From the Division of Research of the Council for Exceptional Children, this is Dive In. I am your host, Federico Weitholder, professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to our fourth episode of the third season of Dive In. In this episode we'll return to our regular programming featuring a great conversation about a topic that is rarely discussed
in special education circles. Questions about diversity of the student body of special education and how to implement cultural response in pedagogies have been an ongoing discussion in special education. Maybe not the central one, but it's a discussion that's been there. When we talk about cultural response in pedagogy, people tend to think about the cultural and linguistic repertoires, an asset that students bring to the classroom and can be capitalized and used to enhance student learning and
to sustain and develop their identities. What is not as common is to think that students disability can be also a source of identity and cultural repertoire. Actually, my colleague Kathleen Quintorius and I have published an edited volume just on that topic called Sustaining Disabled Youth and leave a link
in the episode description. But what is even less common is to think about how those special educators who identify themselves with disabilities also bring a set of unique experiences and repertoires and assets because of their disabilities, not despite of their disabilities. So in today's episodes we're going to discuss exactly that, the experiences and unique strengths of special educators who identify themselves as with a disability.
We discuss the barriers that they face in teacher preparation programs and the workplace. And also we discuss how their unique experiences help them build relationships with special ed students, special education students, and enhance the design and implementation of meaningful learning activities to engage all students. And to do this, I'm going to have three guests today. With us today we have Dr. Amy Tondreau is an associate professor of elementary literacy
at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Her research focus on critical literacy in children's literature and writing pedagogy, critical teacher education and the intersection of cultural sustaining pedagogies and disability sustaining pedagogies in elementary literacy instruction. We also have today Dr. Larry Laurie Larabinowitz, an assistant professor of education at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, New York. Her research and teaching focused on preparing elementary educators who
enact cultural sustaining and disability sustaining instruction. And I asked Lori and Amy to be with us today because they have a very cool project that I've done looking exactly that what we discussing a few minutes ago looking at experiences and and strengths of special educators who identify themselves with disability. But we have a third guest because we couldn't be talking about special ed teachers who identify themselves with disability
without having one as well. So today we have Hannah Benson, which is a seventh grade humanities special educator at the public school in Manhattan. She has a master's degree in special education, identifies as someone with adhd, and we're going to present in some of her her very interesting experiences through teacher education programs as also as working with students. So this is it for the intro.
Let's join. Enjoy the conversation. Let's dive Hey, Hannah, Laurie and Amy, thank you for being with us today. I'm so excited to talk to you about this topic that is usually not very largely discussed in special education or in schools, which is those teachers who are special ed teachers or teacher and general education classroom who also have disabilities or disabled teachers. So thank you for asking.
And I want to start asking you because I know recently you published a book, but also out of that book came out of this project in where you were trying to understand the experiences of disabled teachers. Yeah. So thanks so much for having us. We're excited to talk to you about this topic. It's something that we've been thinking about for a long time. And Lori and I are friends from our doctoral
cohort. We have been working together for a long time. And our experiences sort of brought us together to work on a book where we were thinking about what culturally sustaining pedagogy looks like in literacy instruction and as a part of that, realized how little attention we're really giving to disability as a component of
that conversation. And so through working with some fantastic classroom teachers, one of them, Hannah, who's here with us today, and you'll get to hear from a lot later, we started to think about the role that teachers with disabilities play in creating
disability sustaining classrooms. So classrooms where disability is treated as a cultural identity, as a part of culturally sustaining pedagogy, and how these teachers were drawing on their lived experiences, both as students and now as teachers, navigating systems that just weren't built for them and making schools more inclusive places by drawing on their own expertise. And Laurie and I worked with a bunch
of those teachers while we were writing the book. We also sort of wrote an article that was an offshoot of that where we really shared some of those teachers narratives in a language arts article. And once the book was finished, we wanted to continue having those conversations. So we are sort of continuing that work. And I'll let Lori talk a little bit about what that looks like now. Yeah. And so that takes two forms of what we're
working on right now. The first is that we're conducting a study that involves interviewing educators with disabilities from across the country. We currently have roughly 20 in depth interviews completed with educators who hold a variety of roles. We're defining educators broadly, speech and language pathologists, special educators, general education teachers, afterschool providers, community college educators, and also folks with disabilities
who write children's literature. And we're doing in depth interviews with them to understand what their experiences were like in school, what it's like to be an educator today, and how they navigate working with youth with disabilities and without disabilities to build disability cultural
competence in classrooms. And the other project that we are also in the process of launching is working on creating some videos of these educators that will be widely available so that they can be used in teacher education settings and that educators can view them and learn from the practices of these really thoughtful, brilliant folks
that we're working with. And some initial findings from this research, Amy and I are doing some data analysis right now, is that there seems to be a population of late diagnosed neurodiverse female educators and non binary educators who in particular are leveraging their experiences and identities and their pedagogy in really intentional ways. And it's an under researched community. We can't find a lot on this from prior research about that particular, those particular intersectional
