Introduction: The Birth of Disability Studies in Education

When I began my career as a special education teacher in 1987, I was immediately taken aback by how public schools were configured, and the forceful justification to separate education into two realms, general and special. Labels used such as learning disability (LD) and emotional disturbance (ED), and terms such as "co-morbidity" of disabilities such as LD and ED combined, were used to determine the physical location, class type placement, forms of instruction, and teachers for disabled students. In brief, I recognized that the structural systems and cultural practices within education tended to further actively disable children who already struggled to succeed in schools. As a new teacher, it seemed to me that schools were overwhelming, oppressive places driven in part by a narrow, rigid understanding of human differences.

Everything pertaining to the combined concepts of disability and education was unquestioningly funneled into the default box of special education. Special education, therefore, was an unquestionable reality. It existed as evidenced through laws, institutional certifications, academic degrees, teacher training programs, administrators, school organizations, professionals, textbooks, research, and so on. However, this "reality" disturbed me profoundly and questions constantly arose. Could there be two types of people in the world—disabled and nondisabled? How could we be one hundred percent sure? And, even if this was true, why did they have to be segregated in schools from one another in dis/ability-apartheid? The youth I taught were largely from poor or working class families, some immigrant, almost all children of color. I never saw them "mirrored" or represented in professional literature; special education journals were filled with tables and charts that did not make much sense to me, but sounded authoritative. In brief, from the moment I began there was great dissonance between the established, academic field of special education and the lived reality of those who functioned within it on a daily basis, both students and professionals.

I reconciled myself to working in what I saw as an unjust system, intolerant of students who could not fit into the mold required in schools, and so instead, I focused my energy upon supporting inclusive education—the poorly articulated trend that still seemed rich in promise. Tellingly, however, at the same time, I noticed a significant level of resistance within the field of special education toward the inclusion of students with disabilities (Kauffman & Hallahan, 1995; Fuchs & Fuchs, 1995), and found such a stance antithetical to the desires of most people with disabilities (Fleischer & Zames, 2001). It was then I realized that the field of special education was not a reality per se, but rather a largely unquestioned monopoly of thought that had influenced how children with certain differences—be they physical, cognitive, emotional, sensory—were conceptualized. The trouble, in a nutshell, was that special education was predicated on a deficit-based model and always focused on the disability to the point that it symbolized the entire child. The complexities of all other aspects of identity, experience, and context that showed a three-dimensional, multi-faceted human being were a distant second to the primary interest of disability. Indeed, the disability served as the most single important determination of the child's experience in school—building location, curriculum, teacher, level of additional services and so on. Even then, I noticed many professionals seemed more concerned with issues of legal compliance rather than the actual lives of children. It seemed like school professionals and researchers alike were going about their business without truly acknowledging the lived realities of the children, youth and families whose best interests they claimed were at heart.

Coming to Know Disability Studies in Education

While Disability Studies had grown as an interdisciplinary academic field of inquiry since the 1980s, Disability Studies in Education is a relatively new phenomenon. I initially came into contact with it during my doctoral program and immediately found a "home" that reflected my long-held beliefs about human differences that were not represented within special educational structures, schooling systems, and educational research. I must acknowledge how fortunate I have been in crossing paths with a small constellation of both national and international colleagues who led the way in forging an alternative framework to special education for conceptualizing issues of education and disability. The establishment and growth of DSE has kept me grounded, informed, hopeful, equipped, motivated, and challenged in terms of how to best help educators to educate children with diverse abilities. DSE has done this through being applied to, and pushing the boundaries of, existing research, theory, practice, and policy. Propelled by the need to circulate the story of DSE as a means of providing an alternative paradigm to the master-narrative of special education, my colleagues and I have written about its growth in various venues (see, for example: Baglieri, Valle, Connor, & Gallagher, 2010; Connor, Gabel, Gallagher, & Morton, 2008; Connor, Gabel, Owen, & Peters, n.d.; Connor & Gabel, 2013).

