Constructing the "Other": How Teacher Education Reifies and Reinforces Otherness

• In Event: The Halls of Higher (Mis)Education: Ableism in the Academy

Abstract

With the passing of federal legislation in 1975, a separate system of public education was established for students labeled with one of 13 current federal categories of disability. Since then, many critical scholars have noted the limitations of federal legislation, while also stressing the intention of the federal law (Taylor, 2004; Sauer & Jorgenson, 2016). Currently, separate federal teaching standards exist for those teachers who are being prepared to teach students labeled with disability and most universities that prepare these teachers have separate departments/programs with distinctly different faculty who teach curriculum “specially” designed for disabled students.
The research described here will shed light on common practices at university-level teacher education that both create and reify notions of “otherness” in faculty who prepare special education teachers. This paper utilizes auto-ethnographic data (Ellis, Adams & Bochner 2011) and methods associated with self-study (Lassonde, Galman & Kosnik, 2009) to illustrate, complicate, and untangle the ways in which the author, her students, and disabled students in K-12 schooling are constructed as “the other” within and by a special education licensure program at the university level. The author’s experiences and reflective writing about her experiences working within a separate, special education licensure program will provide a framework for examining both micro (eg. course assignments and student responses on course evaluations) and macro (eg. structural separation of faculty and curriculum in schools of education) forces that construct and reify notions of “otherness” in faculty, teachers, and disabled students.
Despite the large body of research (McDonnell & Hunt, 2013) and federal money (eg. SWIFT Schools) focused on the development of inclusive schools, disabled students and those who teach them continue to be marginalized in K-12 schools. In addition, university-level structures and the separation of “special” and “regular” programs, faculty, and curriculum provide ample and multiple opportunities for the creation of separate, “other” identities (Young, 2008). This auto-ethnographic reflection will illustrate spaces at the individual level, through the everyday work of a faculty member within a special education licensure program that sustain the “otherness’ created by school of education policies and structures. These everyday instances will then be complicated by an examination of federal teaching standards that guide the practices of separate programs at the university level. Finally, the author will attempt to untangle possibilities for praxis by deconstructing “other” identities and the ideologies that maintain them.

Author

• Emily A. Nusbaum, University of San Francisco