Disability Justice and Classrooms of Care & Interdependence

Oct 14, 2025

In this reflective writing, teacher Andrew elaborated on how his teacher training at the Elementary Teacher Education Program (ELTEP) and teaching experiences as an elementary resource room teacher deepened his understanding and advocacy for disability justice. Through ELTEP, he learned to position every student as a general education student first and adopt identity-first languages. However, as he transitioned into an elementary resource room teacher role, he quickly noticed the prevalent medical approach his teacher colleagues held toward multilingual and learning-disabled students. Through this medical lens on students’ special needs, educators quickly diagnose, label, and implement interventions to treat and cure the disabilities that lie within individual students. Instead of adopting this “quick fix,” he kept in mind the potential harm in placing a student in special education and his principal’s words: “a disability is something that doesn’t go away.” With this sense of care and criticality, he reviewed historical Special Education case laws and proposed expanding teachers’ mindset to move beyond the medical model toward a social and/or neurodiversity model of disability. By proposing Universal Design for Learning (UDL) for all students to succeed, Andrew disrupts the common misunderstanding that disability is an individual issue, instead of a systemic social issue.  Highlighted are 4 reflective steps. 

  • STEP 1: Learning about Special Education Case Law
  • STEP 2: Learning about Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
  • STEP 3: Shifting Our Mindsets
  • STEP 4: The Continuous Cycle of Roadbumps, Reflections, and Growth 

This work was part of the Promoting Asset-based Science Teaching for Emergent Language Learners (PASTEL) project, funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Learn More

UDL Guidelines

10 Principles of Disability Justice

UDL At A Glance

When You Design for Everyone, EVERYONE Benefits from the Design

Teaching Considerations

Creating Communities of Care: A Path Forward

Creating communities of care within our classrooms and schools starts with shifting our own mindsets about multilingual and disabled students. For us to truly know what our students are capable of, we have to let them actually try and think for themselves. We can and often must give students with disabilities more structure and support, but we must also value their unique (often tactile/visual/spatial) ways of doing and thinking. Is the problem that we are asking them to do something that they can’t do, or that we think they can’t do, or that we are designing our instruction and assessment in a way that sets them up to fail? Below are some steps I have taken to help build out my disability justice perspective, both in terms of research and practice. 

  • STEP 1: Learning about Special Education Case Law
  • STEP 2: Learning about Universal Design for Learning (UDL)
  • STEP 3: Shifting Our Mindsets
  • STEP 4: The Continuous Cycle of Roadbumps, Reflections, and Growth 

Jeremy and the Dangers of Exclusion Jeremy loved Pokémon, excelled at giving detailed and well-constructed presentations about topics of interest, and playing games with his friends. He also was diagnosed with severe ADHD, was thought by some to have oppositional defiance disorder, and loved screaming, slamming doors, and running amok in the hallways—details which often took precedence over his interests and strengths during discussions about him. One afternoon, my school’s principal, student intervention coordinator, special education teacher, and I were meeting about Jeremy’s increasingly disruptive and destructive behavior. As different options were discussed—ranging from hiring a one-on-one support person to fully remove him from general education and place him into a behavior room—I felt a growing tension between my lack of knowledge around special education laws and policies and my desire to do what was right for Jeremy. Unfamiliar terms like “due process rights,” “least restrictive environment,” and “exclusionary discipline” were floating around like birds of prey that threatened to derail my budding teaching career at its outset.

  • “Why can’t we just move him to the behavior room? Riley’s younger brother is in there, and he’s nowhere near as bad as Jeremy!” argued one teacher.
  • “His mom would never agree to that, and she would probably threaten a lawsuit if we even suggested it,” replied an exasperated Rune, Jeremy’s special education teacher.

This story inspired me to learn more about my students’ rights and set me on a journey of developing an inclusive 4th-grade classroom.

LEARNING & UNLEARNING: Moving Past Legal Requirements

STEP 1: Learning about Special Education Case Law

There are 4 laws I wish I had learned about in my teacher preparation that would have better prepared me to support Jeremy.

