How We View a Person

• In Event: Rethinking Teacher Preparation: Disrupting Marginalization of Children of Color With (Dis)Abilities

Abstract

How We View a Person


It was like they never listened to what she was truly saying.

Did they even hear her? Hear themselves?

The condescending statements…discouragement

All could have been avoided had the teachers and administrators chosen to listen to her.

If they had taken the time to build cultural reciprocity in their conversations,

Making assumptions

make it harder for educators to understand the diverse backgrounds of their students

build the foundation of trust and communication that is needed

Reframe symptoms in way that makes him feel more human than people might perceive him to be.

To pull the positive aspects from it aids in breaking the stigma

Surrounding disability as a disorder that needs to be fixed…that families need to be fixed.
Our words are powerful and create an image of how we view a person
We must pick our words as carefully as we should pick the materials for class
rather than to dismiss or negate our students, their cultures, or their abilities.
The language we use in our classroom reflects our beliefs about our students and the larger world around us
Influences the beliefs and feelings of those watching us
our peers
our students
our families.
intentional interruption of the word
shifts our attention from what the individual cannot do to who they are.




The above poem was woven together from the reflections of my students (pre-service teachers) as they engaged with case studies that provided counter narratives that challenged dominant deficit-based discourses of family, community, and diversity. As I sit cross legged in my home office, away from my community of learners, I question how to create a space to challenge deficit narratives of our students, their identities, and their communities. This challenge increases as shifts in education due to the pandemic create more expanding barriers to equitable and anti-ableist spaces in schools. Who has access to resources? Who is allowed to adjust to new learning environments? Whose voice is left out? I search to provide my eager pre-service teachers with concrete examples of the strength, joy, and challenges families face when navigating systems designed for them to have to fight for access. With this act, I am connected with other researchers, educators, parents, and students who are searching for similar reflections on the navigation of the special education system. This community lifts me and moves me through the tough conversations in our college classrooms, reverberating through their own teaching practices.
As a professor of critical special education, I hold the power of deciding how these conversations will be framed; how we will view a person. This can be a challenge when the system our students see is one fraught with intersectional inequity. As a cisgender white women with heterosexual privilege, my own neurodivergence being one that is easily hidden, my own experience as a granddaughter of refugees to the US not easily distinguishable, I am shaped by the intentionality I bring to my own professional and personal interactions and how I view a person.

Author

• Laurie Gutmann Kahn, Moravian College