Teaching and Care: Cripping Fieldwork in Teacher Education

SAGE Open, 2016

Despite the possibility for mutual benefit, it seems that the fields of Disability Studies (DS) and teacher education have not communicated and collaborated in deep and meaningful ways. This exploratory study utilized an e-survey of 32 teacher education faculty members in the state of California to investigate how, if at all, teacher educators were utilizing DS in their curriculum. Results suggested that some teacher educators confuse DS with special education or rehabilitation. Furthermore, many teacher educators in general education teacher preparation programs indicated that disability issues were only covered in one course. The results of this study suggest the need for further meaningful collaboration and communication between the fields of DS and teacher education.

The Review of Disability Studies: An International Journal, 2017

Special education has historically been understood as a service provided to students with disabilities who are perceived to be too impaired to successfully progress in the general education curriculum and classroom. This perception has been reinforced through teacher preparation programs that rely heavily on the medical model of disability to prepare both special and general education teachers. While there is an increased push both legislatively and socially for more inclusive practices in education, this over-reliance on the medical model does little to nurture inclusive attitudes and worse, perpetuates deficit assumptions of disability. This paper seeks to explore how the infusion of Disability Studies into the teacher preparation curriculum might be used to foster more inclusive attitudes.

The Educational Forum, 2020

Using grounded theory, we examined the ways in which undergraduate teacher candidates with disabilities developed a sense of purpose and constructed professional identities. Our findings suggest K-12 experiences with advocacy as well as exclusionary school experiences influenced their emerging professional identities. Resistance to a deficit view of disability was central to teachers' professional identities and influenced their desire to become "change agents" in their future professions. We describe collegiate experiences that affirmed or presented roadblocks to their career path.

Teachers and Teaching, 2018

Inclusive education requires restructuring educational provision so that mainstream schools are able to provide for the needs of all students in their communities. To help realise this goal, initial teacher education programmes need to better prepare new graduates for teaching students with complex special education needs, including students with intellectual disability. Concerns about the capacity of current school-based placements to prepare new teachers for inclusive classrooms have led some teacher education institutions to develop supplementary fieldwork experiences. The current study involved an investigation into such an experience and looked at the benefits to pre-service teachers (PSTs) of tutoring a young adult with intellectual disability. The findings indicate that PSTs learned effective strategies for differentiating a programme of work and, in their first year of study, were developing a teacher identity. The importance of aligning experiences with coursework units is highlighted and the need for valid assessments of how well initial teacher education programmes are preparing beginning teachers for inclusion, and what these assessments may look like, is discussed.

Journal of Teacher Education, 2001

Reflective practice and the value of reflexivity between personal experience and pedagogy are common research themes today. However, teacher candidates often report a lack of encouragement to be reflective of their experiences with disability and the ways those experiences can inform pedagogy. This article results from a year of inquiry involving 3 novice teachers with disabilities. The impact of their experiences is discussed in light of their developing pedagogical knowledge. The article concludes that for them, teaching is an encounter with the self but that their encounters are an untapped resource with rich potential for the construction of pedagogical knowledge. The article argues that teacher educators must facilitate reflection on experiences with disability as with gender, race/ethnicity, and other identity markers or lived experiences. The article includes examples of the author's attempts to make use of disability experiences in the teacher education curriculum.

2019

Within the larger interdisciplinary field of disability studies, a growing contingent of critical special educators have sought to disentangle disability from medicalized conceptions that have long predominated in the research and practice of schooling. Many of these scholars are also teacher educators and uniquely positioned to introduce disability studies to their postsecondary students. In this paper, we review and evaluate two decades of research literature at the intersection of disability studies and teacher education. We seek to answer the following question: What pedagogical approaches have colleagues used to introduce disability studies to teacher education students through programmatic and curricular revisions, and with what results? We first review foundational contributions in research literature that establish the purpose and precepts of disability studies in teacher education courses. Then we review research of the application of approaches aligned with disability studies within teacher education programs and course curricula. We conclude by evaluating the use of disability studies in teacher education and suggesting future directions for research and practice.

International Journal of Inclusive Education, 2025

Studies have shown that teachers with disabilities remain largely invisible in schools and in teacher education, thus perpetuating both the lack of role models for students and preservice teachers with disabilities and the prevalent deficit view that individuals with disabilities cannot be successful teachers. Existing narrative research points instead to the advantages teachers with disabilities can bring to the area of inclusive teaching, as well as the professional identity development that this involves. Given this background, the author describes his personal experience with a suddenly occurring permanent visual impairment that altered how he is able to engage in his work as a professor of teacher education. The article uses a narrative research format to discuss the impact of the impairment, the ways in which the author has been able to re-learn how to approach his work and adjust his own sense of professional identity, and how, in effect, he can use his disability as an asset in his teaching, exemplifying trends in the research on the identity development of teachers with disabilities. Possible implications for teacher education are suggested.

Learning disabilities are typically diagnosed in early elementary school with the need for services diminishing in secondary school due to learned coping strategies. But as students leave high school and head into the job market or to higher education, they often feel out of balance because the supports from academic instructors and the educational system as a whole are no longer in place. The same strategies used in K-12 to understand text meanings are oftentimes not successful in college due to increasingly difficult academic expectations [1]. Young adults with learning disabilities are often not prepared for the academic requirements and fast-paced lecture of a college classroom. When education majors with learning disabilities are admitted into a teacher education program, they are eligible to receive services as long as the modifications do not invalidate the rigor of the program of study [2]. Once students with learning disabilities go to college, they often find themselves facing new learning contexts with heightened feelings of anxiety and expectations for success. Research into the intersectionality of teacher candidates who have learning disabilities is limited, but due to increases in formal identification of students with learning disabilities and in special needs services at all academic levels [3], it is timely and foundational for classroom teachers and instructors in the academy.