Sustaining Disabled Youth

2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Asset-based pedagogies, such as culturally relevant/sustaining teaching, are frequently used to improve the educational experiences of students of color and to challenge the white curriculum that has historically informed school practices. Yet asset-based pedagogies have evaded important aspects of students’ culture and identity: those related to disability.

Sustaining Disabled Youth is the first book to address this deficit. It brings together a collection of work that situates disability as a key aspect of children and youth’s cultural identity construction. It explores how disability intersects with other markers of difference to create unique cultural repertoires to be valued, sustained, and utilized for learning. Readers will hear from prominent and emerging scholars and activists in disability studies who engage with the following questions: Can disability be considered an identity and culture in the same ways that race and ethnicity are? How can disability be incorporated to develop and sustain asset-based pedagogies that attend to intersecting forms of marginalization? How can disability serve in inquiries on the use of asset-based pedagogies? Do all disability identities and embodiments merit sustaining? How can disability justice be incorporated into other efforts toward social justice?

Book Features:

• ● Provides critical insights to bring disability in conversation with asset-based pedagogies.
• ● Highlights contributions of both university scholars and community activists.
• ● Includes analytical and practical tools for researchers, classroom teachers, and school administrators.
• ● Offers important recommendations for teacher education programs.

Federico R. Waitoller is an associate professor in the department of special education at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author of Excluded by Choice: Urban Students with Disabilities in the Education Marketplace. In 2023 he received the AERA Special and Inclusive Education SIG Distinguished Researcher Award. Kathleen A. King Thorius is an associate professor in Indiana University’s School of Education-IUPUI, executive director of the Great Lakes Equity Center, and co-editor of Ability, Equity, and Culture: Sustaining Inclusive Urban Education Reform.

“The text is organized into digestible parts and chapters and equips readers with analytical and hands-on tools that can be applied in both academic and classroom settings…Highly recommended.

—CHOICE

“Sustaining Disabled Youth is the hybrid space of possibilities that we have needed in (special) education—building on and advancing assets-based pedagogies while centering disability. It is in this hybridity that we can reimagine pedagogies that center and sustain disability with and through the experiences and scholarship of the multiply marginalized scholars, activists, and educators who contributed to this book.”
—Taucia González, assistant professor, disability and psychoeducational studies, The University of Arizona

Contents

Series Foreword  ix

Acknowledgments  xiii

Disability and Asset Pedagogies: An Introduction to the Book  xv
Kathleen A. King Thorius and Federico R. Waitoller

Part I: CENTERING DISABILITY CULTURE AND IDENTITY IN SCHOOLS AND SOCIETY

1.   Disabled Lives: Worthiness and Identity in an Ableist Society  3
Anjali J. Forber-Pratt and Bradley J. Minotti

2.  Cultivating Positive Racial-Ethnic-Disability Identity: Opportunities in Education for Culturally Sustaining Practices at the Intersection of Race and Disability  17
Seena M. Skelton

3.   Smooth and Striated Spaces: Autistic (Ill)legibility as a Deterritorializing Force  31
Sara M. Acevedo and Robin Rosigno

4.   Luring the Vygotskyan Imagination: Notes for a New Bridge Between Disability Studies in Education and Asset Pedagogies  46
Federico R. Waitoller

Part II: SUSTAINING DISABILITY IDENTITIES WITHIN PEDAGOGICAL APPROACHES

5.   Black Deaf Gain: A Guide to Revisioning K–12 Deaf Education  59
Onudeah D. Nicolarakis, Akilah English, and Gloshanda Lawyer

6.  Disability Critical Race Theory as Asset Pedagogy  74
Subini Annamma, David Connor, and Beth Ferri

7.  Krip-Hop Nation Puts Back the Fourth Element of Hip-Hop: Knowledge with a Political Limp  86
Leroy F. Moore Jr. and Keith Jones

8.   Breaking Down Barriers: Hearing from Children to Learn to Teach Inclusively in Bilingual Education  95
Patricia Martínez-Álvarez and Minhye Son

Part III: ON NURTURING TEACHERS AND EDUCATIONAL LEADERS

9.   Of the Insubstantiality of “Special” Worlds: Curricular Cripistemological Practices as Asset Pedagogy in Teacher Education  111
Linda Ware, David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder

10 .  Mothers of Color of Children with Dis/abilities: Centering Their Children’s Assets in Family as Faculty Projects  126
Cristina Santamaría Graff

11.   Practicing for Complex Times: The Future of Disability Studies and Teacher Education  144
Srikala Naraian

12.   Curriculum Theorizing, Intersectional Consciousness, and Teacher Education for Disability-Inclusive Practices  156
Mildred Boveda and Brittany Aronson

13.  Leveraging Asset Pedagogies at Race/Disability Intersections in Equity-Expansive Technical Assistance  169
Kathleen A. King Thorius

Notes  183

References  185

About the Editors and the Contributors  222

Index  228

2024 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

2023 AERA Special and Inclusive Education SIG Distinguished Researcher Award to Federico R. Waitoller