Inclusive and Rigorous Literacy Instruction for All

I spent years as a special education teacher in New York City and Kansas City public schools, working with students who struggled with learning to read and write. What I saw again and again was that a student's trajectory depended on how the adults around them had come to understand who that student was as a reader and writer. Those understandings felt objective and neutral to the teachers who held them. They were neither.

Teachers make sense of struggling readers within systems much larger than themselves. This is a core insight of disability studies, the field in which my work is rooted. Disability studies understands disability not as a fixed fact about an individual student, but as a category that schools and societies create through the meanings they attach to human differences and the institutions they build around them. Where special education has traditionally asked how to identify and remediate a student’s difficulties, disability studies asks how those difficulties came to be defined, by whom, and with what consequences. From this vantage point, teachers’ understandings are mediated by histories of disability categorization, by the labels and sorting mechanisms schools inherit, and by institutional structures that position teachers and their students in particular ways long before any lesson begins.

My research asks how teachers come to understand literacy learning for students with disabilities, how those understandings are shaped by the cultural-historical systems teachers work within, and how professional learning can become a site where they are transformed.

This matters because literacy outcomes for students with disabilities remain persistently low, with consequences for graduation, employment, and self-determination. Changing those outcomes requires changing the activity systems in which teachers learn to see their students.

My research brings disability studies into conversation with cultural psychology, the learning sciences, and systems change, and is informed by my own experience with disability and my years in the classroom. I design innovative approaches to qualitative inquiry and center the voices of teachers with disabilities in my research.

I study teacher learning because it is a place where humanizing research that captures the lived realities of teachers and students can create change. When educational leaders are supported to see struggling readers differently, and to recognize the systems that taught them to see as they do, rigorous and inclusive literacy instruction becomes possible for all students.