Imagining Inclusive Futures in Teacher Education Through Program Redesign

• In Event: Subversive Pedagogies and Critical Special Education in an Era of Surveillance and Silencing

Abstract

Purpose
This presentation shares my experience as a member of a departmental Reimagining Committee that met over an 18-month period to redesign our educator preparation program within the College of Education. We came together across content areas of special education, elementary education, secondary education, and early childhood education, to reflect on what had been, imagine what could be, and take action toward building a more inclusive and justice-oriented future for our teacher candidates across undergraduate and graduate programs. Through this collaborative process, we (the faculty) ultimately proposed the addition of a new course: Identity and Students with Dis/abilities and Exceptionalities. This session will detail how and why that course emerged as essential, particularly within our “Teaching All Learners” major, an integrated program in elementary and special education and our Masters of Arts in Teaching programs.

Theoretical Framework
Our work was grounded in Critical Disability Studies and informed by DisCrit (Annamma et al., 2016) and Intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1991). We approached inclusion not as placement or differentiation, but as a commitment to dismantling ableism, racism, and other intersecting forms of oppression in schools and in teacher education. Our committee’s approach was also guided by the belief that inclusive education must be both a pedagogical stance and a political one aligned with efforts to rehumanize learning spaces and reckon with the historical exclusions that have shaped our field.

Methods
This is a reflective, practice-based inquiry rooted in collaborative curriculum work. Drawing on meeting notes, planning artifacts, personal memos, and departmental discussions, I examine how our evolving conversations led to concrete programmatic shifts. My role as a faculty member on the special education team shaped both my lens and my advocacy within the group, as we worked to foreground the voices and experiences of students who are often marginalized in traditional teacher preparation.

Data Sources
Data include notes from committee meetings, iterative versions of course sequences and curriculum maps, shared drive documents (Google/One Drive) and my own written reflections throughout the redesign process. These materials help trace the arc of collaborative dialogues and decision-making, as well as the tensions and possibilities that surfaced along the way.

Results
Through our inquiry, we realized that inclusion was being treated as an implicit value, unevenly threaded across courses and across the program. We collectively named this as a gap, especially in a program that claims to prepare teachers for all learners. The resulting new course would serve as a space for candidates to engage deeply with critical frameworks of inclusion, connect theory to community-based fieldwork, and grapple with how race, disability, language, and power shape access and belonging in schools.

Significance
This work speaks directly to AERA’s 2026 theme, Unforgetting Histories and Imagining Futures, by acknowledging how teacher preparation has too often excluded critical understandings of inclusive education. It offers a hopeful and grounded example of what becomes possible when faculty engage in sustained, justice-centered reflection and redesign. Our process may resonate with other programs seeking to embed critical inclusion not as an afterthought, but as foundational.

Authors

• Keishana L. Barnes, University of Memphis

• William C. Hunter, University of Memphis