Developing and Maintaining Inclusive Identities: Understanding Student Teaching through de Certeau’s Framework of Tactics and Strategies

ABSTRACT

The article describes how a group of student teachers understood and enacted inclusion in noninclusive school placements during a year-long teaching residency. It examines, within de Certeau’s framework of tactics and strategies, how students made meaning of their placements, their understanding of university practice in relation to inclusion, and their developing teaching identities as inclusive educators. The fissure between university and school praxis, and the student’s relationship to that disconnect, is at the heart of this research. Moreover, the tension between the participants’ pedagogical underpinnings of what constitutes effective teaching practice’ and the ways they experienced their school sites through the adoption of an inclusive ideological framework, informed how participants resisted and negotiated daily interactions within established systems and structures.

KEYWORDS:

• Teacher preperation
• inclusive education
• teacher identity

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant through the New York State Department of Education.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported in part by a grant through the New York State Department of Education.

Notes on contributors

Carrie E. Rood

Carrie E. Rood, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Social Foundations and Advocacy Department at SUNY Cortland. She received her PhD from Syracuse University in 2015. Her dissertation and recent publications have investigated the impact of inclusive and disability studies focused teacher preparation programs on teacher identity development and maintenance. Recent publications have appeared in Teachers College Record and Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Handicaps.

Christine Ashby

Christine Ashby, Ph.D, is an Associate Professor in the Teaching and Leadership Department at Syracuse University, where she also coordinates the 1-6 and 7-12 Inclusive Education Masters’ Programs and serves as the Director of the Institute on Communication and Inclusion. Her teaching and research focus on inclusive education broadly, with specific emphasis on supports for students with labels of autism and other developmental disabilities, disability studies, and clinically rich teacher preparation. Her recent coedited book (with Megan Cosier) Enacting change from within: Disability studies meets teaching and teacher education (Peter Lang Publishers) illustrates the ways that disability studies in education can inform the practical work of teaching. Other recent publications have appeared in International Journal of Inclusive Education and Research and Practice for Persons with Severe Handicaps.