Shaping Inclusive Schools with Diego: Presuming Competence, Humanizing Difference, and Disrupting Normativity

• In Event: Dismantling Dis-Abling Systems of Oppression

Abstract

Purpose
Inclusive education can take on many meanings, and in practice, it is often actualized as including students with disabilities in general education learning contexts. We argue that even in the context of general education, young people with disabilities can experience very exclusionary educational experiences. This is compounded for young people with disabilities with language and racial differences (Artiles et al., 2009). Bilingual Latina/o/x high schoolers with disabilities face ample barriers to meaningful inclusion in schools (deBrey et al., 2019), yet they are seldom included in understanding and dismantling those barriers (Bertrand et al., 2023). The purpose of this qualitative secondary analysis was to examine how collaborations with youth, using testimonio writing (Delgado Bernal et al., 2012), can open spaces for young people to put forth new understandings of inclusive education framed by the following question: How does a young person use testimonio to dream of inclusive schools for multilingual Latina/o/xs with disabilities?

Theoretical Framework
This study used critical disability raciolinguistics (CDR; Cioè-Peña, 2021) and cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT; Gutiérrez et al., 2016) as a framework to connect participation in the GANAS program to historicized systems and youth-dreamt futures.

Methods & Data Sources
We used case study design to delve deeply into the experience of a Latino multilingual learner with a learning disability, who we refer to as Diego (Merriam, 1998; Stake, 1995). We collected over 57 hours of video data from a four-week virtual program designed for multilingual Latina/o/x and Hmong youth with and without disabilities, including artifacts and 31 pre- and post-interviews from the youth and parents. We collectively analyzed all video data using video-informed methods (Erickson, 1986) with additional analysis cycles for all data pertaining to Diego. This included coding, memoing, and writing and testing key assertions by examining data sources that (dis)confirmed our assertions through collaborative work (Erickson, 1986).

Results
Our analysis resulted in a youth-informed vision of inclusive education that accounts for the intersectional complexities of disability, language, and race. This future, shaped through Diego’s testimonio, framed an inclusive system that presumed competence not in spite of his language and learning differences but also through deep understandings of these differences. His inclusive system called humanizing, relational, and non-normative pedagogies.

Scholarly significance
Diego's testimonio contributes youth-centered insights to inclusive education. His intersectional identities served as critical analytic magnifiers of (in)equities that shaped his educational experiences and compel us to look to the margins, or borderlands, as critical starting points for designing more inclusive schools (Anzaldúa, 1987; Gutierrez & Jurrow, 2016).

Authors

• Taucia Gonzalez, University of Arizona

• Mariana Pacheco, University of Wisconsin - Madison

• Na Lor, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Joan J. Hong, University of Maryland

• Kate Roberts, University of Wisconsin - Madison