“Who Created These Rules?”: Narrative Accounts of Two First Generation Black African Immigrant Students with Dis/Ability Labels

Figures & data

Table 1. Data collection procedures.

Planned Interview Protocol	Follow-up Question or Comment to Expand Dialogue*	Confirmation: Example of Member Checking Question or Comment (rigor, trustworthiness) **	Excerpt from Reflective Journal Entry OR field notes of Dialogue
When at school, can you tell me what it means to be a student who receives special education or IEP help?	Now that you have told me your experiences when you need more help, can you tell me what you think, or feel is the reason that students receive IEP services or extra help?	So last time we talked about your school experiences, and your feelings about school and receiving IEP services. You shared that your dad told you that “it’s the way you got to think about yourself. If you think negative about yourself then it would turn out to be negative and if you think positive and think you do not have a “disability”, things will be positive” (verbatim from first interview). Would you like to expand on that or share more about it?	What Kabaka shared in today’s interview is the complexity and multiple layers of interpretation of his experiences with special ed. While he likes receiving extra time and support within the special ed. classroom or with counselor, he also struggles with not internalizing the deficit and medical version of explaining disability at the intersections. Such as at times explaining disability as something inside himself or his “brain”, while other times externalizing it by statements such as “sometimes I do need help and sometimes I don’t … because most of the stuff they give me is easy for me”. Talking about his intersectional experiences of race and disability, Kabaka also highlighted what scholars in the field call interconnectedness of race and ability (Annamma et al., 2013). Such as he often associated whiteness with “smartness”. For example, in one of our exchanges he stated “because like when in school … in class mostly … white kids like, they like know more, most of the stuff like a lot more than black kids … in like my classes like science or math or yeah literacy…” Such complexity is a common theme found in literature concerning students’ identity work and development of sense of self (Gonzalez et al., 2017; Iqtadar et al., 2020). When probed why he thinks that they are better in literacy and other classes, Kabaka shared: “coz they were born here… They went to the elementary schools or kindergarten here… I came here in 5th grade so yeah, I just got from Africa to the Midwest…”

Figure 1. Hermeneutics circle between data collection and data analysis.

Table 2. Hermeneutic circle process for data analysis.

“hermeneutic circle” representing movement between the transcript data, a priori codes, and the researcher constructs
A priori codes	Researcher constructs	Codes from the transcripts
QRS Project and Systematic Literature Review	Personal experiences, theoretical and empirical literature	Initial codes	Analytic codes
It’s all racism, white supremacy, mental illness, he is a criminal, Black kid driving, education will take me out, problematic label Rejecting ableism, Fix Deficit ideologies, only appears in school context not inherent, Testing & competition, Lowered expectations, Normal like others, it’s not disability, it’s the system, Misleading label, Prejudice, Disability is a social construct, created category, code switching	first day of school, individualistic, racial identity, who am I? learning from others, teaching styles, different ways of learning, internalizing linguicism, racism, White supremacy, divorcing oneself from the neighborhoods, deficit thinking about other people of Color, social class hierarchies, studying in White majority institutions of power	school means learning, small class, helps with reading, small group don’t wanna go there, makes me “mad”, not as hard, easy stuff, let’s me stay, feeling othered, stay with them, “normal” English, becoming American, racist language	Special Education: Meaning and Purpose Reason for reading slow or fast Race and ability: problem with the “culture”

Annamma, S. A., Connor, D., & Ferri, B. (2013). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. Race Ethnicity and Education, 16(1), 1–31. https://doi.org/10.1080/13613324.2012.730511

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Gonzalez, T. E., Hernandez-Saca, D. I., & Artiles, A. J. (2017). In search of voice: Theory and methods in K-12 student voice research in the US, 1990–2010. Educational Review, 69(4), 451–473. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131911.2016.1231661

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Iqtadar, S., Hern, D. I., & Ellison, S. (2020). “If it wasn’t my race, it was other things like being a woman, or my disability”: A qualitative research synthesis of disability research. Disability Studies Quarterly, 40(2), 1–46. https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v40i2.6881

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