This article provides an historical analysis of major reforms in teacher education, beginning in the 1970s, specifically focusing on the opportunities each reform presented to build a shared agenda across pre-service general and special education, and the constraints that operated on them. The analysis revealed the existence of several such intersections, each of which created substantive occasions for joint action across general and special education at every stage of teacher education reform. However, four factors— policy, funding, timing, and norms of separation—appear to have operated as constraints upon mining the capacity of these potential intersections. If the promise of a cohesive system of education capable of and committed to supporting struggling students across multiple and intersecting diversities is to be realized, it will be critical to coalesce around a comprehensive equity agenda that builds on the intersections that continue to exist between general and special education.
Intersectional competence captures educators’ awareness of how sociocultural markers of difference simultaneously intersect within the P-12 school context. This article presents findings from a larger mixed-methods sequential exploratory study that established, in part, the theoretical and qualitative basis for validating the Intersectional Competence Measure. The questions asked during the qualitative phase were developed after a review of the literature on intersectionality in special education, collaborative teacher education, and existing measures of preservice teachers’ understanding of diversity. This analysis focuses on the responses of 12 culturally and linguistically diverse special education preservice teachers. When speaking about P-12 students, they tended to position themselves as special educators, privileging their emerging professional identities. They expressed the important role that teacher education played in developing an understanding of sociocultural differences. The participants discussed the complexities of intersecting identities when speaking about their own educational experiences and when considering discriminatory attitudes that persist within minoritized communities.
Our intergenerational authorial team takes up a central—and unresolved—issue within teacher education for inclusion, namely, the role of curriculum in reconceptualizing pre-service programs. We specifically review literature and policy on how special education teacher educators have approached conceptions of curriculum, using this past as prologue to argue that the teacher education curriculum requires a community of educators constructing a balance between a shared equity agenda to support the preparation of all teachers for inclusion, and the simultaneous need to prepare experts who can effectively share and utilize expertise that addresses the specific learning needs of marginalized learners, including those with disabilities. Unless curriculum is addressed comprehensively, deep transformation will be difficult to achieve, and role clarity for prospective special education teachers is likely to remain unclear. Our aim is for readers to consider the complicating power of curriculum theory as essential framework for renegotiating the teacher education curriculum for inclusion.
Conceptualizations of servingness must include an understanding of how racial ideologies shape Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSIs). Three Latinx scholars offer testimonios on our experiences as students, faculty, and researchers at teaching and research-intensive HSIs. From our testimonios, we found that practices of Blanqueamiento (Whitening of a population) and Mestizaje (racial mixture) operate at HSIs to flatten our understanding of Hispanics in U.S. society. To make sense of our testimonios within these HSI contexts and constraints, we applied an intersectional consciousness perspective on racialized organizations. Findings include Whiteness operating as a credential, legitimizing unequal resources, diminishing agency among minoritized groups, and continued use of Mestizaje (disguised as Hispanic) as a prevailing ideology. We provide considerations for HSI leaders, researchers, and administrators to elevate their intersectional consciousness and disrupt how HSIs contribute to essentialist notions of Latinxs.
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