Reimagining Who Counts as Literate: Neuroqueering Literature Response in a Secondary Self-Contained Special Education Classroom

• In Event: Marriott Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Theoretical Understandings of Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

Literature response research has a longstanding history of defining reading as a transaction among reader, text, and poem through aesthetic and efferent stances. However, students in segregated special education settings labeled with disabilities such as autism or intellectual disability often receive reading instruction emphasizing functional skills and sight words only. The data for this study emerged from a secondary self-contained classroom where students identified as significantly disabled responded to inclusive picturebooks. Analysis is framed by the scholarship on neurological queerness. Findings from this research challenge deficit orientations guiding special education literacy instruction and offer implications and openings for continuing to expand who counts as literate and what counts as literature response.

Author

• Monica Christine Kleekamp, University of Missouri - Columbia