Critical Reflection for Inclusive Literacy Instruction

I spent years as a special education teacher in New York City and Kansas City public schools, working with students who struggled with learning to read and write. What I saw again and again was that a student’s trajectory depended on how the school had come to understand who that student was as a reader and writer. Those understandings felt objective and neutral. They were neither. These understandings are produced through the assessments, labels, curricula, and routines that teachers inherit, each carrying a history of who was sorted where, and why.

I study how teachers learn. Teaching is a culturally and historically rooted practice, so what teachers understand about literacy and disability is learned and can be relearned. My research asks how teachers come to recognize the histories carried in the everyday practices of literacy instruction for students with disabilities, and how they can redesign those practices. Critical reflection is the practice at the center of this work: a collective activity through which teachers examine where their understandings came from and revise them.

I approach literacy as a cultural practice. What counts as reading, and who counts as a reader, is settled in what people do together in classrooms. Teaching is a cultural practice too. Teachers’ understandings of literacy and disability are learned, and what is learned can be relearned.

My work is rooted in critical disability studies, which understands disability as a category that schools and societies create through the meanings they attach to human differences and the institutions they build around them. From this vantage point, persistently low literacy outcomes are a product of how instruction has been organized. They are not a fact about students, and they are not a failing of individual teachers.

This matters because literacy outcomes carry consequences for graduation, employment, and self-determination. Changing them requires changing the activity systems in which literacy is taught, and teachers are the people positioned to do it.

I bring critical disability studies into conversation with cultural psychology and the learning sciences, and I draw on decolonial theory as one lens for asking whose knowledge, language, and ways of reading are counted. I design new qualitative methods for making reflection visible as it happens. My work is informed by my own experience with disability and my years in the classroom.

When teachers can read the history in their own practice, they gain the authority to change it, and rigorous and inclusive literacy instruction becomes possible for all students.