Doing Disability Studies: A Duoethnography Exploring the Possibilities and Limitations for Praxis in Schools of Education

• In Event: Academic Mobbing in Higher Education Internationally: Pursuing a Spiritual Center Amid an Injurious Void

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to understand the paradigms at play when “doing” disability studies in schools of education. This notion of “doing” disability studies (DS) moves beyond teaching courses that are designated as such. But rather becomes an embodied way of being a faculty member who is required to exist within many liminal spaces (eg. a traditional, special education program) and yet yearns for being known, welcomed, and understood (versus resisted and refused) within the broader justice in education landscape.

This duoethnography (Norris, 2008; Norris & Sawyer, 2012) reflects the tension, emotionality, and pain experienced by two faculty members and a community scholar, who co-taught a doctoral-level course for special education, graduate students that utilized Heron’s theory of extended epistemology to emphasize experiential learning (Heron, 1981). The course was a semester-long project in which students and faculty had multiple opportunities for experiential learning with disabled artists, dancers, and immersive museum experiences. Additionally, students worked collaboratively with faculty and disabled activists/ community scholars, to create a Pedagogical Toolkit focused on disability justice, art, and culture for educators, families, and community groups. The course utilized a picture book (Moore, 2017) as the foundation for the collaborative generation of the Pedagogical Toolkit to further the ideals and commitments that were at the core of the creation of the book (Black Disabled Art History 101).

This research uses a transformative learning framework (Mezirow, 2009) to understand the duoethnography that emerged between two course instructors (both faculty), as we reflected on emotional communication with/from a third course instructor (the community scholar). This communication took the form of: text messages, emails, and subsequent in-person conversations. Based on the tenets of duoethnography, our research is grounded in the different positionalities we occupied as course instructors from within and outside the academy, our lived experiences, and our relationship to the course content. It represents a conversation within and across theoretical, personal, and professional spaces—and as such takes up individual moments of wanting otherwise, discomfort, and ultimately praxis. We used our experiences in course sessions, reflections/reactions to student writing, and the emotions we experienced when reading communication from the community scholar who taught with us, as the basis of our duoethnography to explore our own praxis, but that students seemed unable to experience.

Ultimately, we remained unable to reconcile questions about how to “do” disability studies on a university campus with a stated commitment to community engagement, yet an institution that upheld institutional barriers and forms of structural oppression that served to mark the knowledge of our community partner as lesser than our own. In our duoethnography we grappled with the question-- How do university faculty authentically partner with community scholars-- those who have shaped/are shaping disability activism and history, but whose knowledge is positioned outside the elitism of the college campus? And more so, as untenured faculty we face(d) the very real threat of course evaluations from students who, steeped in the traditional, special education paradigm, seemed unable to occupy an experiential and transformative space with us.

Author

• Emily A. Nusbaum, Mills College