Sensing and World-making with Students with Complex Support Needs

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Wednesday 9:45 am - Gold 2
  In Roundtable Session: Centering Disabled Students in K-12 Education: Reimagining Access, Belonging, and Ways of Knowing

Abstract

Although research into the experiences of students with intellectual and developmental disabilities has adopted more inclusive multimodal methodological practices, most are nevertheless premised on linguistic modes of coming to know, raising questions of interpretive dominance. Interweaving a theory of activist affordances (Dokumaci, 2023) alongside a questioning of neurotypical perception (Manning, 2016), this paper explores how a focus on sensation can interrupt normative modes of knowing. Drawing on a year-long arts-based project with middle and high-school students with complex support needs, we inquire into the affordance of sensation to attune us to ways of becoming-with our disabled student-participants. We came to identify several themes including attunement to spaciousness of thought, sense-making as embodied affair and the creative abundances fueling student aspirations.

Authors

• Srikala Naraian, Teachers College, Columbia University

• Maria S. Guarino, Teachers College, Columbia University