  1. Diana v. State Board of Education (1970) A Spanish-speaking student was tested with English-only assessments. The court ruled that Special Education evaluations for students who speak a language other than English must be conducted by qualified individuals in the student’s home language. This was a major step toward culturally and linguistically responsive practices in Special Education. 
  2. Larry P. v. Riles (1979) An African American student was placed in special education track based on his poor performance on a standardized IQ test for which he had very few cultural referents. The court ruled that standardized IQ tests cannot be used as a sole determinant for placement in Special Education programs. 
  3. Honing v. Doe (1988) Schools aren’t allowed to unilaterally place a student in a more restrictive environment (including suspension) due to disability-related behavior for more than 10 days during a given school year. (In Special Education lingo, restrictive environment refers to a classroom or facility that is removed from a student’s same-age non-disabled peers or home-school. For example, a 9-year-old student with Autism who spends most of her day in a general education 4th-grade classroom is in her Least Restrictive Environment [LRE], while a medically fragile student with multiple disabilities who is educated in a hospital or care facility is in a much more restrictive environment. The LRE is individualized to each student based on their needs, goals, and other factors.) There is a provision in this ruling that allows schools to make unilateral choices about student placement in case of emergencies, but Jeremy’s behaviors, although highly disruptive, did not include bringing a weapon or drugs to school, or inflicting serious bodily harm, so that was also ruled out. Thus, the school cannot put him in a more restrictive environment. Jeremy’s behavior was clearly serving a purpose for him, and it was also highly disruptive to our classroom community. My colleagues were asking for further removal of Jeremy. As a current Special Education teacher, my newfound understanding of IDEA and the dark history of exclusionary special education norms in the U.S. gives me a shudder to think of this, even though at the time I was mostly in agreement with their conclusions. Jeremy was clearly struggling to make adequate progress in his Least Restrictive classroom environment, but one question kept coming up for me. Was the problem within Jeremy, or within the environment?
  4. Education for All Handicapped Children Act (1975) Before the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, which preceded IDEA, disabled students were often “educated” in completely separate facilities from their non-disabled peers. Disabled students who were considered “educable” (a horrendous idea now, but common at the time—who gets to determine which students are “educable?”) might have been allowed to attend regular schools, but they had none of the current safeguards that students have in our schools. Removing Jeremy from his peers without his family’s input (Ochoa et al., 2019; Scully, 2016) would be to take disability justice backward.

While knowing about the laws around special education has helped me and hopefully will help other teachers in advocating for disability justice and communities of care, I feel that we must look beyond exclusively state solutions. IDEA, Section 504, and ADA have all brought important gains for students and individuals with disabilities, but students and families deserve better than the lengthy process of qualification and often lackadaisical focus on delivering services that many experience in our schools.

By creating ways to increase our interdependence and liberate each other, we avoid greater state involvement in our classrooms and schools, as “state solutions inevitably extend into further control over lives” (https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/). Below, I share 3 steps I used to start my journey: 

STEP 2: Learning about Universal Design for Learning (UDL)

Teaching practices that utilize UDL have the potential to be an extralegal “grassroots solution.” UDL focuses on adjusting the environment so that disabilities are not present or impactful. Through UDL, teachers can provide students with tailored scaffolds to cultivate their natural curiosity and represent their ideas. A simple example of this is installing a ramp so that people with wheelchairs can access locations. This ramp can help other people who aren’t in wheelchairs as well, which makes it universally beneficial. In “Rethinking Disability and Mathematics,” Lambert points out that “differences in attention occur across” the entire population, and thus “adapting classrooms to work for students with ADHD will not just help those students, but all of us.” While UDL is often regarded as a special education pedagogical framework, it can be conceptualized more holistically and inclusively as a purposeful, strategic, and action-oriented approach that supports students’ diverse needs.

