Youth at the Intersections of Dis/ability, Other Markers of Identity, and Emotionality: Toward a Critical Pedagogy of Student Knowledge, Emotion, Feeling, Affect, and Being

Abstract

This chapter concerns dis/ability, emotion, affect, and feelings and how persons with a single or multiple dis/abilities are dis/enfranchised through multiple, intersectional categories in which they are located and provided services in schools. In other words, the author highlights how dis/ability can function together with emotion and affect to exclude people from and/ or include them in social, economic, and educational life. The author explores the relationships among assimilation’s intersectional qualities, deficit thinking and ideologies, and the affect and epistemology that foreground teachers’ discourses and emotional connections to their students and profession. This work comes at an urgent historical moment, when low-income students and Black and Brown students with dis/abilities have become the majority population in our nation’s public schools, despite our nation’s teachers remaining largely non-disabled, White, middle class, and monolingual. This lack of change in the demographics of teachers has brought up an important question of how to go beyond the technicalities of teaching to enable a pedagogy of dis/ability at the intersections of emotion and affect. To this end, the author outlines a critical pedagogy of student knowledge, emotion, feeling, affect, and being to assist teachers in critically examining their own emotions, affects, and beliefs within school systems to work toward enfranchisement with historically marginalized youth with dis/abilities and their families.