Without wishing to be unnecessarily repetitive of previously published accounts, I will recall several key events that triggered the formal establishment of DSE. In 1999 Linda Ware hosted a small international conference funded by the Spencer Foundation to challenge the ways that ideology explicitly and implicitly shaped inclusive education practice and to broaden the critical special education discursive community informed by international scholars of disability 1. Funding was targeted for graduate students' travel to Rochester to join these well-respected scholars in close conversation as most were known only through their writing. Ware's conference extended discussion of ideology and cases of non-recognition through critical examination of exclusion across multiple educational contexts (Ware, 2004). Some months later, Scot Danforth submitted a proposal for a panel to the national conference of TASH (The Association for Severely Handicapped) in Chicago under the name of Coalition for Open Inquiry in Special Education (COISE). The session was titled "Ways of Constructing Lives and Disabilities: The Case for Open Inquiry." His co-presenters included Lous Heshusius, Ellen Brantlinger, Chris Kliewer, and Phil Ferguson. They asked questions such as: Why should a person with a disability, a teacher, or a parent care what academics say in their research and writings? Why should they care about the seemingly distant and esoteric writings in research journals and university textbooks? What is happening in these worlds that makes a difference? The panelists discussed the social and political value of current trends and developments in disability research and scholarship, emphasizing the importance of inquiry and writing for persons concerned with the social valuation and inclusion of persons with disabilities. Arguing for "open inquiry," they urged for expansion and diversification of what was deemed legitimate and valuable writing within special education journals. In addition, they were highly critical of special education's unquestioned acceptance of positivism as the foundational paradigm of the field. Simply put, positivism is a way of doing social science that imitates the ideology and practices of the natural sciences asserting detached objectivity and employing quantitative measurement as ways to find "The Truth." However, as critical special educators were aware of, this "hard science of disability" contributed to a series of unfortunate assumptions in the field of special education, including:

• disability is a primarily bio-physical phenomenon consisting of a deficit condition existing within an individual;
• service professionals know better than persons with disabilities and family members what is best for a served individual;
• diagnosed or labeled individuals should be separated from the mainstream population for purposes of treatment.

In contrast, the panel explored alternative ways of envisioning, talking about, and writing about the lives and possibilities of persons with disabilities including many traditions of scholarship (social science, humanities, arts, spiritual traditions, etc.) and the numerous voices that have something to say about disability issues—in particular international voices convened at Ware's earlier conference. The moment seemed ripe for carving out institutional support and encouraging transgressive perspectives, methodologies, and research.

After much discussion about what the group should be called and with whom it should affiliate—TASH, Council for Exceptional Children (CEC), or the American Education Research Association (AERA)—Susan Gabel and Linda Ware urged affiliation with "Disability Studies." At the same time, Susan informed those assembled that she had already submitted an application with that name to AERA to form a Special Interest Group (SIG), which was approved, and subsequently met for the first time in 2000. Since then, the discipline of Disabilities Studies in Education (DSE) has steadily grown from its "informal" beginnings.

The Annual Disability Studies in Education Conference

The following year, DSE launched its inaugural conference in Chicago hosted by National Louis University. As a doctoral student from Teachers College, Columbia University, I attended and presented with co-researchers from my cohort. It was here that we found like-minded educators who were interested in reconceptualizing disability and education beyond the narrow confines of special education. As a result of the conference success, it became an annual event that helped nurture and grow the emerging field of DSE. It is worth listing the themes of each year to provide readers of DSQ with a sense of how critical special educators have encouraged transgressive perspectives, methodologies, and research and along the way, grappled with their identities as "outsider-insiders" (Connor, 2013).

