Reconceptualizing "Special Education" Curriculum in a Bachelor of Education Program: Teacher Candidate Discourses and Teacher Educator Practices

Abstract

This paper identifies dominant perceptions neophyte teachers have about students with special needs and/or identified as having a learning disability in order to reconceptualize curricula that may provide them with opportunities to critically deconstruct established notions and extend practices they make available for these students. This is accomplished by examining teacher candidates’ responses to surveys they completed before and after their Bachelor of Education program as well as during focus group interviews. The paper specifically addresses how instructional practices designed for teacher candidates in “special education” classes can ensure that they remain focused on a definition of disability that reinforces and reifies deficit-oriented perspectives of disability. The researchers’ processes and critical reflections are offered as a way of demonstrating how they we were implicated in replicating dominant discourses that universalize and fossilize disability. They also offer their attempts to revise curricula and their practices in ways that address this replication.