Thrice disabling disability: enabling inclusive, socially just teacher education

Abstract

The goal of this inquiry was to create a social justice-oriented inclusive and enabling pedagogy by situating traditional individualised views of disability alongside three alternative understandings: a disability studies in education perspective, a First Nations view of disability and one based upon the autism pride/autism-as-culture movement. Using both these conventional and somewhat unconventional views of disability, a self-reflective case study was conducted in which the author attempted to facilitate an inclusive pedagogy in a university class, ‘Working with Diversity and Difference’. At course conclusion, the author explored teacher candidates’ notions of disablement and inclusive practices/strategies. Data sources included five focus group transcripts, 12 weeks of online discussion board postings and eight student assignments, namely inclusive teacher resource files. Data were triangulated and second-level member checks completed. Some students reported how the pedagogy enabled a reflective practice such that it disrupted their ableistic educational impulses, while others talked more about specific classroom implications to facilitate inclusion. Interestingly, when most students entered into the inclusive conversation beginning from a particular exceptionality, label, or diagnosis (such as intellectual disability), they tended to do so exclusively from an individualised medical model view of disability. Implications for inclusive teacher education pedagogies are discussed.

Keywords:

• First Nations views of disability
• disability studies in education
• autism pride/autism-as-culture
• teacher education
• teacher candidates

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge funding received from the Saskatchewan Instructional Development & Research Unit (SIDRU) at the University of Regina and SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Grant Number 410-2008-2712) for supporting this research. I also wish to thank Stacey Kesten, my research assistant, who assisted with data coding and analyses.

Notes

I respectfully refer to autism-as-culture as a metaphor, rather than as an actual culture, just as Broderick and Ne'eman (2008) did. As I have argued elsewhere, teacher education might look quite different if fundamentally the question of inclusion were predicated upon (disability as) culture as opposed to (disability as) pathology (Thompson and Aylward 2010). The hope for the present study was to use the writings and insights of autism pride/autism-as-culture not as a literal site of inclusive contestation and amelioration, but as another tool to interrupt individualised definitions of disability – and, in doing so, another way to work towards social justice oriented, enabling and inclusive pedagogies.

Although these methods, self-study and self-reflective case study, are not synonymous, since self-study demands continually returning to, and adding to, original data-sets; whereas case study data is fixed, usually within a time period.

It is difficult, of course, to say how the entire faculty felt about the lack of diversity regarding dis/ability in the first cohort of student teachers in the social justice cohort. Having said that, there is an Inclusive Post-secondary Education Program at the University of Regina that is primarily housed within the Faculty of Education – so it is an issue of diversity that we are attempting to address.

As one of the reviewer's have pointed out, there is a complex relationship to labels and People First language, and some people disabilities do not appreciate People First language, such as Queer Crips for example (see Guter and Killacky 2004).

Incidentally, providing perspective to data findings like this supports case study credibility, as truthfulness in data representation (Creswell and Plano Clark 2006).

Although, as Gabel (2002) has pointed out, critical theorists often overlook disability.