Undoing Ableism

Teaching About Disability in K-12 Classrooms

Susan Baglieri, Priya Lalvani

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138545601
• eBook ISBN: 9781351002844
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Undoing Ableism is a sourcebook for teaching about disability and anti-ableism in K–12 classrooms. Conceptually grounded in disability studies, critical pedagogy, and social justice education, this book provides both a rationale as well as strategies for broad-based inquiries that allow students to examine social and cultural foundations of oppression, learn to disrupt ableism, and position themselves as agents of social change. Using an interactive style, the book provides tools teachers can use to facilitate authentic dialogues with students about constructed meanings of disability, the nature of belongingness, and the creation of inclusive communities.

1 Why Teach About Disability and Ableism in K–12 Education?

Disability is a form of human variation and an aspect of the human experience. People with disabilities are often described as the world’s largest minority group. Yet, when the topic of ableism arises in our conversations with our teacher education students, friends, colleagues, and other education professionals, we frequently receive quizzical looks, followed by the question: “What’s ableism?” Describing “ableism” as negative or prejudicial beliefs about disability that arise from, and result in, the systematic oppression of people with disabilities is often met with questions of concern: “Why introduce young children to sensitive topics like that?” “Might children be scared?” “Isn’t thinking about disability depressing?” “Won’t it make disabled kids feel uncomfortable?” “Isn’t is better to focus on abilities, rather than disabilities?” “Do we really want teachers to spend time teaching another ‘ism’ in school?” And, the most frequently asked, “Why point out that some people are different if the children don’t even notice?” Many educators believe that questions related to disability do not need to be answered if they are not openly asked, instead presuming that young children do not “see” disability. Consequently, in schools, there are few conversations aimed at addressing children’s curiosity about disability and difference. In its place, there is a silence; like the proverbial elephant in the room, the topic of disability remains unmentioned, and the issue of ableism is unaddressed.

Ableism in Society

“The average American is not, nor should they have to be, prepared to fight every day of their life for basic civil rights. All too many incidences of discrimination have gone by undefended because of lack of protection under the law. In the past, disability has been a cause for shame. This forced acceptance of second-class citizenship has stripped us, as disabled people, of pride and dignity. This is not the way we, as Americans, should have to live our lives.”

–Judith Heumann (1988, p. 74)

Disability oppression and the need to educate people, young and old, about disability and ableism seems far from public consciousness. There is little open dialogue about disability in society. Disability may be perceived as a private, personal, or medical matter, rather than a topic of social, cultural, and political importance. Thinking about disability and encountering disabled people may elicit existential anxiety, as it provokes confrontation of human fragility and raises fears about potential loss of control, frailty, and dependency (Hahn, 1988; Rauscher & McClintock, 1997). Avoidance of disability is also connected to the desire to conform to cultural expectations, ideals of normalcy, and the physical aesthetic. As Rauscher and McClintock (1997) state:

Deeply rooted beliefs about health, productivity, beauty, and the value of human life, perpetuated by the public and private media, combine to create an environment that is often hostile to those whose physical, emotional, cognitive, and sensory abilities fall outside the scope of what is currently defined as socially acceptable.

(p. 198)

Cultural discourses and sociocultural practices are rooted, then, in aversion to disability and a lack of understanding of what life with a disability is like from the perspectives of those who experience disability. Avoidance may have much to do with the discomfort many feel when thinking about disability. Lack of opportunities for nondisabled and disabled people to engage with each other is exacerbated by the historical exclusion of disabled people from school and work environments.

In the absence of robust public dialogue about disability and lack of opportunity to interact in mixed-ability groups, public understandings often reflect stereotypes and misconceptions that compose master narratives on disability. Master narratives are culturally derived, taken-for-granted “knowledge,” or dominant assumptions about what is considered normal or desirable in society (Bamberg, 2004). Master narratives on disability characterize disability as something to be cured, eliminated, fixed, or overcome, and depict life with a disability as tragic, pitiable, and burdensome. People with and without disabilities encounter these narratives and come to understand disability as an undesirable and inferior state of being. For instance, the beliefs that people with disabilities lead lives that are burdensome or sad, that they deserve pity and compassion, or are courageous and sources of inspiration simply by being alive or engaging in everyday activities are largely unquestioned, yet are rooted in assumptions that disability must always be experienced as personal tragedy.