identities. And in doing this research, we're finding that they talk a lot about the grief of not having been identified and how school was challenging and now that they understand more about their own identity and they become researchers of a particular neurodiversity, how it's easier to navigate educational settings. And there's a relief that comes along with that. So that's
the project we're working on right now. And Hannah, as Sami said, is one of the educators who's willing to talk about her practice and experiences and share who she is with the world, which we're really excited about. Yeah, this is a fascinating topic. I'm very excited. I'm also a teacher educator. I work with a lot of
teachers who are about to become special ed teachers. And I don't know what exactly the reason, but I have noticed an increase at least people disclosing disabilities, asking for accommodations, but which also makes me very excited because I've seen in my classes a pretty large increase of future teachers that have experienced a special education in the past, which is great because they have already the experience of what it means to go through that system and that
takes us to what's going on in the classroom. Hannah. But I have a question for you that it's how did or if did? I'm assuming it did. So let's ask how and if did your own experience as having a disability or being a disabled person or disabled teacher shape your decision to work in schools, and particularly as a special ed teacher, had anything to do or have nothing to do with it? Yeah, for me, it was actually sort of the
reverse. So I started getting my master's in special education when I was, I want to say, around 25. At that point, I was not yet diagnosed. So I'm a person with adhd. Really had no idea. Really kind of got through school okay without it ever being mentioned or brought up as something that I was struggling with and really didn't know much about. And it was actually through my studies in my grad school program that I started
learning more about what ADHD is, how it can present. And I actually first kind of identified the qualities of it in my father. And so we went kind of down the path of getting him diagnosed, which was really supportive and helpful to him. Then about a year later, I actually lost my dad in an accident. And it was through, you know, kind of. It was almost that I finally had too much to handle that I could no longer mask kind of the symptoms that I was dealing with.
So I was working full time, going to grad school at night, and then dealing with the grief of losing my father. And through that process, I really kind of started to see the cracks show up. So I saw ways that I'd actually been struggling for years, but was kind of just able to get through or cover up. I was no longer able to do that. And so then I pursued a diagnosis for myself. I think I was diagnosed at around 26 with my ADHD
combined type. So it was actually through my process of deepening my understanding of neurodiversity and special education that I really came to a deeper understanding of myself. But what did get me into special education was I had a good friend who I actually met because I sort of randomly ended up working as a teacher's aide in my junior and senior years of high school in our special education 12 to one classroom, sort of working like a paraprofessional, but sort of
on a volunteer basis. And I made some quite strong friendships with some of the younger students that I was tutoring at the time. One of them is still a very good friend to this day. And I've known her for, you know, a long time now. And something that she always had a goal, a dream set on was to go to the University of Washington after
high school. But I kind of watched, you know, I graduated a couple years before her, and I watched her go through the process being in special education of kind of dealing with the barriers of not being allowed to take certain courses that would be required on a high school transcript in order to even have the ability to apply to university like uw. And so she ultimately
kind of. I saw her and her family try to fight with the system to try to get into certain classes, and she really wasn't able to get the credits that she needed. So she still actually has not been able to apply for the type of college and university that's kind of always been her dream. So that seeing that process was what made me want to study special education and find ways to really fight to make our systems more inclusive.
So that's what got me there. But then it also resulted in me learning a lot about myself. Yeah, it seems like that went in parallel. Right? You going through the program, special education program, and learning about yourselves and discovering these aspects of your life. That's very interesting. And I'm sure navigating the classrooms, but even I would say navigating, even the teacher preparation program probably
came with some unique challenges. And you know, you can answer this, Hannah, but I know probably Amy and Laurie had also have hear other stories from other teachers. So what are the. Some of the challenges that comes that you experience either in your teacher prep program or once you went to the job, that you needed to start performing in certain ways, and maybe there were no supports or they were asking you to do things that not. Not maybe. Set up for success. Yeah, no, set up
for success. Exactly. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. I can speak quickly to my experience. And then I know the others have met with a lot of other teachers with various experiences, but for me, when I really noticed my challenges coming out in grad school, I realized that my ADHD really shows up in areas of executive functioning like impulse control, emotional regulation. I started noticing that affecting my personal life more and seeing
the ways that had been part of my life growing up. But then professionally and academically, something I really struggled with was task initiation, which looked like bad procrastination. But essentially I would. You know, I was working full time, going to class at night. So the weekends I had to work basically full time and get myself to sit down and sort of regulate and get tasks done. And when I had bigger projects that I hadn't tackled before, I would see myself, for example,
carving out the entire weekend. Right. I'd say, Saturday and Sunday, I can't have any plans. I have to sit down and get this project done. And rather than me starting to get it done, I would sit in my house basically feeling miserable and tell myself over and over, just do this. Just do this, Hannah. You got it. Do it. And it wouldn't happen. So it's not like I was off doing other things that I enjoyed. I was literally sitting there trying to force myself to get started and would just lose days.
