Critical Special Education Teacher Preparation: Disrupting From Within (Poster 6)

• In Event: Critical Special Education: Reexamination, Reimagination, and Rethinking of Research, Policy, and Practice

Abstract

Teacher education is often touted as the solution to resolve inequities within education. Yet, there are considerable challenges in helping teacher candidates support the learning of all students, particularly students with disabilities. These challenges occur against the backdrop of divergent perspectives and values about how best to achieve equitable outcomes for students with disabilities––Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education. These fields represent two distinct epistemological, theoretical, and methodological ways of understanding education for students with disabilities. As teacher candidates become novice in-service teachers they are faced with navigating these polarized fields while trying to articulate their own professional identity. Unfortunately, neither field alone addresses both how to navigate existing structures, policies, and practices, and how to enact the visionary anti-ableist ideals that will meaningfully transform education for students with disabilities. In this poster we discuss how Critical Special Education offers an alternative for teacher education. Critical Special Education acknowledges the legal, bureaucratic, and policy constraints teachers must navigate while providing resources and supports to help them critique and subvert harmful ableist practices. We provide examples of what Critical Special Education looks like in practice and discuss how a Critical Special Education professional identity can provide opportunities for community and coalition building for teachers. We provide examples of enactments of Critical Special Education from preservice classes focused on assessment, math methods, and curriculum for students with extensive support needs. Critical Special Education invites others to join this equity focused work, disrupt inequitable special education systems locally, and move towards more just education for students with disabilities.

Authors

• Katherine Lewis, University of Washington

• Erica N. Mason, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign