Disability studies and assistive technology are two related fields that have long shared common goals - understanding the experience of disability and identifying and addressing relevant issues. Despite these common goals, there are some important differences in what professionals in these fields consider problems, perhaps related to the lack of connection between the fields. To help bridge this gap, we review some of the key literature in disability studies. We present case studies of two research projects in assistive technology and discuss how the field of disability studies influenced that work, led us to identify new or different problems relevant to the field of assistive technology, and helped us to think in new ways about the research process and its impact on the experiences of individuals who live with disability. We also discuss how the field of disability studies has influenced our teaching and highlight some of the key publications and publication venues from which our community may want to draw more deeply in the future.

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Disability studies as a source of critical inquiry for the field of assistive technology

What does it mean to foreground social justice in our thinking about education? It has become increasingly common for education scholars to claim a social justice orientation in their work (Adams, Bell, & Griffin, 1997; Ayers, Hunt, & Quinn, 1998; Darling-Hammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002; Marshall & Oliva, 2006; Michelli & Keiser, 2005). At the same time, education programs seem to be adding statements about the importance of social justice to their mission, and a growing number of teacher education programs are fundamentally oriented around a vision of social justice (see, for example, Darling-Hammond, French, & Garcia-Lopez, 2002; McDonald, 2005; Zollers, Albert, & Cochran-Smith, 2000). Murphy (1999) names social justice as one of "three powerful synthesizing paradigms" (p. 54) in educational leadership while Zeichner (2003) offers it as one of three major approaches to teacher education reform. The phrase social justice is used in school mission statements, job announcements, and educational reform proposals, though sometimes widely disparate ones, from creating a vision of culturally responsive schools to leaving no child behind. Despite all the talk about social justice of late, it is often unclear in any practical terms what we mean when we invoke a vision of social justice or how this influences such issues as program development, curricula, practicum opportunities, educational philosophy, social vision, and activist work. In the abstract, it is an idea that it hard to be against. After all, we learn to pledge allegiance to a country that supposedly stands for "liberty and justice for all." Yet the more we see people invoking the idea of social justice, the less clear it becomes what people mean, and if it is meaningful at all. When an idea can refer to almost anything, it loses its critical purchase, especially an idea that clearly has such significant political dimensions. In fact, at the same time that we are seeing this term in so many places, we are also seeing a backlash against it; for example, just recently the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education removed social justice language from its accrediting standards because of its controversial, ambiguous, and ideologically weighted nature (Wasley, 2006). Among the critiques, education that is grounded on a commitment to justice and the cultivation of democratic citizenship "is increasingly seen as superfluous, complicating, and even threatening by some policy makers and pressure groups who increasingly see any curriculum not tied to basic literacy or numeracy as disposable and inappropriate" (Michelli & Keiser, 2005, p. xix). Despite some of the current confusion and tensions, there is a long history in the United States of educators who foreground social justice issues in their work and who argue passionately for their centrality to schooling in a democratic society. We see this in a variety of places, for example in Counts' (1932) call for teachers to build a new social order, in Dewey's work on grounding education in a rich and participatory vision of democracy, and in the work of critical pedagogues and multicultural scholars to create educational environments that empower historically marginalized people, that challenge inequitable social arrangements and institutions, and that offer strategies and visions for creating a more just world. Describing education for social justice, Bell (1997) characterizes it as "both a process and a goal" with the ultimate aim being "full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is mutually shaped to meet their needs" (p. 3). Hackman (2005) writes that "social justice education encourages students to take an active role in their own education and supports teachers in creating empowering, democratic, and critical educational environments" (p. 103). Murrell (2006) argues that social justice involves "a disposition toward recognizing and eradicating all forms of oppression and differential treatment extant in the practices and policies of institutions, as well as a fealty to participatory democracy as the means of this action" (p. …

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Understanding Education for Social Justice.

Schools in America are facing rapidly changing demographics, and because of those changing demographics, this article makes the following propositions. First, the increasing demographic changes in urban schools demand new leadership approaches. Second, because many of the urban educational demands are shaped by ongoing social and cultural issues for addressing needs of African American students, perhaps the answer to leadership changes lies in African American culture. Third, and finally, one possible feature of the African American culture, the application of personal spirituality to community issues of social change and social justice, may provide a direction for educational leadership. The purpose of this article is to propose a theoretical base for reforming educational leadership in demographically changing public schools. With critical theory and antifoundational tenets of pragmatic thinking and postmodern thought interrogating the traditional canon of educational administration, educational leadership has had to, even if reluctantly, include voices of alternative perspectives into its discourse. This essay applies Cornel West’s notions of prophetic pragmatism along with the tenets of African American spirituality to serve as the foundation for this progressive transformation of leadership especially in urban schools.

African American Spirituality and Cornel West’s Notions of Prophetic Pragmatism: Restructuring Educational Leadership in American Urban Schools

This article reports on research with one Black male elementary school teacher in Toronto and draws on feminist, queer, and antiracist analytic perspectives to raise important questions about the discourse of teachers as role models. The voice of this teacher is used to challenge discourses about role modeling in their capacity to address adequately the limits imposed by both cultural and structural problems experienced by minority boys in urban school communities. Important questions about the role of teachers as transformative or organic intellectuals are also raised. A case study approach is employed to draw attention to both important pedagogical issues and the limits of role modeling as a conceptual framework that continues to be used to support generalizable claims about the influence of male teachers on the basis of their gender and racial affiliation with boys in schools. What is required, the authors conclude, is a disarticulation and, hence, a separating out of role modeling from a discussion ab...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/40645418.pdf

Black Male Teachers as Role Models: Resisting the Homogenizing Impulse of Gender and Racial Affiliation:

Socioliteracy, meaning concern with practices, genre, and ideologies, has arguably displaced decoding orthographic writing in the mainstream of literacy theory and research. However, this shift has engendered disagreements about the meaning of literacy itself. Whereas some theorists take the Multiliteracies view that all forms of communication can be considered literacy, others require involvement of written language or, alternatively, education-dependent genres. The present study supports the Multiliteracies definition by exploring an oral vernacular genre, the rap cipher—improvised round-robin rhyming— which fails both proposed delimiting criteria, as literacy. The study explores a young inner-city rap crew’s ciphers using the kind of ethnography and genre analysis typical of socioliteracy research. It finds that the practices and forms of the ciphers are tightly bound up with their creators’ ideologies and that when holders of incompatible ideologies interact in rap, generic conflict results. Since such findings directly parallel those of numerous literacy studies of written and educational forms, they suggest that similar processes occur across modalities and domains. This conclusion suggests that it may be useful to conceptualize literacy as a particular perspective on communicative forms rather than as an inherent quality of certain forms.

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Rap as literacy: A genre analysis of Hip-Hop ciphers

Introduction Promises to Keep: Cultural Studies, Democratic Education, and Public Life D. Carlson & G. Dimitriadis Part 1. Education and the New Cultural Terrain 1. The Globalization of Capitalism and the New Imperialism: Notes Towards a Revolutionary Critical Pedagogy P. McLaren & R. Farahmandpur 2. Civic Society and the Educational Publics: Possibilities and Problems K. Abowtiz 3. Extraordinary Conversations in Public Schools L. Weis & M. Fine 4/ A Talk to Teachers: James Baldwin as Postcolonial Artist and Public Intellectual G. Dimitriadis & C. McCarthy 5. Promises to Keep, Finally? Academic Culture and the Dismissal of Popular Culture J. A Weaver & T. Daspit Part 2. Reimagining Curriculum and Pedagogical Practice 6. Stan Douglas and the Aesthetic Critique of Urban Decline W. Crichlow 7. Screening Race N. Denzin 8. Troubling Heroes: Of Rosa Parks Multicultural Education and Pedagogy D. Carlson 9. The Symbolic Curriculum: Reading the Confederate Flag as Southern Heritage Text S. Schramm-Pate & D. Carlson 10. Urban Education, Broadcast News and Multicultural Spectatorship S. Henke 11. 'They Need Someone to Show them Discipline': Pre-Service Teachers' Understandings and Expectations of Student (Re)presentations in Dangerous Minds D. Freedman 12. Schooling in Capitalist America: Theater of the Oppressor and the Oppressed? C. Torres