That was kind of the tipping point for me that made me realize, okay, this is disability. There's a real challenge here that I need support in. And so I was able to get my diagnosis and then go to my graduate school. They were really supportive, and they gave me the accommodation of extended. And even just being able to take off the pressure of, you know, I need to turn this in by the day, my professor says, helped me to get started more quickly and helped me to manage that challenge I
have with task initiation. I also just learned that things take me longer than other people. I think part of it is perfectionism, which I think a lot of women with ADHD struggle with. And so just getting that accommodation of extended time was really supportive to me. Um, in the workplace, I would say I think there's a various kind of array of professional barriers that neurotyp, kind of like neurodivergent folks in general, I think, can struggle with in a professional
setting. Not just a school, but any workplace. Um, I feel like we tend to be more direct and honest. Um, we don't really anticipate people, like, reading between the lines or not saying what they really mean. And so I oftentimes, you know, if I don't understand something, I ask really direct questions to understand better, maybe in meetings with my admin or my colleagues. Sometimes I feel like my questioning can be taken as an aggression or kind of
questioning of authority or my directness is too much. I feel that way often in the workplace, like, I'm just too much. But really, I'm just a very honest, straightforward person. And I think that is a characteristic of neurodiversity that sometimes doesn't always jive with sort of the neurotypical world, the neurotypical work workplace. Yeah. And how that compares Amy and Laurie with. With other experiences, maybe people with different challenges. Yeah.
What Hannah sharing sort of is that second example is really a pattern. Across a lot of the interviews that we've conducted thus far, we found that several people talk about this idea that school administrators in particular, or colleagues do not Understand the way that they're speaking in the workplace and the type of questions they ask. For example, some folks that we interviewed talked about having a colleague who interpreted them as being rud because they struggle with eye contact
or they have a tendency to interrupt without meaning to. Or one person that we interviewed talked about how like before work he will be at the photocopier and he's trying to like regulate himself for the workday. And it comes across like he doesn't want to be friends with people, but he's really trying to self regulate so that he can get ready to
focus on his students. And so when he has these like passing interactions that other folks in the workplace see as ways to build community and he might seem abrupt or like he's not paying attention, he has trouble. Then he, then people don't want to be his friend in the workplace and that results in having less support in the workplace because he's red is rude. But what he's really trying to do is get himself ready to work with
his students. And he needs like he can't, he can't have those conversations in passing. It's going to be hard for him cognitively to do that kind of shifting before he starts working. And people don't understand that. And in particular we've heard a lot of folks talk about their relationships with school administrators and like a big finding for us is that school admin likely needs to be more educated and aware of what neurodivergence looks like in adults.
You know, to your point, Federico and I see this in my own settings too, and I'm sure Amy does too. We have more people. I teach undergrads in a teacher ed context. We have more people in the undergrad setting who are becoming educators who are neurodivergent. And school admin are not really prepared to know what neurodivergence looks like in adults even though they may know what
it looks like in youth from having been classroom teachers. I know from personal experience when I first started working as a teacher, one of my co teachers I co taught in an integrated co teaching classroom in New York
City as the special education teacher of record. And my general ed teacher that I was working with was someone with a learning disability and he didn't want the school administrators to know because he was afraid that there would be consequences for him professionally that he would be seen as someone who wasn't capable of doing the job. So I would and he had a reading and writing based disability so it impacted the type of school reports he was writing.
It took him more time to write reports. He's a really phenomenal educator. He's been teaching for a really long time. He's amazing. But I remember reading over his behavior reports for him before he submitted them to admin because he didn't want to have to face this kind of stigmatization. So I don't know. A big finding for us is that special education teachers are expected to see students as strength based, but we also need admin to have
that capacity. And because having educators with neurodivergence and disabilities is so good for teaching and it's so good for students with disabilities to have role models and students without disabilities to have role models who are folks with neurodivergence and disabilities. That means admin need to be prepared to understand and colleagues need to be prepared to understand the diverse ways that folks present themselves in a school environment.
