Cripping Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies as a Curricular Practice: Centering Disabled Youth in Transformative Praxis

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

Abstract

Purpose:
Disability goes beyond individual experiences to a broader community and culture yet is rarely positioned as such in schools. Instead, school curriculum acts as an assimilative tool for invisibilizing disability and forwarding prescribed notions of normality (Erevelles, 2006). The purpose of this paper is to present Cripping Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Author, 2024b) as applied and expanded through a curriculum for and by disability community that centers intersectioanlly disabled youth in transformative intergenerational affinity spaces that connect with and sustain disability culture.

Conceptual Framework:
Cripping Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies brings together Disability Studies Critical Race Theory (DisCrit; Annamma et al., 2013) and Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (CSP; Paris, 2012) to inform curriculum development grounded in intersectionally disabled youths’ brilliance, experiences, and perspectives. DisCrit and CSP centralize multifaceted youth identities and expressions of cultural ways of being and knowing, grounding education in community and activist frameworks (Annamma & Handy, 2019, Paris, 2021). Cripping CSP takes an intersectional approach, recognizing that false constructions and hierarchies of ability are deeply intertwined with capitalist, colonial projects, including school curriculum. “Cripping” comes from the Disability Rights and Disability Justice movement to reclaim derogatory language as an activist stance towards positive disability identity and collective action (Sins Invalid, 2019). As a disabled scholar-educator, this work builds on collaborative disability community projects and how we seek to sustain disabled ways of knowing in and out of the classroom. Cripping CSP further affirms and celebrates disability identity, community, and culture by bringing intersectionally disabled youth perspectives and experiences front and center in educational theory and curricular practice.

Methods:
For this study, I used Cripping CSP to design a 10-week Disability Justice in Schools (DJS) unit that I co-facilitated in a high school alongside a disabled educator. I used humanizing (Paris & Winn, 2013), emancipatory (Freire, 1990), and community-centered research practices (Bang, 2016), and incorporated arts-based (Baron & Eisner, 2012) and collaborative methods to highlight the beauty of multimodal and relational disabled expressions of being and knowing.

Data Sources:
For this paper, I drew on a data subset including observations and artifacts of 8 students total, 7 with disabilities. I used qualitative and arts-based analysis to consider how these students embodied, enacted, and extended the Cripping CSP framework.

Findings:
Through this study, intersectionally disabled youth demonstrated that Cripping CSP can further attend to the fluid construction of disability identity, community, and culture as distinct features and in relation to one another. Disabled youths’ narratives illuminated the complexity, and at times contradictions, in youths’ shifting and evolving sense of disability identity and community. Furthermore, the features of Cripping CSP were embodied and expanded through intergenerational and cross-disability collaborations in the classroom, which created opportunities for building disability communities and sustaining disability culture in school.

Significance:
This research offers new perspectives on engaging intersectionally disabled youth in deconstructing ableist ideologies and contributing to curricular insight. Implications of this work include Cripping CSP as a transformative framework for curriculum and generalizable educational theory that foregrounds disabled youths’ ways of being and knowing.

Author

• Sarah Arvey Tov, University of Washington