Promises to keep : cultural studies, democratic education, and public life

How not to speak, today, of the university? ... it is impossible, now more than ever, to dissociate the work we do, within one discipline or several, from a reflection on the political and institutional conditions of that work. --Jacques Derrida, "The Principle of Reason: The university in the Eyes of Its Pupils," 2004, p.129 The introduction to a lecture presented at Cornell University in 1982, Derrida's epigraph captures a key tension in the American university, and more particularly in schools and colleges of education, in the age of "No Child Left Behind." How do progressives in the academy keep the vision of what democratic education could be alive when they are under pressure to align their research and scholarship with reform discourses and practices that are reductionistic and dehumanizing, that both produce and legitimate inequality, and that disempower and de-skill teachers? For Derrida--and we concur--these are risky times, in which resistance to power "risks the worst" (Derrida, 2004, p.153). The worst is that resistance might make progressive scholars, and their research and scholarship, even more marginal and isolated, and lead to a further decline in their influence over the professional education of teachers. Yet, as Derrida warns us, unless we are willing to take the risk of resisting dominant discourses of reform in both the academy and the public schools, the university (and schools and colleges of education) may be in ruins--at least as institutions of democratic culture and public life. In such risky times, Derrida calls upon university faculty (and we would extend this to all public educators and cultural workers) to respond by assuming responsibility. To assume responsibility is to commit oneself to a response, in this case the response of being responsible for the future of the university as a public institution, and being responsible for keeping the promise of democratic education and public life in a profoundly new and unsettling time. Such a response must reaffirm the university's commitment to all types of research and scholarship (including those not considered legitimate in the eyes of policymakers and administrative elites); it must defend forms of pedagogy that engage young people in a deconstructive and reconstructive reading of cultural texts; it must cross disciplinary and other boundaries; and it must be involved in helping build and sustain diverse social movements organized around progressive cultural and educational politics. One response that shows some promise of doing all of this, at least potentially, has taken the form of cultural studies. Over the past decade or so, cultural studies perspectives have had a major impact on both the curriculum field and the "foundations" of education, and in some powerful ways have begun to rupture the borders that separate diverse forms of critical and progressive-minded research and scholarship in education. While some still defend the sanctity of the traditional borders and boundaries that define "fields" within education, guarding stringently against disciplinary interlopers, cultural studies offers a more expansive disposition toward scholarship. In its interdisciplinary scope, cultural studies shares much with the field of education more broadly. Like many other fields within education, the cultural studies of education "borrows" many of its theories from other disciplines. In our view, this is not a weakness but a strength. Such borrowing requires us to think outside the limits of our own fields, encouraging us to read widely and draw upon what is available in diverse theoretical and research traditions when it is useful. Making unpredictable connections across intellectual domains is risky. In particular, we risk our own disciplinary authority and control at a time when university terrain is shrinking. But once more, this is exactly what Derrida asks us to do--to risk unsettling all foundations under our feet, to not be governed and regulated by the disciplinary boundaries meant to define and divide us, to step out of well-worn conventions and modes of understanding. …

Greg Dimitriadis

Papers

Promises to keep : cultural studies, democratic education, and public life

The Cultural Studies of Education: Introduction to a Special Issue of Journal of Curriculum Theorizing

“They Need Someone to Show Them Discipline”: Preservice Teachers’ Understandings and Expectations of Student (Re) presentations in Dangerous Minds

Hip (Hop) Pedagogies and Youth Cultures