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This chapter grapples with the relationship between dis/ability and narrative inquiry through the authors’ personal stories that push back at the cultural-historical, policy, and professional master narratives of dis/ability in order to contribute to efforts that theorize critical emotion praxis. We ask: what is the relationship between dis/ability and narrative inquiry? What are the lived experiences of those living within a variety of intersectional and emotional dis/ability narratives that resist and navigate the cultural-historical, policy, and professional master narratives of dis/ability at the intersections?

We use a Disability Studies in Education (DSE) paradigm to construct a collective autoethnography that challenges socially circulating cultural narratives of disability.

Our individual and collaborative narratives illuminate: (1) how master narratives impact self, (2) the ways that dis/abled women of color elevate human dignity and spiritual practices in ways that subvert and speak-back to master narratives, (3) the emotional impact of Learning Disability labeling, (4) forms of epistemic and personal experiences at various institutions of higher education, and (5) the liberatory practices manifest from co-created narratives with DSE students concerning disability identity within higher education.

This collaboration contributes to efforts that theorize critical emotion praxis with diverse positionalities of DSE scholars, teacher educators, and professionals within educational contexts. The chapter also suggests ways in which construction of collaborative narratives of resistance can point to paths for positive organizational change.

The purpose of this paper was to understand what disability-related curriculum (DRC) looked like in the middle school Language Arts classroom. DRC refers to any curricular material and related pedagogical approach intended to address students’ understanding of disability. The authors drew on the experiences of three in-service middle school Language Arts teachers to understand what disability-related texts they selected, and why they chose to incorporate DRC into their classrooms.

The authors used a qualitative, exploratory multi-case design to understand the what and why underlying three middle school language arts teachers’ use of DRC.

Findings from this study revealed that teachers leveraged DRC to broaden students’ understanding of diversity, increase empathy and provide exposure to disabilities; teachers gathered resources both online and within existing curriculum; and DRC varied in curricular and pedagogical structure.

The results of this study are exploratory. Although the aforementioned findings are promising, they are limited, due to the small sample size and relatively homogeneous participant demographics. Additional research that incorporates a larger and more diverse sample of participants would serve to broaden, or potentially confirm, the results of this study.

The results of this study provide insight into current practice around DRC while illustrating some of the limitations that teachers may encounter when integrating this practice.

While Language Arts curriculum often explores diversity in relation to race or class, it rarely focuses a lens on disability. This study fills a void in current research by providing empirical data on how educators approach the design and implementation of disability programming in their respective classrooms.

In an effort to better prepare pre-service candidates to work with all students and to respond to the current collaborative team teaching trend within New York City public schools, the authors who are professors of bilingual education and inclusive education/disability studies, respectively, combined their student teaching seminars in bilingual education and childhood education, in order to: (1) provide a model of co-teaching as well as an experience and perspective of being a student in a classroom with two teachers; (2) provide pre-service candidates with ongoing access to the expertise of two professors during their student teaching experience; (3) engage pre-service teachers in critical conversations about identifying and resisting deficit constructions of both emergent bilingual students and students with disabilities; (4) engage in a self-study of teaching practice within this collaborative context; (5) consider how well our respective programs currently prepare pre-service teachers. The Self-Study of Teacher Education Practices approach gleaned data from the co-instructors’ weekly reflective journals and student evaluations to reveal multiple benefits of a collaborative classroom context for pre-service teachers as well as the professors. These benefits included a rethinking of academic structures, spaces for interconnectedness across fields, and increased professor and student learning. The findings challenge teacher educators to consider whether or not a traditional approach to teacher preparation truly offers pre-service teachers the tools to serve diverse students. The authors call on schools of education to transgress traditional academic boundaries to adequately prepare pre-service teachers for the 21st century classroom.

This chapter focuses on the critical work of Dorothy Lipsky and Alan Gartner’s Inclusion and School Reform: Transforming America’s Classrooms, specifically through their 1987 piece, Beyond Special Education: Toward a Quality System for All Students. The chapter explores the five broad, interrelated areas of: (1) The Separate Special Education System; (2) Inclusive Education; (3) School Restructuring; (4) The Reform of Education and the Remaking of American Society; and (5) Amplification of Inclusion Issues. The chapter shows how the work of Lipsky and Gartner examines each theme in a discrete way whilst also showing how they are interrelated, analogous to jigsaw pieces that ultimately create a more comprehensive analysis of inclusive education scholarship and practice.

