Sharing Jordan’s Story: A DisCrit Testimonio of Anti-Blackness in an Arizona Trilingual Immersion School

• In Event: Spaces and Places: A Continued Exploration of DisCrit in Educational Research

Abstract

This paper applies Dis/Ability Critical Race Theory, or DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2013), to present a testimonio (Bernal, 2009) that illuminates the schooling experiences of a ten-year-old Black boy named Jordan who is labeled as dis/abled. As a testimonio, this social justice-oriented counter-narrative (Solorzano & Yosso, 2002) illuminates the racist and ableist discourses and stigmatizing practices that contributed to Jordan’s marginalization and informal removal from a trilingual immersion charter school in Arizona. Derived from ethnographic field notes, analytical memos, and my own memories of critical incidents, this testimonio offers a lens to visualize and confront the contours of anti-Blackness which insulate bi/multilingual programs from racially and linguistically minoritized children labeled as dis/abled (Cioe-Pena, 2020).

Author

• Cory Alan Buckband, Arizona State University