Composing Disabled Histories and Futures: A Participatory Place Conscious Approach to Disability History Education

• In Event: Resisting Curriculum as ‘Normalizing Text:’ A 20-Year Retrospective on Disability-Centered Epistemologies in Curriculum Theory

Abstract

Purpose:
As of 2023, nineteen states mandated disability history curriculum in schools (Mueller & Beneke, 2023). Although this was intended to correct the lack of disability representation in curriculum (Erevelles et al., 2019; Nussbaum & Steinborn, 2019), disability history curriculum is often rooted in white perspectives and experiences, thus failing to center intersectional struggles and limiting liberatory potential (Mueller & Beneke, 2023). Foregrounding place and positioning youth as place makers can foster more critical orientations to disability history and the key roles individuals and communities play in moving towards disability justice (Authors, 2023; Saia, 2023).

Theoretical Framework:
This conceptual paper engages in cross-pollinating (Waitoller & Thorius, 2016) Disability-Centered Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (DCCSPs) and Critical Place-Conscious Education. DCCSPs bridges disability activism, scholarship, and educational practice. DCCSPs aims to center the “strengths, gifts, and solutions” of multiply marginalized students, teachers, and communities within teacher education and P-12 curriculum (Authors, 2023, p. 114). Critical place-conscious education enriches curriculum by illuminating historical, cultural, social, and spatial dynamics of place that influence identity and educational opportunity (Reagan et al., 2019). It also challenges dominant power structures by engaging students as transformative community members (Gruenewald, 2003; Greenwood, 2013; McInerney et al., 2011). Together these approaches support our understanding of place-making as a collective process oriented towards disability justice.

Evidence:
We use case studies in this paper that exemplify how DCCSPs and critical place-conscious education can inform and enhance each other. These case studies will highlight how curriculum grounded in community contexts can build critical understandings of disability history and promote connections to present day disability justice movements in the same community. We then analyze these case studies to create a list of assertions and recommendations for educators.

Results:
The following five assertions comprise a guiding framework for our place conscious approach to disability history curriculum.

Assertion 1: Students are place makers, producers of knowledge, problem solvers who embody and envision more just communities and futures, across local and global contexts. Multiply-marginalized and disabled youth are essential, valued place-makers.

Assertion 2: Place-based disability history offers a rich pedagogical resource, including interconnections between people, environment, structures, and memories,

Assertion 3: Place is an exploration of identity and one’s relationship to ability, disability, and debility. Place shapes people and people shape places.

Assertion 4: The physical, cultural, social dimensions of place, past and present, create intersecting systems of power/oppression, normalizing hierarchies across categories of difference. Relationships to place are thus complex and multifaceted.

Significance:
The AERA 2026 theme of “unforgetting” requires that we revisit the disability rights movement’s call for “nothing about us, without us” (Charlton, 2000) and consider how place-conscious disability history curriculum holds possibilities for responding to and expanding upon this demand. Such an approach can do this by attending to the legacies of power and oppression within particular communities (Greenwood, 2013; McInerney et al., 2011), while centering the voices, expertise, and placemaking of those most impacted, across past and present contexts (Helfenbein, 2021; Profitt et al., 2025).

Authors

• Molly Elizabeth Siuty, Temple University

• Naomi Fair, Rutgers University - Camden