A New School of Thought

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

Abstract

Our school district identified our son with PDD/NOS before kindergarten. The IEP team told us not to speak in Hindi at home. Their recommendation thwarted our three boys’ forming identities as Indian-Americans.

The team’s instructions opposed our belief that our country is a multi-ethnic, pluralistic, democratic society. As a result, our sons missed learning Indian-language skills to form bonds with family in India, and to feel affirmed by their school in doing so. The team did not ‘see’ our diversity when it mattered most.

My views reflect my academic background, college teaching, business consulting experience, and being a mother of a son with autism.

In a book project, I shared my belief in culturally responsive, multidisciplinary training of future teachers, service providers, and administrators to prevent losses like ours. To ‘see’ diversity is not racist; it is compassionate, affirming diversity for the good of everyone. Professionals serving intersectional families in the special-education system need cultural awareness and interpersonal communication skills, to bridge cultural divides.

Ineffective teacher skills mirror similar challenges in communities across our country. As a society, we are finally naming historic inequities of social, economic, political, cultural, and educational systems designed for racial separateness and a tacit expectation of failure of marginalized groups. There is a growing hunger for (and a powerful resistance to) an airing of painful historic truths underpinning our long-unchallenged embrace of disparities. The demand to build a more just and equitable future requires rethinking teacher training and recognizing the costs of systemic, deliberate negligence.

A robust multidisciplinary, experiential teacher education program can impart deep skills to build sustainable, culturally sensitive strategies, instilling capacities to see opportunities and barriers affecting intersectional students. If the professionals at our first IEP meeting had this training, we would not have lost what I struggle to name.

What would this curriculum look like?

Multidisciplinary education, ‘baked into’ core requirements, allows students to employ and learn from perspectives grounded in other disciplines. This approach stresses the value of ‘wearing different hats’, assessing data through lenses today considered ‘foreign’ to what educators need.

For example, macroeconomics coupled with the history of urban planning would expose entrenched structural barriers to progress for historically marginalized communities, explaining regional disparities in student progress and access to resources.

I suggest that faculty across disciplines co-teach courses to show the real-world relevance of their expertise, modeling interdisciplinary collaboration, while demonstrating the value of a nuanced worldview. Teaching the history of disability education may be a writing course, co-taught with the History department. Course requirements, electives, and student-led choices on courses of study could offer unique, multidisciplinary program opportunities for innovative outcomes.

Combined experiences (i.e., attending Social Work home visits) can highlight local and state-level practices and specific histories of unequal access to safe, effective, and sustainable services. Student-led advocacy can fulfill goals and outcomes, building empathy through first-hand experiences rather than becoming acculturated into the ‘norms’ of special education.

Creative, relevant teacher training can affirm students, modeling collaboration for all.

Authors

• Punita R. Arora

• Janet S. Sauer, Lesley University