Year: 2019
Type: dissertation
Abstract: This work addresses how encounters between teachers, students and the researcher within segregated special needs classrooms both perpetuate and resist the normalizing narrative of schooling. In this study, I aim to demonstrate how subjectivities, onto-epistemologies and varying embodiments impress upon one another in ways that both shape and refuse to shape our relationships. My participatory classroom exploration took place during 15 weekly visits (Fall 2017) in a Primary Learning Disability (LD) class and a Primary Mild Intellectual Delay (MID) class at “Up North Public School.” Guided by disability studies, post-structural feminisms decolonial studies as well as postcolonial studies, I make a case for a methodology I refer to in this study as reading and being read in disabling ways. The intent here is to explore inhabiting our interpretive relationships with each other differently amidst disability through telling stories embedded in everyday classroom moments between teachers and students. In Part I of this study, I outline the theoretical and methodological orientations that allowed for my reflexive relations to my participant observations within two segregated special education classrooms. Part II addresses the ‘who’ (subjectivities), Part III addresses the ‘what’ (knowledges both vocal and silent), and Part IV addresses the ‘where’ (embodied and contextualized relations). By contending that disability impresses in ways that continue to challenge and transform, my study contributes to a much-needed critical engagement regarding what it means to teach and learn as we reimagine our conception of becoming human amidst disability.
Source: TSpace (University of Toronto)
Author: Maria Karmiris
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2962738693