We reviewed three existing reviews of literature: two related to cultural and linguistic diversity in well-regarded special education research outlets including Advances in Special Education, and the third regarding constructions of culture, race, disability, and risk in early childhood and early childhood special education (ECSE) literature. Some of our findings reflected ongoing oppressions for young children at the intersections of race, disability, and other forms of social difference to which negative treatment has been attached, including static and deficit-based framings of disability, reliance on whiteness, and English as the norm for developmental benchmarks, and failure to account for disability beyond medical models. We present a preliminary framework for special education research and practice considerations in order to remediate these issues in ECSE for young learners of color, among others, with disabilities.

This chapter explores the relationship between disability identity, civil rights, and the law. Twenty-five years after the passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, the question remains why disability rights legislation does not go far enough toward addressing access, stigma, and discrimination issues. People with disabilities have found empowerment from disability rights laws, but these laws are also restrictive because they define people in relation to medical aspects of their disabilities and narrowly define society’s obligation for inclusion. The successes and failures of disability rights laws are an important contribution to the study of conceptions of difference.

In a multicase qualitative study, inclusive school leaders attempted to move their schools from the excessive use of suspension; they employed positive behavioral intervention and support (PBIS) as an alternative they thought would be therapeutic rather than punitive. However, the PBIS system traded a disciplinary system of control for a medicalized system of restoring order. Unwanted behavior came to be defined as evidence of possible behavioral disability. Hence, the PBIS system exchanged one deficit identity of “disorderly” student for another of “disordered” student, subsuming other considerations of race, class, and gender identity. Following the study’s findings, this chapter proposes more liberatory practices for PBIS that interrupt dominant culture discourses of normal behavior and power, and hold promise for establishing justice, rather than simply reinstating order.

The purpose of this paper is to examine current research on self-advocacy and self-determination of autistic students in order to provide an overview of the research and to critically evaluate researcher’s methods of inclusivity of autistic people. Additionally, this paper will critically analyse the discourse of the current research to assess the extent of deficit, stigma and pathology discourse.

Research will be selected from a list of criteria which is to seek research that is inclusive of autistic people. The research will be analysed using elements of critical discourse analysis, critical disability studies and critical autism studies. The critical autism studies approach used in this paper is emancipatory to promote autistic scholarship, autistic inclusivity and autistic led research methods.

The result of this paper is that by prioritising, and including autistic individuals in the studies about them provides valuable educational insights and often challenges assumptions, stigmas and stereotypes of autistic individuals.

The findings of the paper may be limited by the selection of literature reviewed and generalizability, therefore, researchers are encouraged to explore further.

This paper holds potential implications that question the consistency of current discourse and research into self-advocacy for autistic individuals in addition to providing effective research, teaching and support strategies based on insight. This paper also highlights some research that challenges assumptions of autistic individuals.

This paper challenges assumptions and stigmas associated with autistic individuals and demonstrates the importance of self-advocacy and self-determination. This research transforms the paradigm of autism and education practice that has the potential to improve autistic individuals’ education and ultimately, improve their lives.

This research is important and valuable as there is limited research in this area. The potential of this research is that it can shift the broad perceptions of autism and make improvements in education and autistic individuals lives.

This chapter is based on compulsory school experiences of students diagnosed with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and their parents in the educational context of Finland. Located in the theoretical framework of Disability Studies, the chapter aims to contribute to theory of inclusive education by initiating a new dialogue on conceptual foundations of inclusive schooling. In this regard, the chapter first deconstructs the concept of educational need that stems from the field of traditional special education as contradictory to the original ideals of inclusive education. It then moves on to reconstruct the concept of educational need in accordance with the foundational values of inclusion, that is celebration of human diversity and resistance to dichotomies of ab-/normality and dis-/ability and proposes an approach for future implementation of inclusive education.