Dared by the Ware "Wolf" to Bring Disability and Our Whole Selves to the Classroom

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

Abstract

In my early years of teaching, I (author) came across an opportunity to apply for an NEH Institute for teachers, Integrating Disability Studies into K-12 Humanities Curriculum hosted in 2003 by Drs. Linda Ware, Sharon Snyder, and David Mitchell. In my application, I detailed my frustrations as a disabled woman experiencing discrimination in employment and in the community. My application was accepted, and my teaching trajectory took a major turn, thanks to the scholarship and mentorship of Linda Ware. The impact of what she taught me clearly has filtered through to my students, many like my co-authors, who are K-12 teachers. Together, we write to honor the difference Dr. Ware has made in our teaching and in our lives.

In a recently republished article, Ware (2001, 2020) made a case for “doing disability studies” or considering disability in cultural terms in K-12 schools. Pointing out that conversations about disability were always relegated to special education and were only about identification and remediation of disability, she argued that this “discourse of containment and control has failed to consider disability through a cultural lens” (pg 118). Ware described the then-new subfield of Disability Studies in Education as starting a “long overdue conversation among critical theorists, pedagogues, and educationalists who fail to recognize disability as a cultural signifier” (pg. 112). Without this conversation, who would question separate systems of teacher training? Who would challenge policies and practices that impact disabled students? Who would humanize the disability experience? Who would build and teach a disability curriculum?

In writing about conversations with preservice and practicing teachers, Ware (2002) described that although everyone acknowledged having some personal experience with disability, most showed reticence to bring that experience into their teaching. Throughout her career, Dr. Ware pushed these conversations into schools, made some folks uncomfortable, and set many of us up with a dare to continue the necessary work, liberatory work, the work of becoming “fully human” (Freire, 1970, p. 54).

In this paper, we investigate how Dr. Ware’s work has influenced our teaching practice. In conversation with each other about one of Dr. Ware’s works, “Writing, identity, and the other: Dare we do disability studies?” (2001), we use narrative inquiry to tell the stories of how we have been shaped by conversations about disability and how we have implemented disability studies into our practice. Narrative inquiry, often used in critical disability studies, exemplifies the capacity for human agency (Flynn, 2019; Lalvani & Douglas, 2013; Woodfield et al., 2020). Inspired by the counter-narratives within disability arts, often featured in Ware’s writing, we create our agentic accounts. We look specifically at three interests:

1. Infusion of disability curriculum
2. Commitment to professional development for teachers
3. The role of disabled teachers

Our stories about learning to see disability as an asset in the classroom and about shifting our approaches to changing harmful conceptions of disability will add to scholarship that demonstrates the power of disability studies in schools and the value of the conversations Dr. Ware initiated.

Author

• Suzanne Stolz, University of San Diego