Interrogating the Self and Disabled Other: Doing Disability Studies in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Imagining Disability Otherwise: The Impact of Dr. Linda P. Ware's Scholarship and Mentoring in Educational Contexts and Beyond

Abstract

I first saw Linda in person at the AERA conference in Washington, D.C., where she chaired a Disability Studies in Education panel posthumously honoring the work of Steven J. Taylor. As a young graduate student who’d yet to be accepted to present at AERA, I could not have imagined that, years later, I would be collaborating with Linda’s other mentees to propose a similar panel exploring her work. This panel is different; I am thrilled by the possibility of presenting this paper while Linda is still in our audience.

My story here begins as an undergraduate student in a course on disability studies in the humanities with another professor, who, years later, would express that she’d watched my “head explode” as I was for the first time forced to grapple with disability as a social and cultural construct. Among the scholars who first made my head explode around dis/ability was Dr. Linda Ware, who proposes disability as part of the human experience. Her work challenged me to grapple with big questions that gave me a new lens on my own complicated experiences around in/exclusion in K-12 education, but also energized me, and gave me hope that, through teaching and research, I could make an impact on the classroom experiences of children with and without disabilities. Those early questions included:

What are the ways we have available to us to understand and relate to ourselves, to and with others, and to and with disability? and, how are we all complicit in perpetuating exclusion?

We know that limited discourses of disability affect the repertoire of understandings for children and adults in schools (Ware, 2001, 2003). Ware’s (2002) work explores the possibilities and constraints we have around thinking about ourselves and others, and what it might mean to be suspicious of the self. A particular space that I applied this work was in thinking about cooperative learning and peer support strategies. In this paper, I explore how Linda’s work informed my thinking on this common, well-meaning approach, which is in fact produces disability and disabled students in ways that may interfere with meaningful, co-constitutive classroom relationships.

In addition to discussing Linda’s scholarship, I summarize what I have learned from Linda’s mentorship that has changed my ways of working as a teacher educator and scholar. I discuss how she has influenced my advising and teaching with non-traditional college students, including those with identified disabilities and others who have previously been cast out as incapable of academic success on the basis of their perceived differences.

Finally, I discuss the profound implications of Linda’s insistence that “multiple perspectives prove more useful than any one field’s perspectives”—a fact often needlessly rejected, but, that I argue, we must re-center in our ongoing Disability Studies in Education work (Ware, 2001, p. 109).

Author

• Alex Collopy, Weber State University