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. They were 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. Literacy and teaching are both cultural practices: what counts as reading, and who counts as a reader, is settled in what people do together in classrooms. So what teachers understand about literacy and disability is learned, and it can be relearned.

My research asks three questions. Where do teachers’ understandings of literacy and disability come from? How do those understandings show up when teachers plan and teach reading and writing? And how can professional learning be designed so that teachers can examine and change them? Critical reflection is my answer to the third: a collective practice in which teachers trace their understandings to their sources and redesign their instruction.

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. I bring it into conversation with cultural psychology, the learning sciences, and decolonial theory, which asks whose knowledge, language, and ways of reading are counted. 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.

None of this argues against explicit, systematic reading instruction, which has strong evidence behind it. I study what happens next: how reading research is turned into tools, routines, and decisions about children, and what teachers do with them.

Literacy outcomes carry consequences for graduation, employment, and self-determination. Changing them means changing how literacy instruction is organized, and teachers are the people positioned to do it. To study that work, I design qualitative methods that make teachers’ histories and their reflection visible. My research 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.