Cripping Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Celebrating Disability Identity, Community, and Culture in Schools

Abstract

There is a broad disconnect between the beauty cultivated by disabled communities and the ways in which schools continue to position disability as a problem that resides in the individual student. To shift conceptions of disability in schools, there is a significant need to educate folks about disability history and pride, especially disabled students who are those most impacted by ableist educational institutions. In this study, I sought to design and implement a classroom curriculum that fostered authenticity, pride, and joy in disability identity, community, and culture in school. I drew upon academic and activist frameworks to conceptualize Cripping Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (Cripping CSP), a multifaceted approach to uplift and sustain disability identity, community, and culture in school. Cripping CSP was used to design and implement a Disability Justice in Schools (DJS) unit with high school students who have a range of disability identities and classifications. The DJS unit was co-taught by two disabled educators and incorporated a variety of arts-based activities exploring disability identity, community, and culture in schools. Throughout the DJS unit, youth were invited to reflect on their personal experiences of disability and ableism in school, work in cross-disability collaborations, and co-create artwork that illustrated their dreams for realizing the principles of Disability Justice (Sins Invalid, 2019) in school contexts. Based on analysis of classroom observations, student-generated classwork and artwork, and optional student interviews, this dissertation demonstrated (1) how disabled youth made sense of their own disability identity alongside Disability Justice more broadly, (2) how disabled youth engaged in disability community by navigating cross-disability collaborations, and (3) how disabled youth embody and expand the framework of Cripping CSP. This study contributes to theoretical, methodological, and practical shifts in the ways that disabled ways of knowing and being are centered and celebrated schools and in educational research.