Challenging pre-service teachers’ understanding of the intersection of disability and cultural diversity

Abstract

Despite America's increasingly diverse classroom membership, new teachers, who continue to be primarily Caucasian middle-class females, are provided with few opportunities to develop a depth of understanding of cultures other than their own. To further complicate matters, many P-12 students are students determined to have disabilities. Since the inception of special education legislation in the 1970s, concerns were raised about the overrepresentation of students of color in special education (Dunn, 1968) and these concerns persist today (Donovan & Cross, 2009). In an effort to address these issues, the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education Standards (NCATE, 2008) and individual state agencies such as the Colorado's Department of Education (CDE), have outlined a number of performance-based standards and professional dispositions required of educators. This paper explores and evaluates a variety of learning activities we have used in teacher preparation with the intended outcome of developing our students' culturally responsive teaching and supporting their understanding of the complexities involved with the overrepresentation of students of color in special education. Despite America's increasingly diverse classroom membership, new teachers, who continue to be primarily Caucasian middle-class females, are provided with few opportunities to develop a depth of understanding of cultures other than their own. The outcomes for students of color are bleak. For instance, a new report based on data from the National Center for Education Statistics (Faircloth & Tippeconnic, 2010) indicates that less than 50% of American Indian/Alaska Native students graduate high school. What is most troubling is that this situation is not new for minority students, suggesting efforts to change the negative outcomes have been largely unsuccessful. To further complicate matters, many P-12 students are students determined to have disabilities, another group with grim outcomes (U.S. Department of Education, 2003). Our interest is in the intersection between the misunderstanding of cultural differences between teachers and what is referred to as the overrepresentation of students of color in special education. Overrepresentation means that a disproportionately high number of students are being determined to have one of thirteen disabilities recognized by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). What we would expect is students in various disability categories would be commensurate with their natural proportions in society at large. Recent analysis of demographics and disability categories, however, show an overrepresentation of children of color in categories of behavioral