When First Grade Is Too Late: Exploring Neurodiversity, Race, and the School-to-Prison Nexus in Teacher Education

• In Event: Imagining Antiracist and Neurodiversity-Affirming Educational Spaces: An Exploration of Neurodiversity in Education

Abstract

Theoretical Frameworks: Preparing justice-oriented educators has been a longstanding concern expressed in the literature on teacher education. Scholars in the field have theorized pedagogies that are explicitly critical, culturally responsive, anti-racist, decolonial, intersectional, and committed to a project of challenging the power structures that shape our schools (Cochran-Smith; 2004; Domínquez, 2020; Giroux, 2009; Ladson-Billings, 2009; Migliarini & Annamma, 2020; Souto-Manning, 2019). In many ways these theories demonstrate a recognition of the consequences that an uncritical teaching practice can enact upon marginalized students. For multiply marginalized disabled youth, however, that recognition has been largely tacit, in spite of the fact that they experience the brunt of the school-prison-nexus (Stovall, 2018) through intense surveillance, racialized labeling and identification, harsh physical and social discipline, and disproportionate removal from the school system (Annamma, 2017; Coomer, 2021; Skiba, 2014).

As students’ first point of contact within this nexus, teachers play a significant role in naming and policing young people’s bodies and behaviors. Particularly for BIPOC children who have been labeled as having, or are suspected as having, an emotional and behavioral disorder, language is often used that essentializes them “as violent, as victims of trauma, and as dangerous liabilities in schools” (Coomer, 2021, p. 91). Thus even as early as the elementary level, identification becomes a justification for moving them away from equitable educational practices in the classroom and toward the criminal justice system (Coomer, 2021).

Purpose & Methods: It is with this in mind that scholars have called for theorizations of teacher education that contend with the intertwinement of race and disability in schools (Kulkarni, Miller, Nusbaum, Pearson, & Brown, 2023). This paper will explore the author’s attempts to take up this work with a group of pre-service teachers enrolled in a community-immersive program in a West Philadelphia elementary school. The experiences being analyzed took place in the required history of education course of the program, which explores the ongoing criminalization of Black communities, local and national examples of police violence (i.e., the MOVE bombing and murder of George Floyd), and the intertwinement of race and disability in school discipline.

Using vignettes constructed during the program, this paper analyzes the challenges and opportunities that emerged as the pre-service teachers’ learning in the course clashed with their observational experiences in the partner school. More specifically, this paper will discuss (a) the tensions that arose between the students’ articulated pedagogies and their classroom practices and (b) challenges in students’ understandings of the social model of disability. To conclude, I will highlight what I argue are the unique possibilities for shifting pre-service teachers’ practices through the inclusion of conceptualizations of neurodiversity in teacher education coursework. Mirroring familiar concepts like cultural diversity and biodiversity, the neurodiversity paradigm (Walker, 2021) can help pre-service teachers center the experiences of multiply marginalized disabled youth and aid in their transition to justice-oriented educators while in a liminal space.

Author

• Dana Morrison, West Chester University of Pennsylvania