I Still Have Joy: Disability Justice as a Means to Educational Responsibility in Special Education

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

Abstract

Schooling is often a site of colonization and inequities for many multiply-marginalized students, including those that are considered special populations (Lawyer, 2018). Schooling is where students are indoctrinated into their superordinated and subordinated positions based on many identity markers including dis/ability (Lawyer, 2018). Lawyer (2018) names this process as the curriculum of colonization and is enacted at the policy level, higher education level, and K-12 schooling levels. As scholars, educators, and researchers, we must be particularly aware of our role in perpetuating oppression and inequities as well as our potential power for dismantling these systems. As a doctoral student with experiences of multiple-marginalization, I firmly believed it was my moral and ethical responsibility to use advancing education to pursue justice work in the higher education contexts. With the possibility of working with teacher candidates and interpreter candidates, I believed I had the potential to impact meaningful change for K-12 students with whom these candidates would work. Additionally, I believed that my doctoral classes provided a space for dialogue with my professors and doctoral candidate peers about our positions of privilege, positions of power, emic positions in marginalized communities and how all those are embodied or rejected in our research, teaching, and scholarly writing.
This paper is taken from a book chapter that will be published with Understanding the Boundaries between Disability Studies and Special Education through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love. In the chapter, I describe my journey of doing justice work in a teacher educator program as a doctoral student under the umbrella of Special Education, in a predominantly White institution (PWI) in the Southern part of the United States. I use critical autoethnography (Boylorn & Orbe, 2016) to describe the experience of trying to engage in Disability Justice work within a Special Education teacher preparation program. I use artifacts from my doctoral degree such as paper submissions, transcripts of class discussions, emails, professors’ written and/or audio recorded feedback and responses, audio recordings of discussions with Special Education faculty, and video recordings of my personal reflections at the time. Some of my work during my studies included arguing theoretically the need for an intersectionality framework in Special Education (Garcia and Ortiz, 2013), discussing in courses the need for Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy within the field and why (Paris 2012; 2014), and flipping the language power by using minoritized languages so that my Deaf classmates had access first and then interpreting my words into spoken English. My perspectives as a former Deaf Education teacher, masters and doctoral level student in Special Education with emphasis on Deaf Education, my roles as researcher and teacher trainer, as well as my identity as a multiply-marginalized individual are all factors in the approaches I took and how I was received and perceived within a Special Education department. The experiences I had provide insight to what is to bring accountability and justice work in a higher education program as an “Other”.

Author

• Gloshanda Lawyer, Utah Valley University