Dialogue 3: Prioritizing Families’ Perspectives and Stories

• In Event: Beyond Histories of Compliance in Early Childhood Education: Centering Disability and Cultivating Freedom

Abstract

Examining histories of ableism in early childhood also compels us to grapple with how institutionally-determined goals and processes for parent involvement—normed on white, Euro-centric, middle-class practices—have led to devaluing the caretaking abilities and priorities of racialized families (Cooper, 2009; Hannon, 2019; Kaomea, 2005). In this dialogue, contributors will center the wisdom, ancestral knowledges, and stories of racialized families who have young children with disabilities, and whose caregiving abilities have historically been devalued or overlooked within traditional models of family-professional partnerships. Contributors will share: (a) Excerpts from qualitative interviews with mothers of young children of color labeled with “emotional difficulties” that illustrate their children’s educational histories navigating constructions of “good kids” vs. “bad kids” in classrooms and ways of destigmatizing “mental disability”; and (b) A Diné family’s story anchored in an Indigenous framework that elevates families’ cultural perspectives regarding disability and childhood, challenges histories of Indigenous displacement and control, and promotes Indigenous knowledges and ways of being. Together, contributors invite us to consider ways to honor how racialized families assert their caregiving capacities on their own terms, holding their children’s stories with understandings of past and present, as they practice hope and dream for the future.

Understanding families’ histories with educational systems are particularly vital in the current moment, as families contend with the widespread use of public shaming and classroom removal to regulate children whose emotional and behavioral expressions are deemed “problems” (Brownell & Parks, 2021; Freidus, 2020). Indeed, in the current context, racialized families not only insist that valuable learning takes place outside of school walls (McKinney de Royston & Vossoughi, 2021; Patel, 2022) but are making difficult decisions about whether to homeschool their children as a form of protection (Ishimaru & Elmi, 2024). At the same time, educational decision-making structures and processes for children labeled with a disability and those considered “at risk” for disability are grounded in laws that institutionalize educational histories of racism and ableism (Beratan, 2006), prioritizing compliance, efficiency, and educator expertise and authority rather than family priorities (Bray & Russell, 2016; Hancock & Cheatham, 2024). The work that informs this dialogue elevates family perspectives to grapple with and challenge these realities. How can listening to and learning from family stories inform liberatory research and practice? In this dialogue, participants and contributors will consider how learning racialized families’ histories with ableism and compliance in educational systems can support early educators in not only understanding their children, but in reconceptualizing home-school partnership practices themselves. This dialogue will collaboratively document ways of following the agency and resistance of multiply-marginalized families to envision liberatory partnership practices, processes, and environments.

Authors

• Nickie Coomer, Colorado College

• Teukie Martin, Syracuse University

• William A. Proffitt, Montclair State University

• Colleen M. Campbell, University of California - Santa Cruz

• Rae L. Tewa, Arizona State University

• Elizabeth A. Ruiz, Arizona State University

• Nicole S. Begay, Arizona State University