Stimulating tensions in special education teachers' figured world: an approach toward inclusive education

ABSTRACT

I examine special educators’ professional identity emergence and tensions within a researcher-facilitated teacher learning community. I introduced tools to evoke and challenge inequities in educational systems and via which participants examined and planned general education instruction for students with dis/abilities. Initially, professional identity, or figured world, emerged as performance of pathologising and relatedly, remediating students. Over time, participants expressed tensions as they engaged tools to examine structural limitations and design more universally accessible instruction; figured worlds shifted to critical sense-making about their positioning by general education colleagues and school structural barriers, and procedural identity performance tied to investigating student assets. Findings suggest potential for purposefully designed artefacts to mediate special educators’ development as (more) inclusive educators.

KEYWORDS:

• Special education teacher identity
• teacher learning
• inclusive education
• figured worlds
• technical assistance

Notes on contributor

Dr Kathleen A. K. Thorius is an assistant professor of special education in Indiana University's School of Education and principal investigator for the Great Lakes Equity Center, funded by the US Department of Education to address school desegregation in relation to race, gender, and national origin. Dr Thorius has a strong record of facilitating partnerships with state departments of education and school districts to create inclusive educational systems. Via her research, she explores ways educational policy and local practices converge to shape experiences and outcomes for historically underserved students, particularly students of color with dis/abilities. Dr Thorius's work has been published in Exceptional Children, Remedial and Special Education, and Theory into Practice, as well as other dis/ability-related and interdisciplinary journals. She is co-editor (with Dr Elizabeth Kozleski) of Ability, equity, and culture: Sustaining inclusive urban education reform published by Teachers College Press.

Additional information

Funding

The author is grateful for the support of the Great Lakes Equity Center, under the United States Office of Elementary and Secondary Education's [Grant S004D110021]. The funding agency's endorsement of the ideas expressed in this article should not be inferred.