Disabled Youth's Cultural Ways of Knowing and Doing in Special Education: Implications and Strategies

Abstract

As section leader of the ‘diversity/multicultural’ portion of the International Handbook of Special Education: Implications and Strategies, I have spent considerable time reflecting on the conceptualization of disability at the intersections of multiple non-dominant identity markers in relation to strategies benefiting disabled youth. My reflections have been heavily influenced by Waitoller and Thorius’s (2022) critical scholarship on centering and sustaining disabled youth’s assets within educational spaces. Their work alongside the scholarship of those with multiple intersectional identities (e.g., scholars of Color, disabled scholars, disabled scholars of Color), has supported an evolution of thinking around difference encapsulated in two main ideas: a) disability is part of the fabric of human variance encompassing identity formation, a connection to disability culture/s and communities, and a way of knowing that is contributive, beneficial, and evolving and (b) disability can be located as a counterhegemonic construct to disrupt “normalcy and its location in the bodies and minds of those with dominant identity markers” (Thorius, 2019, p. 212).