Ableism is a “pervasive system of discrimination and exclusion that oppresses people who have mental, emotional, and physical disabilities” (Rauscher & McClintock, 1997, p. 198). Ableism occurs because of the persistent devaluing of disability and the dominance of viewpoints in which disability is cast as an inherently flawed and undesirable state of being (Campbell, 2001, 2009). The proliferation and commonality of ableist assumptions about disability, over time, unfolds as a system of oppression. Similar to other systems of oppression, such as racism, sexism, classism, and heterosexism, ableism thrives on beliefs about the inherent superiority of some and the inferiority of others on the basis of group traits. Ableism operates in overt and subtle ways at individual, cultural, and institutional levels. At each of these three levels, advantages available to nondisabled people are perpetuated, and disadvantage is produced for people with disabilities. Like other kinds of structural oppression, prejudice is at ableism’s core, and discrimination is an outcome. The following list describes examples of ways ableism is evident in society.

Institutional level:

• Many homes require the use of stairs; they are not built with ramps, and in many regions, wheelchair-accessible apartment buildings are not readily available.
• Many business facilities are not fully accessible to individuals with mobility, visual, or hearing impairments.
• Restaurants do not typically provide menus in Braille.
• In schools, instruction is often offered at a regimented pace in which students are expected to demonstrate their learning in specific activities—primarily reading and writing text. Those who need support to meet expectations must first receive a disability label—often stigmatizing—in order to receive help or accommodations.
• In many schools, there is often a lack of adaptive technology available for students with disabilities; similarly, there is often a lack of accessibility and adaptive technology such that people with disabilities can participate in local government meetings or committees.
• The continued existence of separate or “self-contained” classrooms for the education of students with disabilities results in the segregation of many students with disabilities from their peers.

Cultural level:

• Cultural narratives uphold restrictive definitions of normalcy by prescribing what people should be able to do and how they should do it, thus marginalizing those who do not fit the parameters of “normal” behavior.
• Independence and individuality are highly valued in many cultures; interdependence or needing care is thought of as a less desirable life.
• Cultural norms dictate the desired body and standards of beauty; these culturally constructed ideals are reproduced and reified through the media.
• People with disabilities are underrepresented in media, literature, pop culture, and so forth. When they are included, they are often represented in stereotypical ways.
• Our cultural lexicon is rife with negative terms for people with disabilities (e.g., slow, dumb, idiot, retarded), euphemisms that only serve to reify otherness (e.g., special, handicapable), and ableist metaphors (e.g., “a lame excuse,” “blind to the truth”).
• The widespread routinization of prenatal genetic testing reifies notions about normative children and upholds beliefs that it is undesirable or a “tragedy” to have a disabled child.

Individual level:

• People may believe that life with disability is “tragic” or characterized by profound loss, or that it is “better to be dead than disabled.”
• Beliefs that people with disabilities are deserving of pity and compassion, or that they are sources of inspiration, are common.
• Beliefs that parents of children with disabilities are “saints,” courageous, or “chosen” to have a disabled child are commonly held.
• Many people, including educators, believe that special education teachers must possess extraordinary amounts of compassion, endurance, and patience, compared with other teachers.

Sources: (Baglieri & Shapiro, 2017; Lalvani, 2011, 2013; Ostiguy, Peters, & Shlasko, 2016)

These examples are experienced by people with disabilities as prejudicial or discriminatory, even as many may not readily interpret them as such. Ableism is largely outside the public consciousness. There is little awareness that it exists and, as such, it is what Chodorow (1999) describes as a “permissible prejudice”—one that is unacknowledged and even accepted in society. That being disabled is abnormal and people with disabilities cannot expect to be “catered to” in every situation, or that the lives of people with disabilities are necessarily shaped by loss, tragedy, struggle, and the desire to be rid of impairment point to common misconceptions and assumptions that underlie the persistence of ableism.

