Ways That Special Education Teacher Education Programs Center Disabled Youth’s “Ways of Doing” to Prepare Future Teachers
摘要
This chapter of the International Handbook of Special Education: Implications and Strategies focuses on surfacing strategies for special education teacher education programs to center Disabled youth’s “ways of doing,” including how they enact their developing sense of self within spaces that honor their multiple identities and repertoires. The chapter begins with a brief outline of the advocacy and activism that led to the development of special education law and policy, followed by an interrogation of localized, cultural interpretations of these laws in ways that subvert educational equity for Disabled students. Subsequently, the author presents four ways in which teacher education programs can embrace a “transformative boundary praxis pedagogy” to make visible the impact of separate “general” and “special” education curricula. Highlighting emerging research about meaningful teaching of students with intersectional, Disabled identities, the author disrupts notions that “general,” “normative,” educational “placements” are preferred. Centering the work of established and emerging scholars in disability studies in education, Crip theory in education, Mad studies in education, and critical special education, the author emphasizes the urgency of teacher education programs to (1) honor a student’s intersectional identity to include Disabled as a historical and political social location; (2) honor a student’s translanguaging practices as politically significant and personally meaningful; (3) honor the expertise of students’ families (mothers) to counter harmful narratives about their children and contribute to better schooling practices; and (4) honor the ways children who are presumed to have emotional and behavioral disorders may reveal the illogic and injustices of schooling.