Enacting Critical Special Education through Harm Reduction in Teacher Education

2026-03-11

Teacher education is often positioned as the solution to educational inequities, yet preparing teachers to support students with disabilities remains deeply constrained by ableist structures within special education. Disability Studies in Education (DSE) offers a transformative framework that rejects deficit models and centers the voices, rights, and strengths of disabled people. However, DSE’s distance from licensure systems and practitioner preparation has limited its reach into teacher education. This chapter introduces Critical Special Education (CSE) as a harm reduction approach that bridges DSE ideals with the realities of special education practice. We situate CSE in relation to DSE’s tenets, explore how ableism produces ongoing harm, and illustrate enactments of CSE in both preservice and in-service teacher education. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate how educators can critically navigate compliance-driven systems while working to mitigate harm, disrupt deficit discourses, and move toward more inclusive, humanizing, and justice-oriented teaching for students with disabilities.

Critical Special Education: Navigating Special Education Realities and Working Toward the Ideals of Disability Studies in Education

Exceptional Children · 2025-05-08 · 2 citations

There are two divergent perspectives about how best to understand and serve students with disabilities: Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education. These fields represent distinct epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical ways of understanding education for students with disabilities. Researchers, teachers, and teacher educators are faced with navigating these polarized fields while trying to articulate their own professional identity. Unfortunately, neither perspective alone addresses both the practicalities of navigating existing structures, policies, and practices, and the visionary anti-ableist ideals that will meaningfully address inequities for students with disabilities. In this conceptual paper we offer an alternative, a Critical Special Education framework, which represents the continuum between the two fields. We describe the siloing of Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education, identify the need for an alternative, and outline the tenets of Critical Special Education. This framework leverages aspects of the existing special education structures to reduce harm in the here and now, while simultaneously striving toward the ideals of Disability Studies in Education and creating more just and humanizing education for students with disabilities.

Students’ Perceptions of Different Grading Systems in Higher Education

College Teaching · 2024-06-22

Understanding students' perspectives of grading policies and practices in higher education is necessary for creating equitable learning experiences that support a variety of learners. Through a researcher-made survey, students (n = 56) reported how their course instructors' grading policies related to perceptions of student agency, emotional health, and content learning. Instructors of those courses utilized one of three approaches: traditional (e.g., points and letter grade systems), alternative (e.g., ungrading, removal of points and letters), or blended (i.e., a combination of traditional and alternative grading approaches). We analyzed students' responses using a Universal Design for Instruction framework. Students perceived there to be benefits and challenges to all approaches, further demonstrating that designing a grading system is complex and a necessary consideration during course planning and preparation for increased student equity and agency.

Teachers’ Views of the Mathematical Capabilities of Students With Disabilities: A Mixed Methods Study

Teachers College Record The Voice of Scholarship in Education · 2023-02-01 · 2 citations

Background/Context: Most students with disabilities receive the majority of their instruction in general education classrooms. Yet, general education teachers persistently describe feeling unprepared to academically support students with disabilities in those spaces. Because disabled students are typically excluded from mathematics education research, and because special education researchers typically describe mathematics teaching and learning in ways that are incongruent with ambitious mathematics instruction, there is arguably a lack of guidance for these teachers. In the absence of clear guidance, teachers may turn to the well-established mathematical ability hierarchy, which positions disabled students (among others) as less capable. Purpose/Objective/Research Question/Focus of Study: The purpose of this study was to uncover teachers’ talk about the mathematical capabilities of students with (and without) disabilities. Existing coding schemes (perhaps inadvertently) treat teachers’ views as uniform across students despite evidence that teachers hold different views of different students, in part because of the multiple and varied identities that students bring to the classroom. By using an adapted interview protocol, which yielded more (and more nuanced) analytic categories, I foregrounded students’ disability status as a factor that could relate to differences in teachers’ conceptions of who they view as mathematically capable. Research Design: I interviewed general education mathematics teachers ( N = 20) about their students ( n = 407) using an adapted version of Jackson et al.’s (2017) semi-structured protocol that focused on uncovering teachers’ usages of diagnostic and prognostic frames. I used open and concept coding to develop an expanded version of Jackson et al.’s coding scheme and then applied the new coding framework to the entire data set. I used student demographic data to compare within-group percentages, noticing to what degree students with disabilities were represented within particular qualitative categories in relation to their representation within the entire data set. I also used transformed data to estimate two multinomial logistic regressions: one that used diagnostic frames as the outcome variable, and one that used prognostic frames as the outcome variable. Both models used students’ disability status and teacher dummy codes as predictor variables. Conclusions/Recommendations: The majority of teachers in this sample explained mathematical struggle in unproductive terms and said they would aim instructional adjustment at unproductive outcomes for students with and without disabilities. However, students with disabilities were overrepresented in unproductive categories and underrepresented in productive categories in relation to both diagnostic and prognostic frames. Regression analyses indicated that a student was statistically less likely to get a productive diagnostic or prognostic frame if they had a disability label. Findings from this study highlight the necessity of including teachers’ views of their students’ mathematical capabilities in instructional improvement efforts. Second, they indicate that student-level factors, such as disability status, relate to qualitatively and quantitatively meaningful differences in teachers’ views of their students, suggesting the importance of attending to broader narratives around constructs that may be associated with teachers’ views, and the subsequent enactment of those views, in mathematics instruction.

