Coalition With/in the Boundaries: A Radical Love Response to Neoliberal Debilitation 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

In order to engage social injustice as important teaching opportunities, teachers must first be able to acknowledge injustice, and their role within it. Given that the majority of our teachers (and who we are writing with this in mind), are white, female, able-bodied, and middle class--we integrate a theoretical framework within teacher education in a way that enables them to understand their power and privilege, while simultaneously becoming attuned to the ways in which their own bodies and labor have been marginalized based on their sex and/or gendered embodiment. Disability Studies in Education (DSE) provides a framework to ground teacher education programs for pre-service teachers in developing a critical consciousness around the ways in which special education practices, in service to the general education curriculum (Authors, 2019), risk employing disability as a rationale for the exclusion of students of color with and without disabilities.
This chapter challenges traditional special education as an apolitical, atheoretical endeavor (Thorius, 2019) through an articulation of critical and feminist disability studies (e.g. Garland-Thomson, 2002; Goodley, 2013; McRuer, 2010) and nepantlan pedagogy (Abraham, 2014; Anzaldúa, 2007; Cashman, 2016) as foundational to coalition building (e.g. Mohanty, 2003; Schalk, 2013) between teacher and students across identities in the midst of neoliberal education reform. The apoloticization of special education functions to serve a neoliberal economy of debilitation and rehabilitation in schools where teachers are expected to embody the laws, policies, and curriculum that function to compel assimilation through processes that codify difference for the purpose of providing accommodation. This process perpetuates special education’s “cloak of benevolence” (Thorius, 2019, p. 325), and presents the education of disabled students as a service bestowed by general education through special education. A critical, politicized approach to special education stands to shift special education toward addressing the ways in which hyper-vigilant accountability mechanisms under neoliberal educational reform objectify the actors--both teachers and students-- within it.
Examining the fluidity with which personal identity traverses lived experiences in and out of inclusion, disability, debility (e.g. Schalk, 2013), and the ways in which we need support to function in dysfunctional schooling systems, we build on the boundary work of critical special education theorists (e.g. Baglieri et al., 2011; Connor, 2014; Leondardo & Broderick, 2011; Gabel & Danforth, 2008; Ware, 2005) and argue that nepantlan pedagogy serves to ground teaching away from technicist deliveries, and toward expansive coalition building through radical love (Authors, 2018). By presenting the contradictory functions of special education relative to general education, we engage the boundary work between disability studies and special education to position inclusion and access as necessarily personal acts of disruption to the hegemonic assimilative currents of high stakes schooling.

Author

• Maureen Negrelli Coomer, Colorado College