How Teaching Shapes Our Thinking About Disabilities: Stories from the Field(26 Disability Studies in Education)

This book purposefully connects practice to research, and vice versa, through the use of deeply personal stories in the form of autoethnographic memoirs. In this collection, twenty contributors share selected tales of teaching students with dis/abilities in K-12 settings across the USA, including tentative triumphs, frustrating failures, and a deep desire to understand the dynamics of teaching and learning. The authors also share an early awareness of significant dissonance between academic knowledge taught to them in teacher education programs and their own experiential knowledge in schools. Coming to question established practices within the field of special education in relation to the children they taught, each author grew increasingly critical of deficit-models of disability that emphasized commonplace practices of physical and social exclusion, dysfunction and disorders, repetitive remediation and punitive punishments. The authors describe how their interactions with children and youth, parents, and administrators, in the context of their classrooms and schools, influenced a shift away from the limiting discourse of special education and toward become critical special educators and/or engage with disability studies as a way to reclaim, reframe, and reimagine disability as a natural part of human diversity. Furthermore, the authors document how these early experiences in the everydayness of schooling helped ground them as teachers and later, teacher educators, who galvanized their research trajectories around studying issues of access and equality throughout educational structures and systems, while developing new theoretical models within Disability Studies in Education, aimed to impact practices and policies.

Table of Contents:
David J. Connor/Beth A. Ferri: Introduction: Learning from Teachers’ Lives – Jan W. Valle: How I Got Here from There: The Road to Disability Studies in Education – Deborah J. Gallagher: To My Students, with Gratitude: A Retrospective Journey of Teaching [Special Education] – Beth A. Ferri: Snapshots of School – Scot Danforth: From Harmful to Helpful – Classroom Spaces and School Structures – Kathleen M. Collins: “Why Is Lisa’s classroom in the basement?” Reflections on Noticing and Disrupting Exclusion – Federico R. Waitoller: Fictionalized Memories: The Making of a Research Identity in Four Seasons – Erin McCloskey: Paintings on Clear Plastic that Hang from the Ceiling – Brent Elder: The Promises We Keep – Pedagogy and Practices – Catherine Kramarczuk Voulgarides: Humanizing “Special” Educational Practices – Christine Ashby: “Off to Another Glorious Day of Educational Opportunity”: But for Whom? – Susan Baglieri: How I Learned to Be a Teacher in Room 137 – Julia White: Giving Points, Pathologizing Race, and Reading Harry Potter – Families – Mildred Boveda: Surprising Home Visits – Maria Cioè- Peña: Teaching as Oppression; Teaching as Liberation – Srikala Naraian: Searching for Competence: (T)reading the Spaces between Ways of Knowing – Linda Ware: No Bat Required – Both Sides of the Desk – April Coughlin: Education Is Power: But Only if You Can Get into the Building – David I. Hernández- Saca: Recovering the Spirit – Saili S. Kulkarni: Journey as a Special Education Teacher of Color with Dis/abilities – Suzanne Stolz: My Disabled Teacher Presence – Beth A. Ferri/David J. Connor: Conclusion: Bridging Theory and Practice through Story – Index.

About the Author :
David J. Connor (Ed.D., Teachers College, Columbia University) is Professor Emeritus of Hunter College (Learning Disabilities Program) and the Graduate Center (Urban Education Program), City University of New York. He is the author/editor of numerous books and articles, many in collaboration with Beth A. Ferri. Beth A. Ferri (Ph.D., University of Georgia) is Professor of Inclusive Education and Disability Studies at Syracuse University, where she also coordinates the doctoral program in Special Education. She, frequently in collaboration with David J. Connor, has published widely on the intersections of race, disability, and gender.

Review :
“This book is essential reading for accomplished as well as aspiring educators. Its power lies in twenty portraits of the personal and professional transformation that occurs when educators grapple with the dissonance between their own experience and the academic knowledge perpetuated by the field of special education. The authenticity of these stories prompts us to embrace our own moments of cognitive dissonance and courageously defy taken-for-granted or deeply indoctrinated precepts as we celebrate our own transformation.”—Beth Harry, Professor Emeritus, School of Education, University of Miami “Fundamental to Disability Studies is the acknowledgement that all students—including those who have acquired labels—are competent, interesting people deserving of respect that includes access to rich, challenging curricula. The contributors to this text share their narratives of how they came to reject dominant assumptions of children assigned to special education as deficient, abnormal people in need of fixing. This book speaks to any educator who confronts human differences in their teaching or scholarship—meaning, all of us.”—Curt Dudley-Marling, Professor Emeritus, Lynch School of Education, Boston College