How Teaching Shapes Our Thinking About Disabilities

This deficit-based message about students labeled disabled that dominated professional literature was relentlessly drummed into special and general educators alike. In our schools we started to notice that in many cases, completed IEPs seemed more valuable to certain staff members for purposes of compliance than supporting actual kids. Labels seemed more important than students’ names, diagnoses more important than instruction. It often felt as though “business as usual,” meant that you were just a small voice within a huge system that always moved on its own terms and often not in progressive ways. At the high school level, I (David) watched as only half the students who entered into ninth grade “self-contained” (read: segregated) special education classes made it into twelfth grade. I also noticed how all of the students in my classrooms were Black and/or Latino, and the classes for students labeled Emotionally Disturbed (ED) were all males, except for the occasional female who had to somehow survive alone.

In my (Beth) first lesson in whiteness and ability as socially constructed, my first class of students, who were dominated by children of several of the very poorest families in the county held little claim to either status. Despite being labeled as intellectually disabled and very much seen as “other” in school, school-based labels held very little meaning outside that context. Later in graduate school we would come to attach theories to our lived experiences as teachers, but it was those early experiences that actually breathed life into the critical frameworks—rendering them more meaningful and powerful.

The backlash against more progressive ways of envisioning the education of students with disabilities, including resistance to helpful knowledge about Universal Design for Learning, team teaching, multiple intelligences, and differentiated instruction bothered us immensely. We knew that business as usual was not enough, shared a faith that things could and should be done differently, and recognized students with disabilities should not have to earn the right to be with non-disabled peers, but rather possessed that right. It struck us that traditional teacher education had told special and general educators what their classrooms should be like and who belonged in them. This phenomenon had to be undone and rethought to benefit everyone.

To be frank, it felt overwhelming and, in all honesty, at times depressing. It seemed like we were frequently being told what couldn’t be done to include students with disabilities and why our students didn’t belong—by other teachers, administrators, union leaders, and researchers in the field of special education. On the other side, we found allies within each of the same groups, and took heart that others shared similar beliefs and sought to create change.

In the following sections titled Working in Classrooms, Working with Administrators, and Working in Local Policy, we illustrate examples of both what we observed and how we tried to support change in our school-level work by challenging the dual systems of special and general education, advocating for inclusive education, teaching ways to rethink the concept of disability, and recognizing the stigma students managed. We do this as prelude to connecting these issues to our subsequent research, demonstrating how some of our earliest experiences informed the entire trajectory of our professional careers and the research we came to carry out.

Working in Classrooms

Working with Administrators

We have always been intrigued by what seems to be a teacher-administrator divide, given that all administrators in public schools were once teachers. As a teacher, I (David) sometimes felt deep empathy for administrators as their jobs seemed thankless (other than a higher salary) overseeing and guiding a very disparate bunch of teachers and students in the department. Teachers occasionally felt resentment, too, when being told to do something we didn’t think was helpful or necessary do or being curtailed from doing what would have been beneficial for our students. Having been indoctrinated in special education ideology via their chosen degrees, some administrators thought inclusive education was primarily purely about cost cutting and were cynical about its implementation. Once tasked with the responsibility to create inclusive classrooms, many took a “hands off” approach to operationalization. Although I (David) was assigned to work with four general educators to team teach English as a Second Language classes for high school students and I (Beth) was involved in a pilot inclusion project, neither of us had much professional development and were basically told to figure it out. It wasn’t perfect, but we did the best we could with what we had and made our baby steps into creating and supporting inclusive classrooms.

Working in Local Policy

I (David) came to see how educators can influence special education polices when I worked in the Office of the Superintendent of Manhattan High Schools for nine years. During that time the number of schools overseen by the office rose from thirty-three to forty-four high schools, with the new ones all beginning as inclusive schools. Of interest to me was how to assist school communities in the growing number of inclusive classrooms with adequate support. I worked with all kinds of stakeholders, including discrete groups of principals, assistant principals of general and special education, general and special education teachers, paraprofessionals, support staff (counselors, psychologists, educational evaluators), parents, and students. In addition, sometimes I worked with the whole faculty of some schools. This allowed me to gain insights into how people in each group of stakeholders or each site thought about students identified as disabled, where and how they were best educated, and by whom.

Like most ventures in education, there were some notable successes, some “in the middle” mixed results, and some failures among the schools with which we worked. On the positive side, some schools had inclusive policies driven by their faculty, and were fully supported by their principal. In the middle ground were schools who made steps toward changes, yet needed stronger leadership and more support. On the negative side, some sites were hostile, with teachers accosting me in the hallway about “The thing you preach that doesn’t work.” Following different paths, we both came to see the need for more than ideals and changes in the law, and to meet people wherever their thinking was, to engage—and respectfully challenge—them to view inclusion primarily not as a mandate from above, but as a civil right by those placed low on the hierarchy of educational worth.

Working in Research

We have included the previous sections in order to trace a line through our trajectories as career long educators who, when entering the field of special education were struck by its very real limitations and flaws, which existed alongside good intentions and protections codified within the law. So many aspects of education that we inherited, such as the structure of schools into separate departments for non-disabled and disabled students, the overwhelming amount of paperwork irrelevant to teaching, the highly prized but seldom used Individualized Education Programs (IEPs), the limiting and/ or misleading disability labels, inflexible curricular standards and sorting mechanisms, and the enormous disconnect between most educational research and lived experience in actual classrooms. Almost all of the research in the professional literature at the time was positivistic and quantitative, reducing students to be numbers in relation to variables. Outside of required classes, we never knew any teacher who voluntarily read professional research journals, considered to be the knowledge base of our field. In essence, although we did everything we could to learn from our colleagues and other sources, and considered ourselves professionals and life-long learners, the professional literature we had been exposed to date simply did not speak to the real work of teaching.

Then something happened. It was not until commencing doctoral studies that we were introduced to different theories to conceptualize human differences and given the language to challenge the status quo that had troubled us deeply to the point of anger and at times, even despair. We discovered Disability Studies (DS) along with other critical fields of study and this changed us profoundly. Readings provided a radically different framework to question taken-for-granted ideas about the field special education and all of its underlying logics. For example, we were challenged to consider what constitutes the idea of a “normal” human being? Where did this idea originate and who/what does it serve? Who generates knowledge about disability and what knowledge counts? In what ways does society actively disable some of its members through physical and social barriers? And how do disabled people themselves construct knowledge, culture, community, and diverse forms of resistance? What is the relationship between other social differences (like race, class, sexuality, and gender) and disability?

Then something else happened. Because DS is an interdisciplinary field containing sub-fields such as literature, arts, dance, sociology, history, science, anthropology, medicine, and so on, a small group of critical special educators gravitated to organizations such as the Society for Disability Studies (SDS). In culling from such an interdisciplinary field, critical special educators saw the value in developing a branch of DS in the field of education. Thus, several significant events played a significant role in establishing Disability Studies in Education (DSE) as a subfield.

The Emergence of Disability Studies in Education

In contrast, the panel explored alternative ways of envisioning, talking about, and writing about the lives and possibilities of persons with disabilities including many traditions of scholarship (social science, humanities, arts, spiritual traditions, etc.) and the numerous voices that have something to say about disability issues—in particular international voices convened at Ware’s earlier conference. The moment seemed ripe for carving out institutional support and encouraging transgressive perspectives, methodologies, and research.