DisCrit at the margins of teacher education: informing curriculum, visibilization, and disciplinary integration

ABSTRACT

Teacher education is polarized. Traditionalists tend to center core practices, while justice-oriented scholars center ideologies embedded within our practices. Both, however, must consider how practices and ideologies can operate interdependently to disrupt inequity and cultivate agency among all students. Drawing on an intersectionally-aligned theory, DisCrit, we argue that practices and the ideologies they embody can be problematized vis-à-vis how racism and ableism operate to support hegemony bound in, and represented by, the normative center of schooling. In this paper, we unpack what DisCrit affords critical teacher education, how individuals with complex support needs are located within DisCrit’s tenets, if at all, and the application of DisCrit in the disciplinary case of science education. By considering possibilities not yet explored within the literature, we further critical conversations about the relationship between DisCrit, silenced perspectives of populations unaddressed in teacher education for equity, and new disciplinary possibilities of what we mean by justice-oriented applications of theory and practice.

KEYWORDS:

• DisCrit
• teacher education
• complex support needs
• science education

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This refers to students with low-incidence disabilities eligible for special education supports and services in categories such as (but not limited to): intellectual disability, multiple disabilities, deaf-blindness, and autism.

2. We use disabled people of color here to specifically highlight intersections of disability and race and curricular possibilities informed by DisCrit to assert disability as a reclaimed and political identity.

3. Systematic instruction and Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA) have been used overwhelmingly in the field of special education in the United States context. These practices have been shown to be harmful and controlling of the bodies/minds, especially of multiply marginalized students (Roscigno 2019).

4. The process of viziblization refers to a concept posited by Nusbaum and Steinborn (2019) as it relates to their theory of ontological erasure: ‘… going beyond the absence of disability from curricular content or the silence regarding disability in educational justice conversations; rather, ontological erasure is the active erasing of certain body-minds from “being” in the educational landscape. This shift from considerations of absence or silence, which both imply passivity and neglect, to an analysis that arrives at the concept of ontological erasure, which is explicitly active, although not necessarily malicious’ (26). Thus, we argue here that extending a DisCrit framework to students with complex support needs makes them visible within this specific, educational context.