UNIVERSAL DESIGN FOR LEARNING GUIDELINES (SOURCE: https://udlguidelines.cast.org/?utm_source=castsite&lutm_medium=web&utm_campaign=none&utm_content=aboutudl)

However, UDL is not widely adopted in bilingual education programs. Considering the lack of scholarly attention on the intersection of UDL and translanguaging, Dr. Peña proposes the TrUDL framework–A combination of translanguaging and UDL. Through TrUDL, teachers can employ multilingual, multicultural, and multimodal strategies to facilitate students’ engagement, honor students’ identities, and build cross-cultural community partnerships. TrUDL works toward eliminating the home-school divide and disrupting the problematic label of emergent bilinguals as disabled (see more in TrUDL and Youtube Video: TrUDL).

STEP 3: Shifting Our Mindsets

Mindset reframing is another step educators can take toward promoting disability justice. We can evolve from a dominant Western medical model (see picture below), in which we perceive disability as a function of the person in need of remediation, toward a social model or neurodiversity model.

In the social model (see picture below), disability is perceived to result from the environment. We can ask ourselves how our expectations for students actually manifest their so-called disabilities. For example, in our math classes, do we value memorization, quick computation, and fluency with singular rote procedures—or are creative thinking, use of visuals, and connections to real life seen as worthwhile forms of doing math? By prizing specific ways of learning and demonstrating knowledge, teachers and school systems often inadvertently create or amplify the appearance of disabilities in students who are actually just diverse thinkers.

The neurodiverse model of disability arose from Autism advocates in the 1990s. People with disabilities do indeed have challenges and limitations, but they also have many strengths and unique ways of seeing and being in the world. These unique qualities are part of the natural cognitive diversity of all people, which neurodiverse advocacy celebrates as part of a beautiful and evolving tapestry of the human community. By embracing this model, along with the social model, we see diversity not as a deficiency but as a benefit that strengthens our school and social community.

STEP 4: The Continuous Cycle of Roadbumps, Reflections, and Growth 

I have a confession to make. In my second year of teaching, after surviving a difficult and chaotic first year as an unprepared and largely unqualified resource room teacher, I thought I knew what I was doing. I felt confident in my ability to use the curriculum in ways that matched my students’ needs, create schedules and manage the tasks of my para-educators, and help homeroom teachers understand my students’ accommodations. I had completed the preliminary coursework of my special education endorsement and had a pretty good knowledge of special education laws, purposes, and legal documents.

Going into my second year, I had high expectations of myself. If I could do as well as I had done my first year “without having a clue what I’m doing,“ then I should be able to do really well with a little experience under my belt and a little more knowledge in my head. I was in for a rude awakening in the form of two unplanned-for kindergarteners, Aaron and Keith. I had to ask myself important questions, such as: How did I unwittingly perpetuate the dominant structure in education of holding low expectations for multilingual students and students with learning disabilities to avoid or mitigate potential disruptive behaviors and adult discomfort? How can I push myself and my school for meaningful inclusion that goes beyond simply “being in the room” with peers? How can I show students concrete examples of how to honor each other’s differences and respect varied accommodations? How do I build an inclusive classroom of interdependence and care to disrupt disability injustices? 

Equity

Through ELTEP, I learned to question the roles of power and history in my classroom, school, and society and to imagine a more just and joyful future. I thought about how we can position languages, cultures, and families as invaluable parts of our classroom communities of care. Moving forward, I will continue to advocate for multilingual and disability justice through the lens of history, power, and futures, with a focus on creating school and social cultures of interdependence and care.

 

Read more work by Dr. Patricia Martínez Álvarez 

Teaching Emergent Bilingual Students with Disabilities: A conversation with Patricia Martínez Álvarez

In this podcast, Dr. Álvarez talked about immigrant children historically viewed through deficit perspectives and the lack of culturally-linguistically responsive ways (e.g. translanguaging) to teach emergent bilinguals. The main issue is the problematic and deficit labeling of emergent bilingual students with dis/abilities. Educational systems often focus on “fixing” children with disabilities instead of humanizing them. Another issue is their lack of opportunities and access to bilingual education. There is also a lack of certified teachers with cross-field expertise. We need to think more about how to create contexts that work for emergent bilingual students with dis/abilities. Dr. Álvarez also talked about humanizing pedagogy rooted in Freire’s Critical Pedagogy to highlight how educational systems dehumanize children with immigrant backgrounds. Educators should validate students’ experiences and acknowledge their funds of knowledge to build trusting relationships. Educators should also realize that we often miss the hybrid humanizing pedagogical moments to validate children’s assets. As educators, we need to (1) take time to listen to children’s sense-making to identify and acknowledge their multiple ways of learning and expressing, (2) explore the communities around the schools to know where their students come from, (3) recognize language learning strategies that students are already using, (4) instill student agency in their learning, (5) attend to students’ cultural and linguistic needs, (6) attend to how disabilities and bilingual education intersect.      

