Understanding Early Childhood Inclusion From the Perspectives of Parents of Children With Dis/abilities

• In Event: Reimagining Early Childhood Education Research Using Video-Cued Ethnography

Abstract

Parents of children with dis/abilities face multiple challenges when it becomes time for their children to enter school settings. Parents have limited school choices because not every school offers programs for children with dis/abilities (Flewitt & Nind, 2007; Glenn-Applegate, Justice, & Kaderavek, 2016; Hanson et al., 2000) and even when the school has inclusive classrooms, parents’ opinions are often dismissed by school professionals who bring up the issue of developmental readiness or special academic support as a reason to counter parents’ decisions for inclusive education (Hanson et al.,2000; Mann, 2016). The purpose of this study is to understand the ideas and experiences of parents of color who have children with dis/abilities in inclusion settings and, by doing so, offering counter-narratives of parents who resist deficit views associated with dis/ability.

Dis/ability Critical Race Studies (Dis/Crit) is a theoretical framework that combines Disability Studies and Critical Race Theory to address the intersection of dis/ability and race in education (Annamma, Connor, & Ferri, 2016). DisCrit also reveals the interconnectedness of racism and ableism that normalize white, middle-class, and able-bodied ways of being. Dis/Crit offers a lens to interpret the manifestation of racism and ableism in the lives of parents of color who have children with dis/abilities.

This study used a variation of VCE (Adair & Kurban, 2019a) in conjunction with a life history interview (Tierney, 1999). Life history interview is one of the ways to pursue narrative inquiry, which studies the lived experiences of people in relation to the larger society because “experiences are shaped by the larger social, cultural and institutional narratives within which they live and have lived” (Clandinin, 2006, p.51). I engaged in a narrative inquiry by individually interviewing six parents of color over four sessions. Then, I conducted a focus group interview with the same group of parents using a 20-minute film of a typical day of Head Start inclusion classroom as a video cue drawn from a larger blinded study that used a comparative, video-cued ethnography. After the focus group interview, individual interviews were conducted again to offer parents more time to share their remaining thoughts and opinions.

Findings showed that pandemic had impacted the inclusive education of children with dis/abilities in both positive and negative ways. Parents believed that virtual learning offered children with dis/abilities to find their own pace of learning and lowered the anxiety of being in school with others. On the other hand, virtual learning made the ableistic notions of learning and assessment visible, which eventually led the parents to opt one’s child out of the virtual class or question the type of tests that do not allow what one’s child can do.

By attending to the voices of parents of color who have children with dis/abilities, this study reveals larger systemic issues that are grounded in racism and ableism and offers an opportunity to rethink the meaning of dis/ability as well as inclusive education in social, cultural, and institutional contexts.

Author

• Sunmin Lee, The University of Texas at Austin