Yeah, absolutely. It seems like your work has a lot of implications for training administrators, other teachers and creating working environments that are more welcome and inclusive of neurodivergent teachers. That takes me to another question that I have. We were talking a lot about cultural sustaining pedagogies and how we treat disability as a culture within that and as an identity. I myself also have done some work around that and the.
We know we may have cited your. Work a little bit. You did, thank you. I have one citation now. That's the one citation appears on my Google Scholar. This is fantastic. I know where it comes from now. But you know, Hannah, I wonder how your, your, your. This, this journey that you have. Understanding yourself and. And becoming someone else to some extent right through understand yourself shapes the ways of two things. One is how do you relate
to your students and second, how impacts your practice. I mean, how you change your pedagogy, the things you do in the classroom. Yeah, that's a great question. I think to speak to the first one. So how does it affect the way I relate with my students? I mean, I think that is one of the most profound ways. I think it sets me up to be an effective teacher. Students with disabilities and without disabilities.
I think because I've had to really self reflect and focus on how I learn and what kind of supports I need to be successful, it automatically gives me sort of a roadmap to see how students themselves are also having to do that work. And I can kind of act as a guide for them to kind of get to know themselves better, know their brains better. And then also, you know, I have plenty of students with
executive functioning disabilities or adhd. And because I've done the work myself to figure out what works for me, I can very easily model. Oh, sometimes, you know, I. You know, if I have a task, I need to break it down into really small steps. So why don't we try that together? Let's see if that works for your brain. Maybe it will, maybe it won't. Or, hey, it really helps me when I am having trouble getting started on something to sit
next to somebody else who's already focused on a project. So why don't you just come sit next to me? I have this email I need to write up, and now I have that student who was struggling to focus sitting next to me, and we're both kind of locked in because that's just a fun thing about ADHD
that seems to help sometimes. So I think it's naturally given me sort of a lot of tools in my toolbox, as we like to call it in the teaching world that I can kind of pull out and try out with students and sort of help them go through the process that I've been going through with myself of figuring out what I need to learn and what I need to be successful in school. In terms of how it's. I guess that sort of speaks to my teaching practice, but I think. I think some of it too, is.
Is it gives me the opportunity to be open about my adhd. I don't necessarily build that informally into my curriculum as of yet, but there are so many opportunities during the school day, sort of an informal moments, like, I'll have a student who I hear, you know, talking to their friend about their ADHD or the medication that they're on, and I'll just bring it up. I'll say, oh, I have adhd, too. I also take medication. And we can kind of just so that they know that they're not alone and
that a teacher can also kind of relate to them in that way. And, you know, I've had kids say to me, like, oh, I can't believe you would struggle with that. And, you know, I can tell them, look, it took me a lot of work to build the systems for myself that I have to help me be successful. And we can work on that together as a team. And.
And the last thing I'll say on it is, I think being neurodivergent or having an understanding of what it is like to live in a neurodivergent brain, I think gives you the ability to see students for who they really are. Like, I'll give you an example I had a student last year who was very hyperactive adhd, had a really hard time sitting still, would often interrupt lessons, kind of make loud noises to himself
that was seen as distracting. And you know, it is something that we were working with him on so that he could be successful in an academic community. But also I have the perspective of okay, well I'm actually kind of singing to myself in my head too. I'm just sort of suppressing it. So I understand where this is coming from. And it, and it's not frustrating to me. It doesn't make me angry with him. I get that it's
actually a really strong coping mechanism for him. So I think in just the way that I see students, it gives me the ability to very quickly see them through a strength based lens kind of naturally. Larry and Amy, have you heard different or similar experiences from other teachers? Yeah, I think our research is full of really unique examples that I'm just learning about from hearing from teachers. One example that I'll just add is the concept of rejection sensitivity dysphoria.
One of the teachers that we work with, who we worked with in a variety of different ways, but she has herself experienced this phenomenon in a classroom where she doesn't get called on by the educator. She assumes that there is something wrong or that educator doesn't like her and has resulted in like lack of participation or getting dysregulated in the classroom. So she's very aware of how this can happen in neurodivergent students and she's done a lot of research on rejection
sensitivity dysphoria. So in her classroom she builds in supports to pre correct for rejection sensitivity. So she has her students have journals. Sorry, that's my email. Her students have journals in the classroom where she's written notes in them, like if I didn't call on you today, that doesn't mean that I don't care about you. Please write down what you have to say. And the students know immediately to go to those journals.
