‘I connected’: reflection and biography in teacher learning toward inclusion

Abstract

In this paper I examine the ways that prospective teachers studying in a university‐based, graduate‐level teacher education programme engage in reflection toward making meaning of disability. I focus on the background experiences, identities, and knowledge that teachers draw from to make meaning of social and cultural models of disability, and which relate to their developing ideas about inclusive teaching practices. Providing prospective teachers a forum to reflect and find connections between their experiences — more often as persons who do not identify as disabled — and persons with disabilities suggests one way that teacher educators can build curriculum that counters a perception of students labelled with disabilities as ‘others’, and subsequently supports teachers to propose directions for inclusive teaching.

Notes

1. To avoid confusion of the multiple terms used in research to describe those studying to be teachers, ‘teacher’ refers to prospective teachers in either graduate or undergraduate education. ‘Student’ refers to school‐age children.

2. Identifying features of the course and institution are masked to preserve the anonymity of research volunteers.

3. Pseudonyms were chosen by volunteers.

4. In the Americas and Europe, Valentine’s Day is a celebration of love that occurs on 14 February. It is often celebrated by exchanges of greeting cards, flowers, candy, and/or other gifts.

5. Rosa Parks was launched to fame on 1 December 1955 when she, an African‐American woman, refused to comply with Montgomery, Alabama’s, racial segregation policies that required African‐American/Black Americans to stand or sit in the ‘colored section’ at the back of buses to make room for White persons to sit at the front. Her refusal to vacate her seat to make room for a White man — even though she was seated in the ‘colored section’ — led to her arrest, and marked the beginning of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The boycott is one of the first, largest, and best‐known acts of civil disobedience in protest of racial segregation in the USA, and is the initial act through which Revd Dr Martin Luther King, Jr gained prominence as a Civil Rights leader. Lasting just over a year, the boycott resulted in the US Supreme Court ruling that the city’s segregation policies were in violation of federal law. In the USA, the names of Parks and King are part of the cultural lexicon and their legacies are featured prominently in school curriculum about the Civil Rights movement.