Disability Studies in Education SIG Leaders (2023-2024)

Social Media Co-Managers:

Ashley Pollitt, The College of New Jersey, pollitta@tcnj.edu 

Ananí M. Vasquez, Ph.D., Roosevelt School District & Neurodiversity Education Research Center, ananimv@yahoo.com 

OFFICER BIOS

Lydia Ocasio-Stoutenburg (PhD) is Co-Chair of the DSE SIG and is Assistant Professor at The Pennsylvania State University. Dr. Ocasio-Stoutenburg's work centers caregiver advocacy, holistic and asset-based supports for students labeled with ID/DD, systems and policy level equity, and Black family and community empowerment. Past-times are spending time with family, writing poetry, and using maker-spaces. 

Kathleen Mary Collins

Casey Woodfield (PhD) is a DSE SIG Program Co-Chair and Assistant Professor in the Department of Wellness and Inclusive Services in Education at Rowan University. Her scholarly activities center communication and inclusion as inextricably connected imperatives. Her research explores inclusive education as a vehicle of social justice, with an emphasis on lived experiences of autistic and neurodivergent students who use augmentative and alternative communication. Her research and teaching aim to counter constructed notions of competence and foster educational approaches grounded in the value of disability and neurodiversity. Outside of work, she enjoys time with family and friends, walks with her dogs, and photography. 

Dr. Sarah Young is a DSE SIG Program Co-Chair and Director of Disability Support Services at Trinity Washington University. In her daily work, she focuses on increasing accessibility and equity for students through staff and faculty development and improvement of institutional policy and processes. Her scholarship explores disability policy history and implementation, the impact of transition and orientation programming for first-time college students with disabilities, discourse analysis of institutional disability webpages, and systems analysis of disability offices and associated training, staffing, and functionality. As a practitioner and researcher, her goal is to confront disability stigma and discrimination in educational settings while advocating and providing space for self-authorship among disabled students. She also enjoys reading and spending time with family, friends, and her dog, Ziggy.

Dr. Chelsea Stinson is the Secretary/Treasurer of the DSE SIG and Assistant Professor of Inclusive Education at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Cortland. Dr. Stinson's research, teaching, and service focus on the experiences of emergent bilingual students, families, communities, school-community relationships, and teachers at the intersections of language, race, disability, migration, policy, and education. Dr. Stinson is also co-editor of Multiple Voices- Disability, Race, and Language Intersections in Special Education, which is the official, peer-reviewed journal of the Council for Exceptional Children's Division for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Exceptional Learners (DDEL). More importantly, she enjoys running, hiking, music, reading, dancing, and spending time outdoors with her children and very good dogs.

Ashley Pollitt is a DSE SIG Social Media Co-Manager and Assistant Professor at The College of New Jersey, has research interests in teacher education and development and equitable teaching formative assessment practices in secondary English Language Arts. When not working, she enjoys practicing yoga, walking outside, reading in the sun, finding new cafes, laughing with family and friends, listening to live music, and completing the daily Wordle.

Ananí M. Vasquez (PhD) is a DSE SIG Social Media Co-Manager, Instructional Coach at the Roosevelt School District, and Research Associate at the Neurodiversity Education Research Center. Her research interests are in neurodiversity and creativity in education and research methods. Dr. Vasquez draws on creativity theory, disability studies in education, the neurodiversity paradigm, process philosophy, and arts-based inquiry while working with others towards post-oppositional educational transformation. As a former elementary teacher and as a teacher coach, she combines her experiences in general, bilingual, gifted, and special education(s) to envision an inclusive education. She enjoys family day trips, painting, crafting, baking, dancing, and cloud watching while floating in the pool. 

DSE Tenets
To engage in research, policy, and action that

• contextualize disability within political and social 
• privilege the interest, agendas, and voices of people labeled with disability/disabled people
• promote social justice, equitable and inclusive educational opportunities, and full and meaningful access to all aspects of society for people labeled with disability/disabled people
• assume competence and reject deficit models of disability

The purpose of Disability Studies in Education is: to provide an organizational vehicle for networking among Disability Studies researchers in education; and to increase the visibility and influence of Disability Studies among all educational researchers.

Approaches to Theory, Research, & Practice in DSE

Examples of approaches to theory and DSE may include:

• Contrasts medical, scientific, psychological understandings with social and experiential understandings of disability
• Predominantly focuses on political, social, cultural, historical, social, and individual understandings of disability
• Supports the education of students labeled with disabilities in non-segregated settings from a civil rights stance.
• Engages work that discerns the oppressive nature of essentialized/categorical/medicalized naming of disability in schools, policy, institutions, and the law while simultaneously recognizing the political power that may be found in collective and individual activism and pride through group-specific claims to disabled identities and positions
• Recognizes the embodied/aesthetic experiences of people whose lives/selves are made meaningful as disabled, as well as troubles the school and societal discourses that position such experiences as “othered” to an assumed normate
• Includes disabled people in theorizing about disability

Examples of approaches to research and DSE may include:

• Welcomes scholars with disabilities and non-disabled scholars working together
• Recognizes and privileges the knowledge derived from the lived experience of people with disabilities
• Whenever possible adheres to an emancipatory stance (for example, working with people with disabilities as informed participants or co-researchers, not “subjects”)
• Welcomes intradisciplinary approaches to understanding the phenomenon of disability, e.g. with educational foundations, special education, etc.
• Cultivates interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the phenomenon of disability, e.g. interfacing with multicultural education, the humanities, social sciences, philosophy, cultural studies, etc.
• Challenges research methodology that objectifies, marginalizes, and oppresses people with disabilities.

Examples of approaches to practice and DSE may include:

• Disability primarily recognized and valued as natural part of human diversity
• Disability and inclusive education
• Disability culture and identity as part of a multicultural curriculum
• Disability Rights Movement studied as part of the civil rights movement
• Disability history and culture and the contributions of disabled people as integral to all aspects of the curriculum
• Supporting disabled students in the development of a positive disability identity

Future Possibilities

While Disability Studies stretches back for almost thirty years, DSE is a relatively new field, not yet a decade old. Bearing this in mind, scholars in DSE have articulated some areas of further potential study. These include:

• Constructing a new discourse of disability in education that emphasizes disability in its socio-political contexts and that is respectful of disabled people.
• Connections, overlaps, and dissonance between DSE and special education
• Tensions, paradoxes, contradictions, and reticence within education toward conceptualizations of diversity that include disability
• An intersectional approach to understanding disability at the interstices of class, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, etc.
• Explicit and tangible examples of ways in which DSE under girds classroom practices.