• 2001 Disability Studies and Education: Critical Reflections on the Themes of Policy, Practice, and Theory, National-Louis University, Chicago, IL.
• 2002 Education, Social Action, and the Politics of Disability, National-Louis University, Chicago, IL.
• 2003 Traversing the Chasm between Disability Studies and Special Education, National-Louis University, Chicago, IL.
• 2004 Reforming, Restructuring, Resisting in Special Education, The Professional Development and Research Institute on Blindness at Louisiana Tech University, Ruston, LA.
• 2005 The 30^th Anniversary of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act and its Impact on American Society, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York, NY.
• 2006 Disability Studies and Inclusive Education: Negotiating Tensions and Integrating Research, Policy, and Practice, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI.
• 2007 Disability Studies and Inclusive Education: Implications for Practice? National-Louis University, Chicago, IL.
• 2008 Mitigating Exclusion: Building Alliances toward Inclusive Education Reform in Pedagogy and Policy, Teachers College, Columbia University, New York City, NY.
• 2009 Righting Education Wrongs: Disability Studies in Education Policy and Law, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY.
• 2010 From "Handicapped Family" to "Partners in Policy": Disability Studies in Education and the Dialogue with Families and Natural Networks, University of Ghent, Belgium.
• 2011 Rethinking Accessibility for the Next Decade of DSE, National-Louis University, Chicago.
• 2012 Contemplating Disability Studies in Education Throughout Life: In School and Beyond, Hunter College, City University of New York, NY.
• 2013 (Re)Imagining and (Re)Building Education for All, University of Christchurch, New Zealand.
• 2014 Learning from the Past. Ensuring the Future, University of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia.

Even the most cursory look at this list reveals a desire for DSE to advance changing education and society as the recurrence of "politics," "policy," "practice," "pedagogy," "inclusion," and "law," conjure a collective stance of critical educators interested in disability who seek to "rethink," "reimagine," and "reform" schools and society. We recognize that the radical change we seek cannot be achieved overnight, but take some satisfaction in creating different ways to understand disability that can be useful in undoing the damage done by limited, self-imposed, and oppressive framings of disability proliferated by the field of special education. Thus, DSE scholars (many of whom also refer to themselves as critical special educators) believe DSE provides social, political, cultural, and historical understandings of disability that reframe how all educators can better understand human differences. By challenging the hegemony of predominantly medical, psychological, and "scientific" knowledge used within special education, scholars in DSE offer different means of understanding and responding to human differences that have come to be signified as disabilities. Such differences are therefore no longer considered an abnormality or aberration; instead, they are seen as normal.

Since 2000, a world-wide network of scholars have published research and position papers, created several book series, guest-edited journals, and developed tenets describing DSE. Their work openly acknowledges the few scholars in special education who went before them to critique an insular, positivistic field at the expense of those it claimed to help (see, for example: Bogden & Biklen, 1977; Bogden & Taylor, 1989; Brantlinger, 1997; Gallagher, 1998; Heshusius, 1989; Iano, 1990; Ferguson & Ferguson, 1995; Peters, 1990; Wang, Reynolds & Walberg, 1986; Danforth & Rhodes, 1997; Skrtic, 1991; Slee & Allan, 2001; Tomlinson, 1987; Ware, 1998). Interestingly, the work of these scholars who existed in relative professional isolation and were often rejected by the field of special education is acknowledged as the foundations of DSE "before it had a name DSE" (Taylor, 2006, p. xiii).

For those of us who have chosen to research, write, present, and publish within DSE while working within the institution of special education, Snyder and Mitchell's comment about institutionalizing disability studies "comes fraught with difficulties in that the field situates itself as a force of destabilization" (2006, p. 192) accurately captures dilemmas unique to our profession that include:

1. To what degree can we transgress within the existing structure of teacher education and doctoral programs without being coopted, or dismissed as too ideological and insufficiently practical?
2. To what degree can we engage (and critique) the field of special education within its journals and at its conferences—to provide a greater plurality of perspectives within them?
3. How can we strategize to widely circulate ideas within DSE throughout education in general and its related fields?