And that allows her then to be able to target the students who maybe need more support or students she needs to talk to, who she can sort of take care of the needs of a student who might be sensitive to rejection, which is common for students with adhd, for example. But also target a student who has more of a learning need or a student who needs to an academic push and who she calls on in the classroom.
She's able to handle multiple things at once. And that ability to do that comes from her sensitivity to having experienced this herself in the classroom. And it also comes from. Because she's had that sensitivity, she's done research on it. So a big piece, and I think you can hear it from Hannah here is A lot of the teachers we've been doing research with become researchers on disability and neurodivergence themselves. They're very curious about it.
And then they use the research they do on themselves, and they extrapolate that to their students. And they also become researchers of other disabilities. They're interested in understanding their own identity. And that is something that we want all teachers to do, to have that inquiry approach. And this is a very unique way that it's happening. And for some of our teachers that even teachers we've done research with who have autism, for example, it's actually a
special interest to do research on their disability. So it becomes like something that they're super, super knowledgeable about. I don't know if you want to share another example, Amy. I was thinking maybe about Jay's work. It's an interesting example.
Yeah, I think, you know, we interviewed a special education teacher, an autistic special education teacher who was really conscious about both students who were sensory seeking and students who were sensory avoidant and who themselves had really gone through a process of experimenting with different sensory tools to help keep them regulated in their own classrooms. And so they had sort of a whole collection of
tools organized by the senses. So things that were different tastes, they had different smells available, they had different textures that students could touch. And they developed a process with all of their students that they worked with to try these different things out and engage in a process of metacognition. Like, did this help me focus? Was this distracting? And really going through the process of figuring out what worked best for them.
And so in addition to kind of the inquiry and the research that Lori's talking about that they do into their own identities and their own disabilities, they're also engaged in this process of creating curriculum around how we learn and helping all kids to really reflect on what works for them as a learner and what is
challenging or distracting for them as a learner. And they kind of incorporate that process that they often have engaged in themselves, that they model for their students and help students engage in that process as well. Wow. Fascinating. It seems like a lot of, I hear a lot of, like, empathy for one, a lot of, like, really trying to understand who the students are, and a lot of, like, drawing from your own experiences to drive your passion, your interests
further for. For learning more about how to. To teach or help Students learn in better ways as well as very specific strategies. I think our, our, our audience will, will, will benefit from that. There is another issue that I think it is, you see it a lot with people with disabilities or disabled people in the workplace. You see it in universities, which is the issue of disclosure. Right. How much. And I think Johanna, you mentioned some of this, how sensitive that is, how sometimes people
are. There are benefits to disclose, of course, because you are able to access, maybe in the university you get the disability Resource center. But at the same time it can be a double edged sword. Right. And people have a phrase sometimes to disclose. So what have you found and what was your experience, Hannah, with you and what have you found, Amy and Laurie, around issues of disclosure in the workplace for teachers
who have disabilities? Yeah, I mean, I think it's important to sort of frame this question a little bit in the current political climate. So, you know, when we started working on this, it must be, I mean, I've been working on this type of work for a while and different iterations, but this research project we started about a year ago and then the article and book about three years ago. And at that time this question of disclosure
looked really different than it does today. I mean, we're recording this a few days. This is two days after the current presidential administration has come forward with a claim that autism is linked to take to a mother taking Tylenol during pregnancy. And despite the fact that like large amounts of research suggests that that is not, there's no causal relationship between that, that's still like a large claim that's happening in our current political environment. And this
is, this is like tied to historical eugenical thinking. It's tied to the history and the autism of blaming mothers for, for their children having autism, despite the fact that we know it's a largely neurodiver developmental phenomenon. That's not the rhetoric that we're seeing in our current political environment. So some of the data that we collected is prior to this rhetoric become manifesting in such a way. And so this idea of disclosure does look
different than in some of the research that we've conducted. I think that there's more tentativeness when I talk to, you know, friends today who have children who are autistic or friends who are thinking about getting classifications for
their kiddos. The questions people are asking today are different than they were six months ago, a year ago, and they really seem to also be different depending on where you are in the country, what the school district is like, where you work, what the community is like what the families are like. I mean, one predominant thing, and Amy and Hannah can talk more about this that we do see, though, is that when folks are choosing to disclose in classrooms, it tends because they believe
it's for the benefit of their students and for the families. So, like, one particular example I can think of in the research is someone that we've been doing some work with for a while. He is someone who didn't used to share this information about neurodiversity with his students, and he's begun doing so. And the reason why he has is because he's had families who are afraid to get their children classified. And so he uses
his own disability, the fact that he takes medication, as a way to. To show families that this is like a path forward. And he's like, he's doing great. He's a productive member of our society. He's got a beautiful life, who is a teacher, has a master's degree. So he has chosen to become more active in sharing this information, in part because he has now people he can talk
to who have similar experiences. So he doesn't feel alone. He has other educators who also have disability identities, and also because he thinks it's in the service of youth and families. So even in this contentious political climate, we are finding that folks who disclose tend to do it because they believe it's in the best interests of students. I don't know
if you want to add something to that, Amy. Yeah, I think, you know, we are hearing from different educators that their schools and the administrators in their schools, going back to what we were talking about before, really set a climate right and make schools environments where there is safety and allow disclosure to happen. And so, as Laurie mentioned, the cultures of schools vary greatly across geography.
