Blurring Boundaries: Dreaming/s of a Neurodivergent-Teacher-Parent-Student-Researcher

• In Event: "Rolling Up Our Sleeves": Radical Love Consiliency Within the Boundary Work Between Special Education (SPED) and Disability Studies in Education

Abstract

As a neurodivergent-teacher-parent-student-researcher and becoming-teacher-educator, I explore self and consilience of special education, general education, gifted education and disability studies through dreaming/s as a method of transforming ‘the real world’ of education, blurring the boundaries towards multiple possible future realities. Teachers and students usually experience learning through the ‘educations,’ (special education, gifted education, bilingual education, etc.) which have been siloed into distinct departments for factory-like efficiency. Students, as sorted, quality-controlled, processed and delivered, or discontinued, products are unsupported in identity and talent development. As an educational researcher with intersectional identities that are relevant to the topic, I endeavor, through self-study dreaming/s, or rhizomatic narrative mini-revolts, to present actual and virtual realities across educational spaces (Arndt & Tesar, 2019). Dreaming/s “are an opportunity to enter productive methodological spaces that enable the emergence of events and questionings that would otherwise remain invisible and silent in ‘the real world’” (Arndt & Tesar, 2019, p. 136). I am a self-identified neurodivergent individual. I am a teacher, with experience in general education, bilingual education, gifted education and special education, as well as a parent to medically and educationally categorized and “processed” children. I have been a student across four decades. The classroom has been my world, one with many realities. Through explorative text, I blur the siloed ‘educations,’ disability studies with the ‘educations,’ teachers with students, and typical with atypical. Because our society has for so long categorized and polarized, it is difficult to imagine a consilience for such seemingly disparate systems. Self-study dreaming/s allow for “exploring what it may mean to be ‘outside’ of reality” which may lead to “multiple interrelated and interdependent becomings and materialities” (Arndt & Tesar, 2019, p. 138, 142). Some of the potentialities that emerged through self-study as critical reflection and attunement to the ecologies, or the interrelated, interdependent relationships between human and more-than-human, of educational experiences will be presented.

Author

• Anani M Vasquez, Arizona State University