Martínez-Álvarez, P. (2020). Dis/ability as Mediator: Opportunity Encounters in Hybrid Learning Spaces for Emergent Bilinguals with Dis/abilities. Teachers College Record (1970), 122(5), 1–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146812012200506 

Emergent bilingual children (Carcia, Kleifgen, & Falchi, 2008) are often portrayed through a deficit lens and they have been disproportionately represented in special education (Artiles, Waitoller, & Neal, 2011; Sullivan & Bal, 2013; U.S. Department of Education, 2015). Teachers working with children with dis/abilities often uphold beliefs of ableism (Baglieri, Bejoian, et al., 2011; Kilinc, 2018)–valuing individual competition and independence rather than dependence or collaboration (Coakley-Fields, 2018; Siebers, 2008). Due to the ableist ideologies and norms, emergent bilingual students with dis/abilities tend to be placed in more restrictive environments than their white counterparts (Losen & Orfield, 2002). This study disrupts ableism by showcasing how 8 bilingual teachers and 15 2nd-4th grade bilingual Latinx children with dis/abilities can build a hybrid space for multiple literacies, modalities, and languaging (K.D. Gutierrez, 2008; Lizarraga & Guitierrez, 2018; New London Group, 1996). The author challenges the conception that children with dis/ability are “less developed” (Vygotsky, 1993, p. 30) but rather “different” from their peers. The author draws on the concept of dis/ability as a mediator (Vygotsky, 1993) to explore how children with dis/ability within third spaces compensate their learning through resisting, shifting, reappropriating the learning activities and using external artifacts that demonstrate their flexibility, fluidity, agency, and linguistic and cultural expertise. To create third spaces that foster children’s learning, teachers need to center children’s bilingual/bicultural experiences, expand forms of participation, adopt expansive views of literacy, and grant children access and control over learning artifacts to facilitate the demonstration of children’s abilities. For educators, it is essential to explore and integrate emergent bilinguals’ funds of knowledge and linguistic/cultural assets into instruction (Moll, 1992; Moll, Velez-Ibanez, & Greenberg, 1989; Nieto, 2002). 

Read more of Dr. Cioè-Peña’s work on TrUDL 

Youtube Video: Summer Webinar Series W: Maria Cioe Peña

In this video, Dr. Peña presented a talk titled Where does language reside? A conversation on language learning and expression for multilingual people with disabilities. Drawing on her own experiences as a former English learner with disabilities (e.g. anxiety disorder) and a young immigrant, Dr. Peña highlights the biases embedded in educational assessments (e.g. the white gaze). Her research with Spanish-speaking mothers sheds light on (1) how/why emergent bilinguals have been labeled as dis/abled, (2) how languages are a form of commodified intellectual control, (3) how teachers play a role in convincing nonverbal students’ parents to place them in monolingual English classrooms, (4) why emergent bilinguals have inequitable access to bilingual programs, and (5) devaluing of alternative communications and ableism embedded in how people define bilingualism. Dr. Peña calls for educators to expand our definition of bilingualism and language expression. More future research is needed on parents’ perception of language. 