The annual DSE conference has served as a venue to explore these and other important conversations over the past thirteen years. With the help of colleagues in the New York City metropolitan area, I hosted the 2012 conference at my institution, Hunter College, which continues to house a large traditional special education department with category-based programs. However, as a DSE-identified scholar, I believe having this event at my institution has served multiple purposes, including: "forcing" my colleagues to take note of DSE as an established field of study; collaborating with other universities, programs, and projects in the NYC area that are interested in DS and DSE; and last but not least, providing opportunities for a continued dialogue among scholars with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and interests who support—and keep building—a valid alternative to traditional special education. In the following section, I describe the structure of the 2012 conference (www.hunter.cuny.edu/conferences/dse-2012), along with an analysis of the topics presented. Through these sources, the questions listed above can be explored, all subsumed within the larger question: How do we continue to grow DSE? As the conference has always served the ongoing purpose of nurturing and expanding our discipline, it makes for an ideal "site" to analyze in relation to the theme of this special issue of DSQ.

Snapshot of 2012 Conference

The structure of the DSE conference is somewhat different from many other professional conferences. For example, the badges have a person's name and affiliation—but not rank. Regardless of professorial status (emeritus, distinguished, full, associate, or assistant), student level (doctoral, masters, undergraduate), community organization, family member, or interested parties—all are encouraged to talk, sit, and eat together. There are frequent breaks and long lunchtimes to chat informally. In addition, there are "full group" events such as presentations by senior and junior scholars who receive recognition for their work in the field, as well as screenings of documentary films. The 2012 conference listed approximately seventy-five presentations, two film screenings, and time to spotlight our junior and senior scholars. One of the major differences between this and other conferences is the presentation format option. Options include: a full-fledged article, a paper in progress, or a good idea proposed to engage participants that may potentially yield a project. The conference maintains an international following and this year included individuals from Australia, Belgium, New Zealand, South Korea, UK, and the USA.

In the following sections, I provide selected information about the historical context of the conference and thematically describe a selection of presentations as responses to the three questions posed earlier, all subsumed beneath the overarching question: How do we grow DSE?

DSE Facing Forward

Age twelve at the time of initially writing this paper, and now almost fourteen, the DSE conference has grown into adolescence, a time in which contemplation and self-reflection occur in a transitional phase of self-consciousness about one's purpose and identity. Experienced by many as a time of simultaneous hope for the future, insecurity within the present, and a desire to leave past traditions, DSE in adolescence finds itself looking in the mirror with a variety of questions, among them: Where do I fit in? Who are my peers? How will I change? What will the future hold? At the end of every conference, a Town Hall event is held in which attendees share their thoughts about the most meaningful aspects of the conference, explaining why and, based upon our collective experience, decide our next steps going forward as an informal network of scholars, educators, and activists. In sum, this "conference wrap up" space helps synthesize new thoughts, ideas, and directions.

However, at the 2012 conference Town Hall, Susan Gabel posed some difficult questions drafted by herself and Phil Smith about DSE's future. Surprisingly, the open microphone was underutilized, as participants did not readily step forward to respond, and subsequently, the usual lively debate and rich conversation did not materialize as in previous years. This was, I assert, not due to lack of interest, but rather the sobering nature of questions asked—that served to channel the joy of ending three productive days together with a critical self-look in the mirror. From viewing DSE as the proverbial glass as half-full, the focus was abruptly shifted upon the same glass as half-empty. Following their instincts, Gabel and Smith suggested that the questions articulated may better be suited for posting on the DSE listserv to allow people to participate after having more time to think and formulate responses.

The following is excerpted from Smith and Gabel's (2012) email to the DSE listserv. Including Smith's commentary in italics:

When we started the DSE conference, we all had a sense of a new frontier — a feeling of excitement and possibility — a belief that we could change the world. We wanted to make an impact. Since then, we have faced significant resistance and barriers.