And it also matters where individual teachers are in their own sort of diagnosis and identity exploration, how comfortable and confident they feel, sharing with others, the interactions that they have with their colleagues. You know, if they're in a place where colleagues are sort of expressing ableist views or microaggressions, that's obviously going to discourage them from feeling comfortable disclosing. And so the approaches that individuals
have to discussing their own disabilities are really contextual. And that also carries over to social media context. We found that particularly folks who have adhd, folks who are autistic often have robust social media communities or online communities where they feel seen, they feel supported, they see tiktoks and reels that affirm their experiences, and that often contributes to their sense of confidence and their sense of not Being alone and being able
to disclose. Folks who are members of other disability communities, for example, folks who have OCD or bipolar, necessarily find that same kind of community right now. And so that often leads to a little bit more perception of stigma or concern about disclosing. So I think it's also important that we don't talk about teachers with disabilities as though it is one thing. Right. There's so much variation in individuals, experiences and identities within that.
But overall, I think the overarching theme is that the educators that we're talking to are generally very committed to disclosing their disabilities to students and families, with the goal of being a safe place for students to disclose their identities and discuss the things that they're grappling with with them, and also are really committed to more broadly destigmatizing disability
identities and being a role model. One of the other things that's come through really strongly in our research is that that to a person, folks that we talk to cannot identify a mentor that they've had who had a shared disability identity to them. And they really would like that to be different for their students,
as Laurie was talking about with that particular example. Right. With a teacher who's trying to show that, like, people with disabilities are happy, they're successful, they're, you know, experiencing success. And so having that opportunity to mentor is. Is really important to the teachers that. That we talk to. I want to. Just about personal life. Right. Not everybody needs to be successful. I mean, we want to be successful, but even people like non.
Non neurodivergent folks are. Don't feel successful sometimes or they're not successful. You know, life brings a lot of stuff that. Well, and success means different things to different people too. Right. Success can look a lot of different ways. But there is. Yeah. I just want to put a word of caution, because I don't. There is, you know, there is a lot of trying to put, like, great examples and so you can be like, this person and, you know, like kind of inspiration porn, as in
this. In disability studies, we call. And, you know, the truth is, like, we experience life in many different ways, and sometimes, yeah, we don't need to be rock stars or successful or be the best or whatever. This takes me also to think about the. I mean, because you're. You're speaking about how they. They disclose, but also wonder about how that translates in the classrooms in the sense of how they support their students to figure it out, how well their own identities as students
with disabilities. So, for example, what do you do? I Mean, how do you, what do you do? Any specific activities? It's more about the relationship you have with them, how you help them to navigate. And particularly. Do you teach high school, Hannah, or elementary? I can't remember. I teach seventh grade. Middle school, seventh grade. Okay. So, wow. Talking about developing identities, seventh grade, very important stage. Right. They're trying to figure out who they are.
So what do you do? What, what, what are your, your experiences with that? Yeah, I mean, I think my honest answer to the question is that I'm still figuring it out. It's a priority for me, but I think there's always places for me to grow. Something that I do very concretely now. Well, especially in terms of disclosure. Right.
I. I am somebody who will talk about my ADHD if I'm in an IEP meeting with a family to kind of, you know, sort of lighten and normalize the conversation that we're having and also, I think, make families feel more comfortable around the conversation. I think because I'm someone who, I'm naturally kind of quite open, comfortable, sometimes I say
things too honestly or overshare more than I would even want to. I think in some ways that does create an environment with my families and with my students where it kind of just shows this isn't. There's no reason for these conversations not to being, not to be being had. Right. There's no reason for us to keep it hush hush. Disability is not something that we have to keep quiet. It's something that we can be proud of.
