Making inclusion matter: critical disability studies and teacher education

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the affordances of critical disability studies (CDS) for curricular theorizing in teacher education for inclusion and socially just pedagogy. Specifically attending to the posthumanist thread within this field, I offer provocations to three tenets that undergird a disability studies informed teacher education curriculum for inclusion, and which are also salient within the larger field of teacher education. These tenets include the critique of schools, exhortations to act agentively towards change, and the foundational premise of a narrative understanding of experience. I argue for a recognition of the ontological inseparability of schools, teachers and teacher educator-scholars that can move us towards a more ‘affirmative critique’. I assert the significance of affect as a compelling force in not only how teachers experience inclusion and inclusive teaching, but also for how teacher educators mobilize themselves towards this project. I question the presumed disembodied ‘freedom’ attached to conceptions of inclusive teachers and teacher educators. And, finally, I deploy dishumanism to extend an understanding of narrative that can both affirm teachers’ role as agents while simultaneously recognizing their embeddedness in material-discursive assemblages.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical disability studies
• teacher education
• inclusive education
• posthumanism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I acknowledge that many positions may be adopted when selecting language to describe disability as an identifier (Carey et al., 2020). In choosing ‘disabled’ I have elected to align myself with those who celebrate disability as an identity category and reject the privileging of personhood over disability in person-first terminology, as in ‘students with disabilities.’

2. A performance-based assessment required of teacher candidates by many state licencing agencies in the US.

3. While world regions have been categorized in many different ways, for the purposes of this paper, the distinction between Northern and Southern contexts is premised not in terms of geographical boundaries, but in terms of the socio-economic conditions that are evoked by colonial histories, the overwhelming presence of poverty, and reduced access to basic human rights.

4. I use the Deluzean concept of ‘assemblage’ to denote the material-discursive arrangements of ontologically inseparable human and non-human entities, which are always in a state of flux (Delanda, 2006).

5. For this paper, I distinguish forms of research that draw on data from teachers which are then constituted as their ‘stories,’ from inquiries that are premised on narrative as both a way of knowing and method of inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Polkinghorne, 1988). The conception of narrative inquiry used in this paper privileges the latter approach.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Srikala Naraian

Srikala Naraian is an Associate Professor and Director of the Preservice Elementary Inclusive Education program in the Department of Curriculum and Teaching at Teachers College, Columbia University. She locates herself in the disability studies tradition and is interested in investigating processes of inclusive education in schools as well as teacher preparation for inclusive education. Dr. Naraian has prepared teachers for inclusive education not only in the US, but also in Germany, Iceland and in India. She has published widely in many journals including International Journal of Inclusive Education, Teachers College Record and Curriculum Inquiry. Her recent book Teaching for Inclusion: Eight Principles for Effective and Equitable Practice (2017) draws on her extensive research in schools and with teachers to derive an understanding of inclusion that is situated in the complex material realities of schools.