Cultivating Pedagogical Resistance through Critical Inquiry: Developing Teacher Leadership for Critical Inclusion

Abstract

Without critical professional development opportunities, teacher leaders, such as coaches, can sustain the exclusion and marginalization of disabled and multiply marginalized students of color. This is exemplified through the persistence of segregated special education classrooms and the ongoing disproportionate assignment of students of color to these settings. Inclusive education reform often focuses narrowly on the physical inclusion of disabled students and therefore lacks the necessary intersectional justice-oriented lens needed to disrupt this long-standing harm. Critical professional development, however, can support coaches working in such reform contexts to cultivate the collective power and practices needed to both recognize and disrupt these historical patterns of intersectional educational injustice. This year-long participatory multiple case study explored how one group of inclusive education coaches engaged in critical inquiry to work towards more just and inclusive schools in their district. Through a conceptual framing of pedagogical resistance grounded in Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit), the findings of this study suggest that such critical professional development for inclusive education can support teacher leaders’ engagement in pedagogical resistance, including (1) problematizing and deconstructing inclusive education; (2) exploring teacher leader roles, identities, and agency; and (3) practicing pedagogical resistance through the co-creation and use of collaborative pedagogical structures and tools.