Celebrating Disability History and Pride

• In Event: "Rolling Up Our Sleeves": Radical Love Consiliency Within the Boundary Work Between Special Education (SPED) and Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

There is an increasingly urgent call for research on teachers’ conceptions of disability and understanding and application of anti-ableist practices (Connor & Gabel, 2013, Lalvani, 2015, Annamma & Morrison, 2018, Baglieri & Lalvani, 2020). Educational research and schooling practices have traditionally focused on special education with the aim of fixing and assimilating students with disabilities into normative constructs of intelligence and productive value (Baglieri et al., 2011). Further, equity and inclusion movements for students with disabilities have often come at the cost of distancing and devaluing disability identity. To this end, disability culture remains absent in classroom curriculum and teacher education programs, leaving space for the under- and misrepresentation of disability identity and erasure of disability history and culture (Baglieri & Lalvani, 2020). This situates disability in the oppressive and segregationist history of education, as opposed to the liberatory practices and innovation by disabled peoples, and powerful potential to bring disability culture to the classroom.
The chapter being presented explores the creation of K-12 curriculum and teacher education programming designed to center authentic stories of youth with disabilities and histories of disability activism. It critically engages two key features of the author’s work: 1) the collaborative development of K-12 disability history and pride curriculum by disabled media storytellers, a disabled scholar/educator, and a special education teacher, and 2) qualitative research documenting how the curriculum was taken up by general education teachers in pedagogical practice and shifting conceptions of disability. Importantly, the author will also share personal reflections and self-study as she navigated qualitative research as a disabled scholar utilizing principles of universal design for learning to support her methodological process. The piece necessarily explores boundaries embedded in parallel special and general education teacher education coursework, reconceptualizing disability through teaching philosophies and practice, and disability as insight in K-12 schooling and academia.

Author

• Sarah Arvey Tov, University of Washington - Seattle