It's something that we struggle with. It's something that we can loudly kind of figure out what we need from ourselves, from our teachers, from our administration to help us be supported in whatever it is that we're doing and that it's just normal that there's so much diversity and ability and it's something that we shouldn't feel scared to talk about. That being said, I think that I am quite aware of the fact that, you know, my identity
is not the same as everyone else's. You know, I show up in my place of work as a white woman. I know that people with other intersecting identities wouldn't be interpreted the same way as I am when I speak openly about disability. Even just the fact that I'm speaking about adhd, I think in some ways is interpreted differently than if I were talking about having a reading or writing disability or anything else. So I think I'm quite privileged in the way that I'm able to be open at work about
my adhd. But I Don't think I directly answered your question. What I also wanted to share is something concrete I do with students is I am very intentional about making sure they're included in their IEP meeting. So anytime we're having a conversation about what a student's strengths or needs are academically, I want them to. To be present for it and to prepare them for that meeting. I have a survey that usually I'll sit down with students. Usually I'll get a sense of their reading,
their writing skills, so I have something to present to their families. But I also have them fill out a survey that asks them, do you know what your disability classification is? Do you know what an IEP is? Do you know what accommodations and supports you are legally entitled to? And most of the time, my seventh graders come to me and they say, I have no idea what you're talking about. And so then that opens up the conversation for me to talk about, you know, what disability is,
ways that we can see it. You know, I just want them to know what their strengths are, what their struggles are, and make sure that they know what to ask for. Right. Because, you know, we have students who really should have the right to have a computer to type with or be able to listen to text so that they're not missing important content in the classroom. And if they don't know that, they won't know to say to their teacher, hey, this is something that I
require to be successful in this setting. So. So, you know, I want them to be able to advocate for themselves as much as possible. I mean, the IEP is a great example of empowering students and help them understand themselves, not just per se, what disability they have, but what are the needs they have and what supports they need. And also teach them to advocate for themselves. Right, exactly.
As they go through, because unfortunately, they're going to need to as they go through high school and university and the workplace, life, et cetera. Those are great examples. I like, Hannah, you brought the issue of intersectionality and how, you know, the huge diverse experiences within this social group we call this disability, and within that, how race and class also plays a role and how people see each other through a racial lens. Also within the disability experience.
Right. That maybe you will say something that we interpret as, oh, she's very active and she wants to collaborate, and maybe some other person says, like, oh, how aggressive is that person? Right. So that's. That. That's. That's. That's right. Thank you for bringing that up. You know, I want to finish. I always finish the show with something like looking forward, something hopeful, not that we were not talking about hopeful things actually was.
This was one of the most hopeful shows we have in a while. We've been talking a lot about politics and what is going on in D.C. so imagine that. So this is a very uplifting show compared to ola. I'm going to give you, like a few minutes or few time for each of you to dream a little bit. And what would you like to see in the next 5, 10 years regarding the teaching and learning of students with disabilities? And now we're talking about also of disabled
special educators. What would you like to dream and see in five to 10 years? I can go. I teach like an introductory class to critical special education practices for future teachers, social workers. It's an elective course, future child psychologists, et cetera. And it is often the first time my students have ever learned anything about the disability rights movement in the United States. We watch Crip camp together. We read a little bit of Judy Heumann's biography.
We study a little bit on the eugenics movement. And it's completely new to the majority of my students. So for me, I would love curricular change where disability history is taught as history, not as a separate part of history. It's part of history. I think that disabled teachers can lead the way in integrating that more into curriculum. Disability rights
is part of the civil rights movement. And I also think that disabled students, to Amy's point before, should graduate from high school having had a mentor somewhere in their academic career who had a disability. Many folks, you know, with disabilities might not have a family member who has a disability because it cuts across all different intersectionalities. So having disabled folks in school who can serve as mentors and foster pride.
I know. Frederica, you talked a little bit earlier about how, from a DSC standpoint, we want to make sure that folks know that you don't have to be successful. I am also an educator who's super passionate about helping people be the best possible versions of themselves and coaching them into that. So I want folks to. I want the kids that my future teachers work with to have mentors that can help them feel really good about themselves and that can look a variety of ways.
