Disrupting Notions of Literacy Incompetence: Harnessing a Theoretical Lens of Neurological Queerness

• In Event: What Does Queer Theory Have Yet to Offer Literacy Education Research?

Abstract

As education research, including literacy research, has made the turn toward more critical discussions of whose knowledges count (and whose don’t) within the walls of our school buildings, we’ve begun to disrupt social and educational inequities braided through existing schooling structures including preservice teacher education (Brooks, 2018) and pedagogies currently enacted in schools (Baker-Bell, 2020). The call for proposals for AERA this year rightly considers the harmful impacts systemic violence has had on marginalized identities, especially for students who come from “racially, ethnically, culturally, or linguistically” diverse communities. Absent from this discussion, and the call altogether, though, is a focus on the ways these discourses and practices have impacted members of the dis/ability community (Connor et al., 2016).

Stemming from the eugenics movement, special education structures perpetually marginalize, disenfranchise, and track students with dis/ability labels, especially students of color (Bell, 2017). The large majority of these students have most often had research done to them rather than with them. A sub-group of those affected, students carrying the system’s most significantly sanctioned dis/ability labels (e.g., intellectual disability; autism), are regularly excluded from discussions of humanizing research and pedagogy, including critical literacy research. Disability scholars have argued that one of the major shortcomings of critical theory broadly, and subsequently critical literacy, was its exclusion of dis/abled identities from its outset, especially related to issues of neurodiversity (Gabel, 2002; Goodley, 2007).

In asking what queer theory still offers education and literacy research, I locate neurological queerness (Yergeau, 2018) as a generative theoretical framework for problematizing normative perpetuations of dis/ability and literacies for students with significant dis/ability labels. Emerging from the autistic online blogging community (Walker, 2015), neuroqueerness asks what becomes possible when we queer dominant perceptions of how students’ literacies can be enacted. What new literacies emerge when we turn our expectations upside down? To respond to this question, I center research findings from a two-year research study in a segregated secondary special education classroom where all students carried significant dis/ability labels and were regularly referred to as non-readers, word callers, or at best, early readers. Findings from this research reveal how acts that have always been deemed as meaningless, deviant, or delayed might be reimagined as literacies.

Author

• Monica Christine Kleekamp, University of Missouri - Columbia