Pursuing Justice-Driven Inclusive Education Research: Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit) in Early Childhood

Abstract

Multiple scholars have argued that early childhood inclusive education research and practice has often retained racialized, ableist notions of normal development, which can undermine efforts to advance justice and contribute to biased educational processes and practices. Racism and ableism intersect through the positioning of young children of Color as “at risk,” the use of normalizing practices to “fix” disability, and the exclusion of multiply marginalized young children from educational spaces and opportunities. Justice-driven inclusive education research is necessary to challenge such assumptions and reduce exclusionary practices. Disability Critical Race Theory extends inclusive education research by facilitating examinations of the ways racism and ableism interdependently uphold notions of normalcy and centering the perspectives of multiply marginalized children and families. We discuss constructions of normalcy in early childhood, define justice-driven inclusive education research and its potential contributions, and discuss DisCrit’s affordances for justice-driven inclusive education research with and for multiply marginalized young children and families.

Moving Through the Pipeline: Ethnic and Linguistic Disparities in Special Education from Birth Through Age Five

“…Scholars have called for disproportionality research in EI/ECSE to move away from analyzing effects of isolated identity markers and toward analytical models that account for the interdependency of children’s multiple marginalizing identities (Love & Beneke, 2021). Our intersectional analyses lend credit to the value of this approach and support the notion that language and ethnicity in particular are intertwined (Rosa & Flores, 2017).…”

“…To develop targeted solutions that enhance equity for young children of color with communication concerns, we must precisely identify at which points in the EI/ECSE system, from referral to placement, outcomes differ for specific groups of children and families (Nalani et al, 2021). We also must use an intersectional lens that recognizes that children’s multiple marginalized identities interact in the production of discrimination and exclusion in EI/ECSE systems (Annamma et al, 2013; Love & Beneke, 2021). Simply defined, intersectionality is the idea that children’s race/ethnicity, linguistic background, and disability type (among other characteristics) “operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequities” (Collins, 2015, p. 2).…”

DisCrit Literacies: Early Childhood Teachers Critically Reading School as Text and Imagining an Otherwise

“…Across our data, members of our collective used DisCrit literacies to "hold each other" as we troubled dominant notions of normalcy in early literacy and enacted a politicized form of care (Nasir et al, 2017). By centering multiply-marginalized children and their families (Love and Beneke, 2021), we worked together to recognize how ableism and racism co-constitute status-quo schooling practices (Annamma et al, 2013) in our literacy classrooms. Reading "traditional" written texts (i.e., definitions of ableism) in community, we frequently noticed and critiqued notions of normalcy (Baglieri et al, 2011).…”

“…First, DisCrit uncovers how ableism and racism intersect to multiply target, and thus multiply‐marginalize, Children of Color with or “at risk” for disabilities (Annamma et al, 2020). In early childhood settings, children’s normative development (e.g., building oral language and vocabulary, progressing through independent reading levels) is often narrowly defined, surveilled, and regulated (Dyson, 2015; Meiners, 2017; Souto‐Manning and Rabadi‐Raol, 2018), and connected to processes of segregation, exclusion, and/or expulsion that disproportionately affect Black, Indigenous, and Latinx children (Kulkarni et al, 2021; Love and Beneke, 2021). Examining how societal norms of ability are defined in proximity to, and as a property of, whiteness (Leonardo and Broderick, 2011), DisCrit centers the experiences of multiply‐marginalized Children of Color, unveiling ways even young children’s abilities are racially profiled (Collins, 2013).…”

From the Personal to the Global: Engaging with and Enacting DisCrit Theory Across Multiple Spaces

“…In a recent critical literature review, we discovered, for example, DisCrit has increasingly been used in doctoral dissertations and interdisciplinary journals that cross disciplinary boundaries and geographic borders (Migliarini 2017); critically analyze Positive Behavioral Intervention and Supports (PBIS) in classrooms (Adams 2015); integrate simultaneous issues of race and ability into teacher education for White teachers (Beneke 2017) and teachers of color (Kulkarni 2015), and; that center the voices of disabled scholars of Color (Cannon 2019;Hernández-Saca 2017). Moreover, it has been used as a tool to better understand, and address concurrent issues of racism and ableism in early childhood education (Love and Beneke 2021) and k-12 schools (Friedman, Hallaran, and Locke 2020;DeMatthews 2020). In tracing this growth, we are struck by the ways DisCrit has been taken up, expanded upon, and used as a starting point for further creative articulations and investigations in ways race and ethnicity impact education.…”