Question 1: What has been the impact of Disability Studies in Education?
   a. Can our impact be measured? By what metrics?
   b. What has our impact been in terms of theory?
   c. What significant, broad-reaching initiatives have we accomplished with practice and policy that can be implemented and understood by those outside of those who know and understand the meaning of Disability Studies in Education?

For some of us, there's a feeling that we've become just another conference that builds people's vita. We don't create white papers about policy and disseminate them. We don't speak to the public about our concerns. We are a bit cloistered. We "speak to the choir" every year. We haven't grown in any meaningful way — although new people come and go. Our old-timers are the same for the most part, and we haven't developed very many new-timers who stick around. In other words, it's pretty much the same central people coming every year, with the same number of new participants who don't come back.

Question 2: How do we — as a philosophy, a movement, a conference — grow in a meaningful, strategic, and sustainable way?
   a. Where do the new folks go when they leave us?
   b. Why do they go?

We get charged up at our annual conference and then slack off all year until we charge up again. While rejuvenating our energy serves a good purpose, we don't make use of our numbers throughout the year.

Question 3: How can we sustain our momentum and energy throughout the year, so that we can accomplish significant and real change?

Question 4: What is our purpose — as a philosophy, a movement, a conference?
   a. Are we clear about what our purpose and goals are?
   b. Do we like what we have become? Do we agree with it?
   c. Do we want or need to rethink who we are, what we are about?

Question 5: Looking ahead, what projects, ideas, narratives, or spaces do we want to engage?
   a. What do we want to accomplish in the next three years? Five years? 10 years?
   b. Who do we want to become? How do we want to transform ourselves?
   c. How do we want to transform this thing we call education?
   d. Understanding that shared commitment requires joint action, what are our commitments?

Highlights from The Open Discussion

Although only about a dozen people actively participated in the online discussion during fall 2012, their responses were open and thoughtful, inviting of further comments. In regard to the sub-question 1c about DSE initiatives accomplished, Owen (2012) writes,

I think we should not underestimate the impact some of us have in bridging DSE, practice, and policy… Many of us are part of other professional organizations or on state policy boards. We are at the tables. We have influence and impact on the conversation and the outcomes. It's often helpful, however, to have rationale and research to support stances we take…I would go a step more and add the formulation and publishing of DSE resolutions on policies and practices, updated from time to time with current research or to reevaluate relevance, as actions that would be very helpful.

Here, she calls attention to ways in which many DSE scholars do many things that are effective and promote change yet, unfortunately, these academics usually operate in isolation. So, although their locus of control is acknowledged, they are motivated and satisfied with their contributions.

Broderick (2012b) reminded us that several conferences have been staged collaboratively with partners in the form of local networks, resulting, for example, in Ghent University's focus on parents and their disability-knowledge. A welcome complication to the discussion was the introduction of whether, as DSE scholars, we should develop our own journal, and if so, what it might look like, and whom it should benefit. She pointed out how a U.S journal that conceptualized inclusive education broadly would be a major contribution, as current and newly proposed venues still adhere to limited, positivistic framings.

In returning to answer the questions he originally posed, Smith (2012) shared his own thoughts about the significance of DSE:

I think that our impact has been limited — partly by the unwillingness of the field of special education to recognize the eugenicist foundation on which it is built and continues to be maintained, and partly by the lack of will in the broader field of education to see itself as a political project, and to engage in it as such. This is partly our fault as well — we see ourselves primarily as academics, and don't take on the kinds of political and activist work in which we need to engage. While we have made substantive contributions to theory, that theory is only poorly understood and explored beyond those in the DSE closet.

