Love Is Praxis

Lived Experience-to-Classroom Lessons Through the Voices of Disabled Students, Practitioners, Mothers, and Siblings

Dr Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg, Dr Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg, Yuchen Yang, Dr Damian Mellifont PhD, Dr Jennifer Smith-Merry PhD

• Publisher: Lived Places Publishing
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781916985063
• eBook ISBN: 9781916985087
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Curricula

How can we centre disabled people and their family members as knowledge-bearers, enriching classrooms with their perspectives and knowledge in non-traditional ways?

Through testimonies and critical ethnography, and bell hooks' centering of love as transformative praxis, this book explores the lived experiences of disabled young adults and family members. The testimonies reposition people with disability as knowledge-bearers whose ways of knowing have typically been discounted by professionals. The stories are raw, sometimes painful, enlightening, and filled with hope. The chapters feature stories from both emerging and former educators, the voices of authors with disabilities with and without experience of intersectionality, former practitioners who have supported children with disabilities and their families, family members who have navigated systems, and life through a local and global context. Each story shows the value of disabled people and their families as educators who teach others both informally and formally.

This book is ideal reading for teachers, emerging teachers, curriculum designers, and education policy makers, as well as students of Education, Social Work, Special Education, and Disability Studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Abstract
• Table of Contents
• Foreword: What’s Love Got to Do with It?
• A Note on Language
• Content Warning
• Introduction
• Learning Objectives
• 1 A Parent’s Fight: Nurturing Identity, Overcoming Adversity
• 2 Older-Younger Sister: The Unknown Middle Child
• 3 Mama Bear
• 4 It’s Complicated
• 5 Too Much…Not Enough
• 6 Speaking Out: A Letter to the Reader
• 7 “Listen”
• 8 How Does It Feel to Be a Woman with a Disability in a Developing Country?
• 9 Finding Myself through Autism
• 10 School as a Site of Resistance: Becoming an Advocate
• 11 Empowering Exceptionality: A Mother’s Call for Collaborative Understanding in Education
• 12 Kerri’s Way: Family, Lessons, and Memoir
• 13 The System Failed Me, but I Did Not Personally Fail
• Notes
• References
• Notes on Contributors
• Index