Perceptions of autonomy: Differential job satisfaction for general and special educators using a nationally representative dataset

Teaching and Teacher Education · 2023-01-08 · 14 citations

Understanding how general and special education teachers perceive autonomy has been linked to job satisfaction and increased student outcomes. The current research investigated the interaction between teacher autonomy and teacher type on teacher job satisfaction using a nationally representative dataset. The study included approximately 22,850 teachers from 4,620 public schools, representing a weighted sample of 2.38 million teachers. Results from multilevel modeling found that special education teachers may be less sensitive to changes in classroom autonomy compared to general educators. Implications for research and practice are provided.

Investigating race consciousness within teachers’ and leaders’ visions of equitable mathematics instruction in the U.S.

Prometeica - Revista de Filosofía y Ciencias · 2023-07-26

We report on an effort to characterize (changes in) teachers’ and school and district leaders’ race consciousness within their visions of equitable mathematics instruction. We analyzed interviews conducted over multiple years within a project in an urban school district in the U.S. that focused on racism and racial equity in secondary mathematics and included multi-week professional learning opportunities for teachers during the months between school years. Our analysis yielded a 4-level trajectory modelling the development of race consciousness in participants’ discourse. Distinctions across levels pertain to the presence of race in individuals’ discourse, the directness with which they talk about race, and the extent to which they locate sources of an historical accumulation of racial inequity within systems.

Weekly Versus Intermittent Progress Monitoring in Mathematics: A Conceptual Replication and Pilot Study

Assessment for Effective Intervention · 2022-11-03

Replication studies in special education are necessary to strengthen the foundation upon which instruction and intervention for students with disabilities are built. J. Jenkins et al. (2017) found intermittent reading fluency progress monitoring schedules did not delay decision-making and were similar in decision-making accuracy to the traditional weekly progress monitoring schedule. Results of the current pilot study, although underpowered, conceptually replicated the original claims and extended their work by investigating their questions in the area of mathematics computation. Implications for research and practice are shared.

How to Structure and Intensify Mathematics Intervention

Beyond Behavior · 2022-02-08 · 9 citations

Many students who experience difficulty with mathematics may also require behavioral support. We suggest educators create an appropriate scope and sequence for mathematics intervention by focusing on the critical mathematics content. Educators can then design the intervention with a common session structure. Finally, educators can embed and intensify supports for a student by increasing the dosage, focusing on the alignment of the intervention, and attending to transfer.

“You Must Become a Chameleon to Survive”: Adolescent Experiences of Camouflaging

Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders · 2021 · 96 citations

• Psychology
• Developmental psychology
• Clinical psychology

A Systematic Review of Mathematics Interventions for Middle–School Students Experiencing Mathematics Difficulty

Learning Disabilities Research and Practice · 2021 · 24 citations

• Mathematics education
• Psychology
• Mathematics

In this systematic review, we explored mathematics interventions for middle school (Grades 6, 7, and 8) implemented with students who experienced difficulty in the area of mathematics, including students with an identified learning disability in mathematics. A total of 72 single–subject and group comparison studies met inclusion criteria, with 59 studies demonstrating positive effects on student–level mathematics outcomes. The majority of mathematics interventions focused on foundational, prealgebraic skills (e.g., operations and problem solving) related to algebraic reasoning. To understand the landscape of effective mathematics interventions and inform instruction within mathematics intervention, we identified six instructional components used with regularity within the effective studies. These components included explicit instruction, multiple representations, problem–solving instruction, mathematical language, mnemonics, and graphic organizers.