Schooled Selves: Toward a DisCrit Lens on Student Subjectivities

• In Event: Disrupting Disproportionality: Implications of Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) for Teaching Toward Equity

Abstract

Objectives
Our second paper presentation explores how different theoretical stances on disability and identity influence teachers’ responses to students’ behavior, participation and efforts in schools. It presents the public cases of two multiply marginalized students who have been criminalized and pushed out of school because of their intersectional subjectivities. In doing so, it will pay close attention to the material consequences that these interpretations have on disabled Black and Brown students. The paper advances a Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) perspective to student subjectivity that is designed to position teachers to understand and ultimately disrupt the social, cultural and legal influences on multiply-marginalized students whose embodied selves are seen through a lens of deficiency and fear.

Theoretical Framework
The two public case studies are interpreted through the medical model and the social model of disability, as well as through the DisCrit framework, in order to contrast the affordances and constraints of each lens. The medical model is driven by the imperative to ‘healthy normalcy’ (Watermeyer, 2013, p. 29), whose defining characteristic is the location of disability within the individual with biological impairments. In contrast, the social model of disability affirms that disability is purely social—an oppression layered on top of impairment (Oliver, 1990). DisCrit illuminates how ability is distributed and withheld based on race through policies and practices, and recognizes interlocking oppressions faced by students at the interstices of multiple differences (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2013; 2016).

Methods and Data Sources
We apply Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) (Fairclough, 2010) to two public cases of Black disabled students who were criminalized and expelled from school. The first case analyzed is that of Kayleb Moon-Robinson, eleven-year-old Black and autistic boy charged of misdemeanor disorderly conduct and felony assault on an officer (Ferris, 2015). The second case analyzed in the paper is that Niya Kenny, who filmed a school officer assaulting a Black, female classmate and was then herself arrested for “disrupting school.” The data analyzed in this paper were collected from media accounts and legal documents.

Substantiated Conclusion and Scholarly Significance
Our DisCrit-informed CDA of the documented legal and media conversations around these two cases illustrates how the medical and social models of disability work in concert with ableism and racism to craft the narratives used to justify violence against and incarceration of youth identified as ‘out of place’ in community and schools (Collins, 2016). Kayleb and Niya’s experiences in school, the criminalization of their behaviors, the social and institutional push to exclude them from the ‘mainstream’ classroom, and the roles of both ableism and racism in their exclusion, physical restraint and arrest are not at all unusual. This paper expands knowledge on how DisCrit can help teachers in constructing students’ subjectivities differently. It will also equip them to disrupt educational inequities through the refusal of actions leading to the push out and incarceration of multiply-marginalized students.

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Authors

• Kathleen M. Collins, The Pennsylvania State University

• Valentina Migliarini, University of Birmingham