Teaching (dis)abled: Reflections on teaching, learning, power, and classroom community

Green, Nicole E. (2010). Teaching (dis)abled: Reflections on teaching, learning, power, and classroom community. English Journal, 100(2), 86-92.

The author shares her journey as a visually impaired student, teacher, and graduate student. She openly tells readers about times when others discriminated against her and threw barriers in her way, as well as about other times when some people showed openness, sensitivity, and willingness to help her find her way as a learner. The key point Green makes is that we all can learn from one another, and forming a learning community is an important way to make that happen. That means teachers can learn from students as well as students learning from teachers. Green points out that a disability makes the traditional authoritarian roles difficult to maintain, thus opening the door to a more collaborative context.

I selected and read this article with some amount of personal interest. I am a career educator who also has recently been diagnosed with a progressively disabling medical condition. At this time, I am still fighting to maintain my career and “keep all the balls in the air.” I related well to some of the problems Green relates, especially when she writes about low expectations (which can both discourage and motivate), the time it now takes me to complete what used to be simple teaching tasks like grading papers , the absolute terror that one will not meet the expectations that people have of teachers, and worry about how best to “come out” or even if one should do so. I have come out to my colleagues and supervisors, but not officially to my students yet. Some of it is fear of losing my identity as their teacher, and some of it is just a desire to keep things private and not risk making my courses all about me and my disability rather than about learning. I am trying to consider what both I and my future teacher students could learn from my coming out. Green would probably tell me I should, that coming out would break down barriers and provide for learning opportunities all around. Green, however, has had time to get used to all this. Unlike me, she has been disabled her whole life, and her story clearly shows how she arrived at her own identity and developed her own sense of self-advocacy. I have only been at this disability thing for a year or so, and I haven’t figured it out yet by any means.

Green provides some poignant vignettes that will stay with me. My favorite is the one where she sat in on a student’s IEP meeting and noticed that no one was actually talking to the student, who was in the room. Everyone was shocked (the student pleasantly so) when Green began talking directly to the student, using second-person pronouns instead of third-person pronouns. What a moment! I wonder if there are any moments of revelation like that for me to share with preservice teachers?