Michael's Story: “I get into so much trouble just by walking”: Narrative Knowing and Life at the Intersections of Learning Disability, Race, and Class

The problem of overrepresentation of students of color within special education classrooms persists, maintaining levels of segregation based on disability and/or race within widespread schooling practices. The voices of such students and how they understand their position in the education system are noticeably absent from traditional scholarship. To counter the absence, this article privileges knowledge of a person usually marginalized in “official” literature. The autobiographical data of Michael—a person who is labeled Learning Disabled (LD), and is black and working-class—is represented in the form of a narrative poem. The poem is followed by an intersectional analysis framed within Collins' (2000) matrix of domination. This analysis helps foreground subjugated, “unofficial” knowledge(s) held by Michael from his position(s) simultaneously located within less valued sides of binary divisions of ability/disability, white/black, and middle/working-class. In his counter-story, Michael offers a critique of special education, portraying it as a form of containment and control, an extension of larger restrictive forces operating within society. Implications for theory, research, and practice are discussed.

Notes

1. I use this term to denote that Michael was both participant and researcher of his own life. By this I mean that the research design was created to deliberately cultivate the active role of participants in making decisions throughout the entire process—including generating empirical questions, as well as organizing, analyzing, and arranging data. The term “participant-researcher” is used deliberately to challenge traditional notions of the “subject” in research—reframing the ascription of a passive role to one of active involvement and investment in the process.

2. I use the term “scientific staging” to call attention to the restrictive, widely used quantitative-based formats of tables, charts, and graphs used within special education research that privilege scientific-medical based epistemologies held by researchers. Such formats do not allow people with disabilities access to understanding the knowledge about them. Poetry, in contrast, does provide a much greater access to understanding the lived experience of disability.

3. Individualized Education Program.

4. Name changed.

5. Name changed.