Dare to Speak/Teach From Our Hearts: A Self-Study of Critical Disability Studies Teacher Education

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

Abstract

This chapter critically evaluates the traditional structures of special education from a
Disability Justice (DJ) (Invalid, 2017) approach through a critical disability studies (CDS) lens (Meekosha & Shuttleworth, 2009) within higher education. While special education embodies “good intentions” through a “cloak of benevolence,” traditional special education holds deficit medicalized, racist, and capitalist views about students receiving services under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. DJ values individuals as whole and people outside of capitalist production relations. Through a CDS consilience approach, we conceptualize teaching and teacher education through critical emotion praxis and radical love. In this self-study chapter, we will discuss how we—as co-teachers—operationalize intersectionality within our co-taught undergraduate Introduction to Special Education: Legal, Advocacy, and Assistive Technology Practices and Issues course. We do so by having an open inquiry of radical love, in the spirit of DSE’s intersectionality and interdisciplinarity as we critically learn and teach about special education law, assistive technology and advocacy.
Using critical analytic autoethnography (Anderson, 2006), we interrogate how our personal and professional intersectional positionalities impact and get impacted by the widely accepted practices of traditional special education. In higher education, educators of Color are often subject to racialization through assumed or real racial, linguistic, ability, behavioral, and immigrant/refugee identity markers and differences (Endo, 2019; Reddick & Sáenz, 2012). We find that it is critical to bring in a CDS consilience framework at the boundaries of special education and Disability Studies in Education (DSE) for 1) personal renewal, 2) professional renewal, and 3) program renewal for liberation and justice. For these reasons and framings we ask: 1) How does being teacher educators of Color with and without traditional and subjective special education disability labels impact the co-teaching experiences within an upper and middle class midwestern white majority institution? 2) How do we feel vulnerable within this institution coming from our multiple and intersectional identities and disrupt white, patriarchal, and ableist hegemonic power structures? 3) How do we operationalize critical emotion praxis and radical love within our special education pre-service teacher preparation program which is at the boundaries of traditional special education and Critical Disability Studies?
We identified that through such critical analytic autoethnography research questions, grounded in self-study in teacher education, we were able to engage in continuous personal situated and critical collaborative inquiry (Samaras, 2011) of our higher education teacher practices at the boundaries of traditional special education and CDS. Specifically, we were able to do so undergirded by our critical friendship (Berry & Russell, 2014) that enabled our personal, interpersonal, structural and political critical individual and collective consciousness and improved learning. Such improved learning allowed us to be agents of transformative, coalitional, and global intersectional analyses and praxis throughout the research process. In doing so, we were also theoretically and methodologically (Samaras, 2011) transparent and systematic for knowledge generation for pre-service teacher preparation and dissemination at the boundaries of traditional special education and DSE for liberation and justice (Kosnik et al., 2006).

Author

• Shehreen Iqtadar, University of Northern Iowa