Cioè-Peña, M. (2021). Raciolinguistics and the Education of Emergent Bilinguals Labeled as Disabled. The Urban Review, 53(3), 443–469. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11256-020-00581-z 

When emergent bilinguals are labeled as disabled (EBLADs), these decisions are often made entirely by school representatives with little family or child input (Ochoa et al., 2019; Scully, 2016). These labeling often lead to placing EBLADs in monolingual placements leading to a decline of their home languages (Algood et al., 2013; Bedore and Pena, 2008). These decisions reflect admins’ and educators’ bias grounded in emergent bilingual students’ racial, ethnic, linguistic, and dis/abled identities (Annamma et al., 2013; Brown and Ault, 2016; Flores, 2015). This article drew from literature to highlight that under the English monolingual norm (Cioe-Pena, 2017), bilingualism is only appreciated when the speaker’s first language is English (Bowern, 2014; Erard, 2012). Access to bilingual education has been limited for most EBLADs due to gaps in educational policies addressing dis/ability and linguistics (Cioe-Pena, 2017) and the misconception that students with disabilities cannot be bilingual (Cioe-Pena, 2017). Through disability critical race theory (DisCrit) and Linguistic human rights (LHR) as theoretical lens, Dr. Peña argues that all linguistically diverse children have a right to learn in their home languages. Through a raciolinguistic stance (Alim, 2005; Flores and Rosa, 2015), the article highlights how policy makers and enforcers excluded EBLADs from bilingual education based on their racial and ethnic background and their parents’ immigrant status. These racially motivated language decisions have impacted Spanish-speaking Latinx mothers’ and EBLAD children’s language practices at home. The main findings are: (1) schools’ deficit-centered ideologies (Santa Ana, 2004): framing dis/ability as a limitation to success and bilingualism as an optional advantage (Cioe-Pena, 2017) and the Spanish-speaking parents internalizing the medical model of disability; (2) teachers ingrained in parents that children’s disability is a barrier to bilingualism, a discrete forms of subtractive schooling (Valenzuela, 1999), to the extent that parents accept the monolingual English placement; (3) Spanish-speaking mothers felt frustrated by the English dominant homework tasks that contributed to parent-children language barriers and parents’ powerlessness; (4) parents experiencing racial discrimination even in linguistic pluralist contexts that prevented them from further advocating for their children. This article highlights commodification (Cioe-Pena, 2017), gentrification (Williams, 2017), and high-power languages (e.g. French, Italian, Mandarin) being dominant–not reflecting minoritized students’ home languages (Gramanzini, 2018; Harris, 2015) as the main issues of bilingual education. All resulting in emergent bilingual students being placed in monolingual or transitional-monolingual programs. Combining a raciolinguistic and DisCrit lens, the authors points out “how the racialization and pathologization of students with dis/abilities work concurrently to position EBLADs as abnormal for their racial and ethnic identity, and on accounts of their deficient bodies and brains” (p. 460). This article concludes with implications for teacher education, such as forefronting linguistic suppression of EBLADs in social justice discussions, acquire and advocate for parents’ desire for children’s linguistic development, adopt translanguaging practices so students can use their full linguistic repertoires (Cioe-Pena, 2015; Garcia et al., 2016; Garcia and Wei, 2013), TEPs to integrate more intersectional literature into their program practices, and educational policies around bilingualism to be inclusive of students with dis/abilities.

Padía, L., Cioè-Peña, M., & Phuong, J. (2024). Mending the intersectional gap: Supporting emergent multilinguals labeled as disabled through translanguaging and Universal Design for Learning. Theory into Practice, 63(4), 438–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2024.2355843 

This article offers multimodal, multilingual, and culturally responsive strategies for educators to support EMLADs’ full communicative repertoire and learning strengths, needs, and preferences. EMLADs often fall through what Dr. Cioè-Peña has called the intersectional gap (2017) due to siloed educational approaches that position giftedness, disability and multilingualism as mutually exclusive. The authors call out a common educator trap: serving students’ needs within our own disciplinary boundaries that lead to narrow and fragmented views of students’ needs. Considering the histories of pathologization and racialization (Kangas, 2021), this study focuses on EMLADs who are racialized youth of color. As 3 former special education teachers and current teacher educators, the authors called out the deficit labeling of students with disabilities and intentionally refer to them as emergent bi-/multilinguals labeled as disabled and advocate for their “complex educational needs” (p. 440). While some schools can provide EMLADs with gifted, special education and language services, the majority of schools often lack resources of all three services–leaving EMLADs with only one in more restrictive settings (Artiles et al., 2005; Tefera et al., 2017). By integrating Universal Design for Learning (UDL) and translanguaging (Flores, 2021), TrUDL supports EMLADs’ full linguistic repertoire and different modes of learning. A table (table 1 on p. 443) that summarizes TrUDL Toolkit is provided with examples of classroom adaptation and implementations. This TrUDL Toolkit includes (1) Venn diagram, (2) culturally responsive-sustaining curriculum scorecard, (3) strategies for teaching multilingual learners, and (4) exploratory interviewing with families.

