Accomplices and Alibis of General and Special Education: Colluding in Excluding

• In Event: 15.060 - MTCC Roundtable Session One
  In Roundtable Session: 15.060-12 - It’s More Than Just a Placement: Thinking Beyond Least Restrictive Environment and Inclusion

Abstract

Over the past 50 years, critical special education and disability studies in education (DSE) scholars have critiqued special education on multiple fronts, laying bare its role in the overrepresentation of students of color and questioning its epistemological, ontological, and methodological foundations. Less attention has been paid to the complicit role that general education has played in maintaining these same forms of inequity and marginalization. In this paper we examine how the foundations, structures, and practices of general education serve as accomplices to special education in creating and maintaining deficit thinking and ability norms that privilege whiteness. We do this critical work to generate possible strategic alliances (Thorius & Waitoller, 2017) between DSE and teacher education curriculum and practice.

Authors

• Beth A. Ferri, Syracuse University

• Federico R. Waitoller, University of Illinois at Chicago