Speaking Through Silence: How Multilingual Children of Color With Disabilities Resist Intersectional Oppression With Silence

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Awareness and Agency at Intersections of Identity As/Including Disability (Table 22)

Abstract

This paper calls on educators to listen to the silence of multilingual children of color with disabilities as an indicator of systemic oppression at the intersection of multilingualism, race, and disability. I employ qualitative case study methodologies to explore how multilingual children of color with disabilities use silence as a form of resistance against schooling processes aimed at pushing conformity with white, nondisabled, academic language-centric ways of being. Drawing on the theories of DisCrit Resistance and TrUDL, I show how the children’s silence communicates a desire to preserve their full selves and demand alternate approaches to instruction that counter the reductionist practices they experience. This paper advances intersectional justice for multilingual children of color with disabilities who speak through silence.

Author

• Soyoung Park, Bank Street College of Education