Teacher Educators & Professional Learning

Learn more about Disability History 

One Out of Five: Disability History and Pride Project 

This site is designed by the Washington State Governor’s Office of the Education Ombuds in partnership with Rooted in Rights and two Washington local educators, Adina Rosenberg and Sarah Tov. The title of this project is “One Out of Five” because 1 out of 5 people in the United States has a disability. This site not only offers an overview of disability history but also features 5 lessons with scripted lesson plans, activities, differentiated techniques, links to CCSS, and additional resources that teachers can adopt and modify to fit their grade levels and subject areas. With these resources, teaching about disability is more accessible to all teachers and students regardless of backgrounds and experiences. By centering on disabled people’s intersectional experiences, this site invites its readers to interrupt our deficit perspectives and expand our perceptions of disability. 

Learn Who Your Students are: Listening Deeply to Foster Inclusion 

Lean in and Listen: Shaping Inclusive Schools With Youth

This is a University of Kansas’s blogpost authored by Taucia Gonzalez, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education. In this post, Dr. Gonzalez explores how to create inclusive classrooms attuned to histories of exclusion (e.g. based on disabilities and race), and recommended listening deeply to what youth have to say. Drawing on asset-based pedagogies (Valdes, 1996; Gonzalez et al., 2005), the author emphasizes countering deficit narratives with counter-narratives. The author reflected on her experience with a struggling seventh grade student whose writing didn’t have proper punctuation but captured a genuine and deeply personal story that expanded the author’s conception of literacy. In return, the author responded to the student’s story with “the human reactions that it deserved.” To better include youth perspectives and narratives, the author proposes collaborative research methods. In an interdisciplinary research project with her colleagues Mel Bertrand and Sybil Durand, the author adopted Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) methods (see Bertrand, Durand & Gonzalez, 2017; Gonzalez & Bertrand, 2017) to study youth’s perspectives on educational inequities. This study surfaced the lack of racial teaching in schools and marginalized youths’ internalized racism (e.g., youth with disabilities, youth classified as English language learners, indigenous youth). This study calls for teachers, admins, and parents to incorporate racial and cultural identities and histories in their curriculum.

Research

TrUDL: Translanguaging & UDL for Full Inclusion

SUSTAINING DISABILITY IDENTITIES

Beneke, M. R., Machado, E., Taitingfong, J., Dhoot, S., Nagarajan, J., & Rupert, M. (2023). “‘Together’ Means I Am Not the Only One”: Educators Reclaiming Interdependence in Early Literacy through Narratives of Struggle. Language Arts, 100(5), 365–377. https://doi.org/10.58680/la202332499 

