Disability – Assignment 1 – September 28

            Over my few years working in the school district, I have loved working with the inclusive education classes. For blog post three and assignment one, I decided to research disabilities. I could not decide if I wanted to be general with the topic or try and research a certain disability, so I decided to just go general. I found a paper called “The Curriculum of Disability Studies: Multiple Perspectives on Dis/Ability Introduction: An Invitation to Complicated Conversations”. The paper touches on the curriculum, studies and possibilities and future directions.

            While reading it, the article touches on curriculum studies and disability studies. Some studies began in the late 1990s and early 2000s. As studies were performed back then, they discovered some unjust practices taking place in the inclusive classrooms. Scholars have pointed out the lack of inclusion of disability in texts about social justice and multicultural education. Special education became an unquestionable reality, all conversations about disabilities were funneled into the default box of special education.   

            I found very interesting that DS scholars reject the medical/deficit model of disability. That makes them focus more on impairment or the difference of the individual. The social model of disability was the most popular alternative model, beginning in the 1970s and 1980s. Many within the DS group have criticized the artificial barriers between impairment and disability and/or the failure to theorize the embodied and intersectional experiences of people with disabilities in the decades after the social model became the dominant alternative to the medical/deficit model.

            My next step is to dive into this topic a bit more as I only read the first few pages of the article. I want to find different articles from different time frames to possibly compare how things used to be and how they are now. I would also like to dive into some of the issues with this topic.

Citation

Jamie Buffington-Adams & Kelly P. Vaughan (2019) The Curriculum of Disability Studies: Multiple Perspectives on Dis/Ability Introduction: An Invitation to Complicated Conversations