We return to the frequent question, “Why point out that some people are different if children don’t even notice?” It is likely that even young children have noticed disability or markers of disability in the world. By the time they enter school, many have asked curious questions about neighbors in wheelchairs, service animals, or people they see who seem different from themselves in any number of ways. Contemporary media directed at children increasingly features people with disabilities. Sesame Street, for example, introduced Julia, a Muppet with autism in 2017. Picture books designed to educate children about disabilities are easy to find, and the (problematic) use of eye patches, dwarves, hooks, and humpbacks in children’s stories has a long tradition. Most young people have probably observed the international symbol of access—the blue wheelchair symbol—hanging in many public areas. When disability is left unmentioned in the classroom it sends an implicit message that it is a topic with little relevance, yet the persistence of ableism suggests that it is relevant to all of us. In presuming that young people do not notice difference or that differences do not matter, we miss the opportunity to instill in children an appreciation for human differences in self, family members, and others, and to support futures in which they can participate in building more inclusive communities.

Ableism in Schools

Attitudes toward members of social, cultural, and identity groups different from one’s own are formed through direct contact, implicit and explicit messages received from others, and through making meaning about depictions of others in cultural narratives. Children can gain an appreciation for diversity and develop knowledge about groups of people as a result of their own experiences within heterogeneous environments. In many schools, however, nondisabled children and those who have labels of disability may not have sufficient opportunities for sustained interaction and the development of meaningful relationships because some kinds of disabilities are quite rare among school-age populations. Another, more pressing reason that meaningful interaction is rare is that large numbers of students with disabilities continue to be educated in segregated and “self-contained” learning environments in US schools. Students labeled with autism, intellectual disability, and multiple disabilities are overwhelmingly more likely to be educated in partially or entirely segregated learning environments (Morningstar, Kurth, & Johnson, 2017; US Department of Education, 2013). At the root of this arrangement is the existence of a bifurcated system of education within which general and special education function as parallel universes, each with its own sets of teachers, training programs, and teaching certifications, and with underlying implications about two distinct kinds of learners—those with disabilities and those without; those deemed normal and those considered abnormal (Connor & Ferri, 2007; Linton, 1998).

In this bifurcated system, students are sorted by ability and many are assigned to physically segregated learning environments. Despite a decades-old struggle for inclusive education in which all children are educated together, in many schools being “included” in education remains characterized as a privilege only for those students who “keep up” academically and meet values-laden criterion for normative behavior (Lalvani, 2013; Valle & Connor, 2011). In this way, the bifurcated system of general and special education becomes an avenue through which the otherness of some students is constructed and the normalcy of others upheld. The very existence of separate classrooms reinforces the idea that some people are different enough that they cannot be educated in the same space as everybody else. Ableism plays a key role in decisions to exclude students from general education classrooms through educational discourses that support and sanction their segregation (Storey, 2007). These separations among children with and without disabilities allow ableism to proliferate by reinforcing disability stigma and preventing natural opportunities for interaction among ability-diverse children.

Stigma is a powerful phenomenon linked to the value placed on certain identities. Stigma involves recognition of a difference, and a consequent devaluing of the difference (Dovido, Major, & Crocker, 2000). Stigmatizing serves to establish a psychological and social hierarchy, and people who are stigmatized are almost always the target of prejudice and social rejection (Goffman, 1963). Goffman (1963), in his foundational work, discussed the ways in which stigma is produced by physical environments. In the context of special education, students with disabilities become marked as other, not just through the labels they are ascribed but also by virtue of the physical spaces to which they are assigned—or even via association with these spaces. As such, the existence of segregated physical spaces itself perpetuates the stigma attached to disability, and particularly to those with intellectual disabilities, in school culture and in society overall (Smith, 2010). Consequently, children with and without disabilities receive the message that they belong in different spaces and places, separated from each other.

Calls to end disability segregation in schools are cl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Why Teach About Disability and Ableism in K–12 Education?
• 2. Foundations for Teaching About Disability and Ableism
• 3. Teaching and Learning as Critical Inquiry
• 4. Guidelines for Teaching Critical Inquiries on Disability and Ableism
• 5. Exploring Meanings of Disability
• 6. Understanding Ableism in Society
• 7. History of Disability and Ableism
• 8. The Emergence of the Disability Rights Movement
• 9. Disability Culture and Disability Pride
• 10. Exploring Contemporary Perspectives on Disability Rights and Culture
• 11. What Are Our Roles in Taking Action Against Ableism?
• 12. Undoing Ableism With Critical Pedagogy
• Index