In this article, the authors explore a teacher inquiry group’s collective and interdependent struggle with/for liberatory literacy pedagogies. Deficit-based notions of struggle are sociopolitical constructions (Biklen & Burke, 2006; Kafer, 2013) tied to normative learning expectations in schools. It challenges the myth of independence grounded in intersecting oppressions (e.g., ableism, racism, linguicism) that position white children as good and capable while black and brown children as “struggling.” It draws on disability justice activists’ principle in everyone’s mutuality and care (Piepzna-Samarasinha, 2018; Sins Invalid, 2017). The authors conceptualize literacy as a social and ideological meaning-making practice (Street, 2005) that is inherently co-constructed through multiple modalities. This study builds on a body of literature that recorded justice-driven teacher inquiry groups’ shared dialogue on transforming inequitable educational systems (e.g. Campano et al., 2016; Taylor et al., 2019; Nieto, 2001). This study is a multi-year inquiry group of eight early educators committed to liberatory literacy. Through narrative inquiry (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000) of the audio/video-recorded inquiry group dialogue and artifacts, this study highlighted how teachers centered interdependence as they struggled together and reimagined struggle toward liberatory classroom spaces. The featured k-3 school-based educators shared the power of teacher inquiry communities over struggles, diverse ways for student engagement and expression, and critically reflect on the creation of fictional struggling reader/writer and the “right way to tell a story.” These teacher narratives demonstrate how teachers were grappling with and disrupting the label of struggling child in early literacy, reclaiming interdependence in and through literacy, and dreaming of collective struggle toward justice. Collectively, the teachers frame literacy through expansive, multimodal, and interdependent lenses. In the teacher inquiry group, struggle is a form of pedagogy that teach each other to support one another’s liberatory literacy pedagogies.    

Lalvani, P., & Bacon, J. K. (2019). Rethinking “We Are All Special”: Anti-Ableism Curricula in Early Childhood Classrooms. Young Exceptional Children, 22(2), 87–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1096250618810706 

Educational settings should mirror the diversity of people’s intersecting identities (e.g. gender, race, disability, social class, etc). Inclusive education can be the most effective way to combat discrimination and build acceptance. Early childhood classrooms should reflect the “full range of human differences, and in which all dimensions of human variations are valued” (p. 88). However, little progress has been made toward inclusion (Barton & Smith, 2015) with less than half of 3-5-year-old children with disabilities educated in general education settings (U.S. Department of Education, 2012). Children with disabilities in general education classrooms are likely marginalized and may encounter isolation and bullying (Rossetti, 2014). Drawing from Allport’s (1979) studies on intergroup prejudice, the authors support naming the diverse group identities, valuing their differences, and establishing their equal status. Children as early as preschoolers begin to notice differences (race, gender, physical characteristics) to recognize and internalize social hierarchies based on systems of power and privilege (Boutte, 2008; Derman-Sparks, 2008). Children, through exposure to media, educational practices, and cultural discourses, can internalize negative messages about disabilities (Baglieri & Shapiro, 2017). For instance, in early childhood education curriculum, disabilities have been problematically portrayed as sad, burdensome, and pitiable (e.g. Captain Hook in Peter Pan, Tiny Tim in The Christmas Carol). Through the adults’ responses and/or the lack of conversation about their observations, children learn that certain groups and differences are less valued. Educators in early childhood education (EC) and early childhood special education (ECSE) are in ideal positions to disrupt ideologies of normalcy through their pedagogies (Robinson & Diaz, 2009). But educators often end up “downplaying human differences through the watered-down message of ‘we are all special,’ and children can miss out on the opportunity to learn to appreciate the full range of human diversity and develop an understanding of ableism” (p. 90). Echoing Sapon-Shevin’s (2017) critique on the silences surrounding disability in schools and Derman-Sparks and Edwards’s (2010) anti-bias education goals, the authors share the following strategies to purposefully infuse anti-ableist lessons into the EC/ECSE curriculum. (1) Use inclusive approaches (e.g., Meyer, Rose, & Gordon, 2014) to introduce multiple entry points to meet children’s varied abilities and preferred multimodal communication. (2) strategically incorporate books and speaker series of diverse families (some that include disability, different languages, etc) can open dialogue and normalize all family structures and group identities to children to develop pride and understanding. (3) facilitate activities for students to redefine normalcy and promote critical thinking (e.g. what if Leo in the Leo the Late Bloomer remained different from his peers). (4) asking critical questions to interrogate unfair power dynamics and advocate for themselves and others (e.g. Sweeney, as cited in Allen, 2013: ‘Is this fair?; Is this right?’ Does this hurt anyone?’ Who benefits and who suffers?). (5) explore the problematic nature of stereotypes and its connection to bullying. (6) show videos of disabled people (e.g. disabled athlete participating in the regular Olympics (Berenstain, 1993)). (7) extend lessons by developing structured ‘social action’ projects aiming at local change.         

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