Linda Ware

Writing, Identity, and the Other Dare We Do Disability Studies?

Although inclusive education is often characterized as a special education initiative, both general and special educators must assume responsibility for all children’s learning as mandated by 1997 amendments to the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The practice and implementation of inclusion policy in both K-12 public education and teacher education necessitates close examination of many issues that extend beyond compliance concerns. This article problematizes two related aspects of inclusion reform and its implementation in practice: persistence of unexamined assumptions about disability and uninspired curriculum. The author begins with an overview of humanities-based disability studies, an emerging field of scholarship that holds great promise for reimagining disability. Then the author describes a partnership between a secondary language arts teacher and herself wherein they created and cotaught Writing, Identity, and the Other, a curriculum unit informed by humanities-based disability studies. This example provides insight to the question, Dare we do disability studies?

Worlds remade: inclusion through engagement with disability art

This paper revisits the 2007 Disability Studies in Education Conference plenary session, ‘Using Disability Art in Teaching About Disability: Riva Lehrer, David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder and Linda Ware’. The plenary coincided with a group show at The Arts Club of Chicago that featured multimedia works by artists who figure disability experiences into their art. The interdisciplinary panel presentation began with Lehrer’s overview of recent paintings and drawings and a screening of Disability Takes on the Arts, a film by Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell in 2004. The panel concluded with examples that linked these works to enhance teaching about disability in teacher education by Ware, a professor and practitioner.

Urban educators, disability studies and education: excavations in schools and society

This paper describes early efforts underway at City College, New York, to introduce a disability studies content into an otherwise traditional special education programme. The paper draws on previously funded research projects that merged humanities‐based disability studies in education, prior teaching experiences and excerpts from the writing of City College Master’s students in special and general education.

When Art Informs: Inviting Ways to See the Unexpected

In this essay I consider the arts—created and performed by artists with disabilities—as a site of productive knowledge for educators willing to interrogate the limits of scientific ways of understanding disability. A sample of artists who deploy the arts for self-understanding and self-expression informed by their experience living with disability in contemporary society is included here. The artists represent all disability categories in an effort to encourage LDQ readers to probe the multiple possibilities that exist for researching learning disabilities by reflecting on the cultural meanings ascribed to disability experience, and, in particular, those meanings authored by individuals with disabilities. The cultural flashpoints described here reflect a shift in understanding the disability experience in the present moment and, as such, hold great promise for translation and application by researchers and educators.

Infusing Feminist Disability Studies in Our Teaching

Over the past 20 years, disability studies has become a vibrant, interdisciplinary field. The five co-authors have worked together to examine the work of feminist disability scholarship with the goal of incorporating disability studies into our current intersectional approach to teaching. We begin with a brief introduction to feminist disability studies, paying particular attention to issues of identity and embodiment, and the ways in which disability, like gender, is socially constructed. We then share how the incorporation of a disability studies lens has influenced each of our courses, providing concrete examples. We examine the creation of new courses, such as the Sociology of Disability and Disability Studies in Education, which both explore disability through a gender, race, and class lens. Additionally, we discuss the integration of disability into existing courses, including an intersectional theory course, and a course on class, stratification, and power. Finally, we present an example of how disability studies perspectives can transform the teaching of a specific subject widely taught in gender-related courses—reproductive justice and the politics of choice. Bringing disability studies into the dialogue does not simply add to the curriculum and make it more inclusive, it also transforms it.

Diego's Life without Her.

This essay comments on parenting experiences with attention to both the resonances as well as the variant chords struck over a lifetime. Specifically, it hopes to convey the complexity of authorship concerns in the example of overlapping lives parents and their disabled child share.

Special Education Teacher Preparation

This chapter describes the impact on student learning that followed the revision of a traditional special education masters’ program to one informed by disability studies in education (hereafter DSE). DSE is a field of educational inquiry focused on disability as a topic that is too complex to be understood by any single field of study alone: in the context of P-12 schools, it advances the value of shared understanding across general and special education as well as educational administration (Ware 2010). As noted on the DSE website, the inter-disciplinary field of DSE draws on “social, cultural, historical, discursive, philosophical, literary, aesthetic, artistic, and other traditions to challenge medical, scientific, and psychological models of disability as they relate to education. DSE embraces four tenets intended to guide research, policy and action: (1) contextualizes disability within political and social spheres; (2) privileges the interest, agendas, and voices of people labeled with disability/disabled people; (3) promotes social justice, equitable and inclusive educational opportunities, and full and meaningful access to all aspects of society for people labeled with disability/disabled people; and (4) assumes competence and rejects deficit models of disability” (http://hunter.cuny.edu/conferences/dse-2012).