The college campus where I work right now, some of the students have put together a disability club, and they have also disability representation on our student government. So where they're advocating for better. I teach in, like, the woods, and it's very icy and there's really bad access on campus because you can, like it's bad because of the nature
of where I work and they're advocating for themselves. So all these different pieces of having pride, mentorship, clubs, representation and disability rights as curricular I think could be really uplifting in this particular political climate. Yeah, no, it's a great point and it's a great, you know, I think we teach a similar class. I also teach a similar class and we also watch Crip Cap. And I have exactly the same experience. I do. It's like I ask
the students, like how many of you knows about the civil rights movement? You know, and everybody lecture had and you know, talked about Martin Rankin, you know, Malcolm X, everybody knows. But when you start talking about the disability rights movement, the have happened very, very, very close to that people doesn't know about. So. Yeah, and I like the success part. What I meant by that is like, you know, I think sometimes we put these amazing examples. Now you can be this
despite your disability, right. When it's in change. We need to teach students that you can be. Yeah, you can have fulfilling life not despite your disability, but because of your disability. I think that's, that's a better way that I probably didn't express myself very well. Any other dreams, Hannah or Amy? You want to go or you want me to? Hannah, you go,
Amy. Okay, so I think one of the other things that we hope for is, you know, as you were alluding to, this can be kind of a bleak time and having these conversations and uplifting the work that teachers with disabilities are doing. The teachers that we work with are incredible. They are doing amazing, brilliant, groundbreaking work.
And you know, every time Lori and I get a chance to learn with and from them, we are inspired, we are motivated and so I think bringing more attention to their expertise and the work that they're doing and seeing their work uplifted as building all of our disability cultural competence. You know, we are often thinking about, from perhaps more of a deficit mindset, thinking about needing to or offering access to general ed curriculum, general ed spaces, able bodied ways of
knowing and being for disabled folks. And you know, Lori and I have been talking a lot in our work about thinking about that as
a two way conversation. Right. That it is also valuable for everyone to learn about disabled ways of knowing and being and developing disability cultural competence in that way so that the teachers with disabilities, the knowledge, the lived experiences, the expertise, the incredible work that they're doing, you know, we really hope to see gain more traction and gain more attention and have their expertise be respected for the
powerful, strong work that it is. And that hopefully in doing that we start to decouple disability from shame. Right. And all of these conversations that we're having about disclosure become experiences to disclose with pride as being a part of this expert community rather than, you know, something that we're, we're. That teachers are afraid they're going to be judged for or viewed with stigma. And so really hoping that, that teachers have their identities valued for
their expertise. That's, that's one of our dreams for sure. Well, Hannah, you got the last one. I don't know, I feel like that was a really great closing place. But I mean, I do have a very sort of far fetched big long term dream, which is that, you know, I think just systemically I'd like to see our education systems
turn more inclusive. You know, one of the challenges that I feel being a special educator in our public school system or just our education system in general, is that in order to receive these types of accommodations and supports, you have to be labeled as having a deficit, which, you know, I think it's the whole balance of disability. Right. We hold our disabilities with pride. I think getting diagnosed for me was such a positive and there is
so much pride in that. And also we are requiring ourselves to be labeled in order to get the supports that we're looking for. And so I love the idea of education just being education. And all teachers who are trained in bachelor programs or graduate school programs are being trained in how to work with students with all different types of learning profiles, all types of disabilities. And that, that's something that's just widely known in the general
education community. I would love if every single classroom was co taught by a gen ed teacher and a special ed teacher. But those are sort of the long term big dreams for me. Well, I asked you to dream, I didn't ask you to be frank.
Yeah, I mean something smaller that I've been really kind of of irked about lately is in New York City or perhaps it's a New York state issue, or perhaps it's a federal issue, but I know it happens at, in my specific school district, students who really struggle with executive functioning challenges, unless they have a doctor medically diagnosed them with adhd, they're not allowed to receive a disability label and therefore support through
special education. So right now when I work with our school psychologists and identify a student whose clearly their executive functioning challenges are impacting their ability to show up in the classroom and do their best work, if that family doesn't have access to taking their child to a doctor and getting a medical diagnosis. With adhd, there's really not much a school psychologist can do in terms of adding mandated
supports for that student. So I think in some ways the field of psychology is ADHD is kind of like the wild, wild west, and we're just catching up. So I hope to see change there. But that's sort of a smaller thing I think could be more easily fixed in the short term. Thank you. Well, Hannah, Laurie, Amy, thank you so much for being with us today. This was a great conversation, a great project that you have, and I look forward to seeing that polish around. Thank you for having me.
Thank you so much. Much. Thank you for listening to Dive In. I hope you learned from this episode as much as I did. Please help us to spread the word about the show. See you next time.