autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000) is used to critically examine our experiences as teacher preparation faculty. We use autoethnography to describe and analyze how we negotiate the boundaries between the university classroom and schools where our students participate in field experiences and must navigate a multitude of challenges, including conflicting and often contradicting messages about disability, “best practices”, and accountability.

Three major sources of data are examined that represent both private and public dimensions of this self-study: 1) auto-ethnographic journals, 2) course syllabi and readings, and 3) student artifacts in the form of classroom assignments. Data collection spanned several years and included many diverse course preps, numerous course readings, major assignments, and hundreds of journal entries.

Our paper will consider how teacher education faculty play a central role in preparing new special education teachers. In this role, we must negotiate two contradictory views of disability and the subsequent implications. Working at the boundaries of DSE and special education, our findings reveal four processes at work: identification, coordination, reflection, and transformation. Evidenced in an oftentimes nonlinear manner, these processes are described and implications are offered for how to prepare special education teachers to similarly work at the boundaries of DSE and special education in order to recognize, dismantle, and re-create the rules of governance in special education.

In this year’s CFP, AERA asks, “What have scholars learned from their own first-person experiences?” In light of this question, we are compelled to consider our role in the struggle to ensure all students with disabilities receive an equitable and just education. Through this self-study, we offer DSE as a point of praxis where new understandings, instructional practice, and outcomes can emerge.

Authors

• Amy J. Petersen, University of Northern Iowa

• Danielle M. Cowley, University of Northern Iowa

• Emily A. Nusbaum, University of San Francisco