Abstract:

The U.S. government funds technical assistance (TA) centers as a prevailing approach to support schools in remediating racial and disability segregation, yet there is little research on such efforts, and TA has been heavily critiqued for its top-down approaches and neglect of concerns with educational equity. Accordingly, I describe a research study of a TA partnership between a Midwestern State Department of Education and a U.S. Department of Education-funded Equity Assistance Center where I am executive director. In this study, I led a set of professional learning activities over an academic year toward more equitable education systems, particularly for students of color with disabilities who have long been disproportionately represented in special education and experience more punitive discipline as compared to their white and non-disabled counterparts. Engeström's theory of expansive learning (1987) informed my design of this partnership with a team of ten state education administrators in which we sought to understand and address contextual and historical factors that contributed to inequitable opportunities to learn for students at the intersection of race and disability. My data collection included detailed field notes and memos from four day-long professional development sessions with participants, artifacts I designed prior to and co-developed with participants during these sessions (powerpoints, handouts, readings, etc), and recorded reflections on the nature and impact of the partnership from a set of eight pre- and post-session phone calls with a subset of three study participants. I analyzed these data through a process of open coding and member-checking and found four overarching functions of professional development activities informed by expansive learning and that participants described as instrumental in expanding their goals from the narrowly technical focus of increased reading achievement toward addressing long-standing systemic inequities in access to high-quality, culturally responsive, and universally designed literacy education. Participants indicated the value of TA that explicitly: 1) mediates educators’ encounters with the residue of eugenics in the sorting of students by race and ability (e.g. segregated classes, reliance on IQ testing); 2) evokes educators’ identification of white racism/and non-disabled ableism in everyday practice (e.g., assumptions about students' families); 3) illuminates the undercurrents of white supremacy and ableism in educators beliefs about themselves and their students (e.g., educators’ identities as patient and expert helpers on the basis of their knowledge of the relationship between students’ disability labels and skill-deficits); and 4) document educators’ deficit discourse about students of color/with disabilities (e.g., newspaper editorials describing students’ “poor, broken homes”). In the current work, I focus on the first three steps of an expansive learning cycle to show how introduction of purposeful artifacts into this partnership brought this group of educators in contact with contradictions between their expressed goals of eliminating school segregation and pathologization of children’s differences at the intersection of race and disability. In turn, such contradictions created disturbances in current policies, practices, and beliefs as learning opportunities for educators toward more equitable and inclusive education for students of color/with disabilities.

Keywords:

Special education, race, disability, cultural historical activity theory, technical assistance.