Office Confidential: Narratives of Generational Academic Ableism

• In Event: By Being HUMAN: A Collaborative Self-Study of Intersectional and Emotional Disability Narratives Within Higher Education

Abstract

I sat in my shared office space, inches away from the red, tearful eyes of a college student in my education course, surrounded by piles of dog-eared texts separated from their shelves for future projects. This student had come to me, like several before her, after I disclosed my own invisible disabilities in our education college course. As she wiped her nose on an offered tissue, she described her past experiences with her own disability diagnosis, disclosure, navigating educational support services, teachers’ and professors’ lowering expectations for her, and her own understanding of her own worth, being at the disposal of social stigma and misconceptions. As my experiences weave together with those of my students, I have come to understand academic generational ableism and how supportive spaces create liberatory practices that manifest from co-created narratives concerning disability identity within higher education.

These narratives consisting of informal and spontaneous support sessions for students with disabilities contribute to a larger conversation of how ableism is passed down in academic settings across educational trajectories. What values, behaviors, and narratives do we hand down to our students with disabilities who are studying to be educators themselves and who will be working with students with disabilities? How do we, unknowingly pass down our own internalized ableism deeply rooted in our own trauma to our teacher education students, and therefore their students with disabilities?

As a professor of disability studies in education, identifying as a person with a disability, teaching pre-service teachers with disabilities who plan to teach students with disabilities creates exponential opportunities for both challenging ableism and perpetrating internalized narratives of deficit-based pedagogy. The pain, struggle, emancipation, and joy we experience becomes re-lived, shared, and passed down without critical examination, only to be absorbed by subsequent generations of students labeled with disabilities.

This paper purports to explore the ways in which both internal and externalized ableism is (re)constructed through shared and collaborative autoethnographic narratives as I engage with students and colleagues facing structural barriers. By engaging in this collaborative narrative research, we can also be emancipated from it through engaging in deeper conversations about ableism. I know that these supportive spaces are important to construct because I have sought them out myself in my own identity. Without these spaces, our opportunities to participate in academia in any meaningful way are significantly limited. Without collaborative narrative research, these spaces can become ones that seek to dismantle ableism without attending to how it is complacent in (and therefore perpetuates) white-supremacy, heteronormativity, cis-normativity, sexism, etc. is not actually a liberatory space. For these supportive spaces to be truly emancipatory, we need to embrace intersectionality to “pass the mic,” allowing voices silenced by the intersections of interlocking forms of oppression with ableism to be heard. Without this crucial element, academic generational ableism will continue to be constructed into our teacher education and school settings, continuing the need for these office conversations.

Author

• Laurie Gutmann Kahn, Moravian College