Teaching for inclusion: complexifying practice with critical disability studies

Over the last few decades, educational research grounded in critical disability studies has developed a sophisticated and comprehensive critique of the ways in which norms of ability have structured schooling systems around the world (see, e.g. Brantlinger, 2005; Connor et al., 2016; Danforth & Gabel, 2006; Graham & Slee, 2008, among many others). Such research has both enriched and complicated our understanding of a pedagogy that must interrogate normalcy and fixed-ability thinking. What does teaching for inclusion mean? How will we know? Does it entail specific “competencies” for teachers and how can teacher educators facilitate their actualization to benefit students? As a sustained and in-depth conversation between the fields of teacher education and disability studies continues to remain tentative at best, and completely missing at worst (Cosier & Pearson, 2016), our imaginings of inclusive education—still an elusive and ephemeral concept—are at risk of remaining out-of-sync with rapidly shifting political, social and material environments in which teachers teach and students learn. Said differently, one might ask: whose concept of inclusion counts? What theoretical frames can allow our commitments as teacher educators and researchers to remain dynamic rather than static? Where can inclusive teaching flourish in today’s complicated educational places? Why does inclusion emerge from within sociological claims as including some groups and excluding others?

The authors of the articles in this issue enlist multiple bodies of work including DisCrit, Cultural-Historical-Activity Theory (CHAT), posthumanism and postcolonial writing to explore the intersection of disability studies with teaching and teacher education. Not surprisingly, dilemmas and tensions abound. On the one hand, the necessity to make visible disability as a location of marginality remains urgent. For example, Waitoller, Woodard, Rao and Kang learned in their study that even as urban teacher education has been attentive to matters of equity, disability does not generally prefigure those commitments. So, teacher candidates may emerge from their preparation as knowledgeable about how racialized identities lie at the heart of teaching encounters, but the ideologies of ability that underpin such knowings may remain outside their awareness. Similarly, Bialka, Hansen and Wong found in their study that well-intentioned pre-service teachers solicit empathetic responses from their students only to erase disability in that process. They remind us that the liberatory practice of using children’s literature to engage students in conversations about disability is complex and requires careful manouevering among various possibilities that evoke different attachments. The findings from both studies have immediate significance for teacher education programming and practice.

We wonder how and why race-consciousness eclipses dis/ability awareness in teaching and teacher education? What is it about teaching inclusively in schools that invites critical engagement with equity in relation to disabled students (and implicitly, therefore, towards special education) but not towards the ability mindset that undergirds researcher and practitioner discourse about schools? Why does a culturally responsive pedagogy seem impermeable in practice to dis/ability matters (whether in K-12 settings or in higher education)? In other words, as “inclusivity” is increasingly claimed as an institutional aspiration, we wonder how it directs the movements of people and ideas? How do varying epistemologies work in and through those movements? In their investigation of inclusive education in post-conflict Sri Lanka, Handy and Kozleski disclose the “normalized violence” in schools that posit teachers in threatening relationships with their students. They show that student activities may not fall neatly within Eurocentric notions of a resisting “agency,” raising the question of how scholars understand plurality of epistemologies within the field of inclusive education.

On the other hand, we also recognize that neither teachers nor teacher educators are separable from the political and cultural arrangements that constitute their practice. This has perhaps, with some exceptions, been the most neglected element within research in the teaching for inclusion. Teacher educator-scholars who rely on critical disability studies have, justifiably, prioritized disabled students and families as the pivot around which they make arguments for more inclusive environments and for inclusive teaching. Yet, the theoretical resources they/we have drawn upon have often lacked the elasticity to attend simultaneously to the becoming of educators themselves in this process. In other words, researchers are often left with an uncomfortable ethical choice—we can commit to one group (disabled students and their families) but not both (students/families and educators). It is not surprising that theoretical explorations of teaching for inclusion have lacked energy.

The above dilemma provokes an important question about the relationship between critical disability studies and teaching for inclusion. Can insights from disability studies be ethically used to serve the interest of teacher learning, regardless of whether the focal participants are disabled or not? We follow Campbell (2009) in acknowledging that “there is no concept of difference without ableism.” While ableism has been investigated in relation to schools, the field of teacher education has benefited minimally from it. Scholars have urged the importance of inclusive approaches to teacher education for socially just pedagogy (e.g., Burciaga and Kohli, 2018; Philip et al., 2019), but the ableist foundations of the field itself are obscured. For instance, notions of “competencies,” “skills” or “resistance” that pervade teacher education discourses implicitly uphold normative notions of teaching bodies. We suggest tentatively therefore, that the appropriation of insights from disability studies for understanding teachers (and not only students and families) may be not only appropriate, but necessary if “inclusion” is not to be decoupled from ability/disability.

The study by Daelman, De Schauwer, Vanobbergen, and Van Hove offers an entry into these dilemmas. It provides us a glimpse into the “thinking-doing” of teachers for whom multiple elements (such as an empty desk, media headlines, immigration policy, students) when variously assembled, evoke particular enactments. Such enactments operate as “a minor gesture” (Manning, 2016), which weaves through larger majoritarian structures that may seem to be prohibitively powerful, and leaves unfinalized the experience of inclusion for teachers, students and their families. The turn to more-than-human assemblages in their post-qualitative study embeds their teacher participants within entities at both micro and macro levels as they intra-act agentively with each other. Their study suggests that we need theoretical frames that can expand the scope for disability studies to matter in teacher learning and preparation. As an important set of texts that evoke a liberatory praxis, disability theory and disability studies co-evolve alongside families, disabled students, teachers, labels and schools in ways that differentiate each in unpredictable and unexpected ways.

Naraian and Gabel pursue this ontological focus in their explorations of a posthumanist methodology that may evoke new forms of DSE inquiries. Taking up broad themes of identity, ethics and becoming, they engage data in unconventional ways. They assume different positions (one more persuaded by posthumanist thought than the other) to anticipate misgivings on the part of DSE researchers towards such forms of inquiry while also disclosing its connection to DSE commitments to disabled students and their families. They offer suggestions for inquiry that enfold the interconnectedness of topics that matter deeply to DSE scholarship.

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. By the time this special issue of QSE is published, it would have been more than 2 years since the COVID-19 pandemic actualized what had for many of us been the stuff of movies. The completion of this issue occurred amid acute political, economic, medical, and personal uncertainties of which scholars, editors, reviewers, proof-readers and publishers were/are a part. Even as we enter what, for some of the wealthier nations, has been dubbed as the “post-pandemic” era, the future of schools, cities and communities remains uncertain. The pandemic re-surfaced historic inequalities and the racialized foundations of predominantly white, Western nations was made increasingly evident. At the same time, for disabled scholars and activists the effects of the pandemic was yet another instance whereby the necessity for all communities to recognize and plan for varied embodied states within any kind of human encounter, was made even more transparent. As we continue our becomings as teacher educators, we know that critical disability studies offers, always, the potential for an agential cut within assemblages to evoke more liberatory engagements (Barad, 2007).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).