Furthermore, Smith shared favoring a less institutional definition of DSE, lest it supplant existing regimes that it could inadvertently morph into. In thinking about inclusion, he lamented it as "an essentially failed project" and the subsequent need for "a much more powerful transformation of Western, modernist (and even post-modernist) culture," stating, "I think that we need to engage in some conversation and dialogue about what it would look like to move BEYOND inclusion." And, after about several weeks, our collective asynchronous conversation wound down, leaving us with more food thought about what DSE has been, currently is, and could be…

Reciprocity: How Does DSE Inform Disability Studies, and How Might DSE Inform DS?

Although DS has always been interdisciplinary, the field of education took a long time to engage with DS. Conversely, it could be said that DS was wary of education as a field, given that disability was monopolized by special education. Regardless, to state the obvious, without DS there would be no DSE. As the parent organization field, DS has produced the theories and practices that have been applied to education, allowing critical special educators to become DSE-oriented and create new ways of thinking and doing. We have utilized the ideas of DS scholars such as Len Barton, Brenda Bruggemann, Jim Charlton, Thomas Couser, Lennard Davis, Rosemarie Garland Thomson, Simi Linton, Robert McRuer, David Mitchell, Michael Oliver, Tom Shakespeare, Tobin Siebers, Sharon Snyder, and others, bringing them into our own world of teaching and learning, classrooms and schools, teacher preparation programs and professional organizations, policy and politics.

In little over a decade, scholars in DSE have made a significant contribution to the field of education by forcing it to engage in conceptualizing disability in more progressive—even radical—ways. Shifting the focus away from medicalized, psychological, scientific, and legalized understandings of disability toward social, cultural, historical, and intersectional understandings is a major undertaking that involves swimming upstream for our entire professional careers. As Smith (2012) points out, there is so much work to be done, and changes occur at a much slower pace than we would like. The Behemoth of institutionalized special education that exists, reified through interlocking ideas, systems, institutions, disciplines, is formidable. As a loose network of critical special educators, we realize our current limitations—yet have no choice other than challenging the status quo in which disability is devalued and negated to uphold overlapping notions of normalcy, desirability, and acceptability.

Coming together at the annual DSE conference with the specific focus on disability and education has served to galvanize a group of academics committed to promoting social change and provided a safe place in which ideas are shared, debated, and then acted upon. As such, it has served as a "minority space" where members who share an aspect of their professional identity can be with one another without perpetually explaining their differences to those with a majority ideological status. Some people may justifiably wonder: Is the DSE conference indulgence or necessity? I would argue that it is both in that the synergy from shared ideas has created a movement within education, and pushes us to grow as we think best; there is no map except the one we make. At the same time, without wishing to sound overly dramatic, this conference has meant emotional sustenance for far-flung educators in institutions where they can be misunderstood or marginalized because of their beliefs. Strategies have been created to mobilize and support one another via institutional means such as the tenure and promotion process. Book projects have been hatched, special editions of journals developed, and problems discussed and solved. On a personal note, the DSE conference has kept me grounded, informed, hopeful, motivated, equipped, stimulated, and challenged in terms of my job: teaching educators how to work with all children.

In the USA, although initially emerging as understanding disability within a minority model, DS has seen its largest impact within the Humanities including wonderful contributions that help further shape our thinking about disability (Snyder, Brueggemann, & Garland Thomson, 2002). At the same time, DSE needs to be an applied field, and our challenges—reflected so clearly in Smith and Gabel's questions to our network—propel us toward envisioning systems, structures, practices, institutions, and disciplines that do not devalue, deficitize, and denigrate human differences we have come to call disabilities. Our work is cut out for us. The degree to which we can and do influence our own classrooms, institutions, professional fields, and related disciplines (including science, psychology, medicine, law) is continuously open to discussion as we negotiate our role and commitment to what can be achieved.

Realism is recognizing the current world we live in; idealism is what we imagine and strive toward; and activism is a means between them. As we go forward in DSE, it is helpful to keep grounded in all three isms—as they are inextricably connected, and must be balanced with each other as we move toward creating change for a more socially just education system that prepares citizens for a more socially just world.