Contemplating Dis/Ability in Schools and Society

This book chronicles the professional life of a career-long inclusive educator in New York City through eight different stages of his career in special and general education. Chapters reflect a chronological trajectory. The unprepared rookie teacher who flounders but learns through trial and error. The optimistic professional development specialist intent on supporting teachers to help students. The driven doctoral student who engages with the complexities of educational history and theories. The flexible teacher coach returning to full time work with teachers in two unique and contrasting schools. The over-stretched college professor striving to prepare large numbers of teachers to enter public school system. The critical scholar who participates in a small but growing movement to present alternative understandings of how we conceptualize differences among students. The hopeful doctoral faculty member who seeks to explore ways of improving teacher education programs. The reluctant university department chairperson managing the day-to-day operations designed to prepare teachers for certification and a life of teaching.

Developing a new approach to research as part of qualitative methodology, the author merges the academic genre of autoethnography with memoir to create a narrative that seeks to engage the reader through stories of personal experiences within the profession that politicized him as an educator. After each chapter's narrative, a systematic analytic commentary follows that focuses upon: teaching and learning in schools and universities; the influence of educational laws; specific models of disability and how influence educators and educational researchers; educational structures and systems-and their impact on social, political, and cultural experiences of people with disabilities.

Through the lived experience of a career-long educator, this autoethnographic memoir documents for three decades the relationship between special and general education, the growth of the inclusion movement, and the challenge of special education as a discrete academic field. As part of a national group of critical special educators, the author describes the growth of counter-theory through the inception and subsequent growth of Disability Studies in Education (DSE) as a viable academic field, and the importance of rethinking human differences in new ways.