Exclusion And Education: Disability And Personhood In Public School

Author

Kathryn Marie Wright, Wayne State University

Access Type

WSU Access

Date of Award

January 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Ph.D.

Department

Social Work

First Advisor

Jessica Robbins-Panko

Second Advisor

Tam E. Perry

Abstract

This study examined how the interpersonal relationships and daily practices within schools shaped disabled students’ personhood. The school experiences of the students in this study were heavily influenced by their placement within special education classrooms. I conducted a 10-month ethnographic study of three special education classrooms in a racially and ethnically diverse and low-income middle school located in a working-class suburb of Detroit. In addition to participant-observation ethnography, I interviewed students and teachers and held a focus group with students. Participants totaled 41, including 32 youth and nine adults. Of the 32 youth, 17 were educated in isolated special education classrooms. Data collection focused on these students. Twelve of these 17 youth were multiply-marginalized students, whose racial or ethnic background and disability status placed them at greater risk for discrimination and negative outcomes in the school setting. Approaching this inquiry through ethnographic and phenomenological methods and theoretical frameworks from anthropology and cultural studies regarding personhood, disability, and race, findings from this study can be grouped into three themes: social relations, spatiotemporal relations, and futurity and personhood. Social relations among students: Despite common perceptions of disability as limiting relational capacity, the disabled and isolated students in this study cared for each other in ways that affirmed each other’s personhood. These relations were complex and contained traces of care and neglect. This person-extending care, despite overwhelming isolation from the larger school, was practiced in the context of ambiguity, without assurances that this care would be reciprocated or guaranteed in the future and with the knowledge that some students desired very much to exit the classrooms in order to participate more fully in the wider social world of the school. Spatiotemporal relations: Spatiotemporal practices of special education create forms of inclusion and exclusion. These spatiotemporal practices should be understood in the larger context of disability in the history of U.S. social services. In this school, spaces were inaccessible not through physical barriers but because of school practices that limited the mobility and access of student and thus opportunities for peer relationships. Analyzing the construction of certain school spaces as White spaces and others as abled spaces, I found that spatial exclusion contributed to constructions of disabled and racialized personhood as limited and to constructions of disabled students as non-learners. Futurity, citizenship, and personhood: Cultural perceptions of disabled youth as future failed adults, in conjunction with choices regarding classroom practices and how to spend educational time, worked to figure disabled youth as outside of the citizen-building project of contemporary education. Based on an analysis of three field trips, students’ emplotment on a temporal trajectory as either permanent children or future failed adults show how sociocultural perceptions of disability and racialized perceptions of Black youth interfere with child-personhood and adult-personhood. This study contributes empirical data and theoretical depth to the study of personhood and the cultural construction of disability. Empirical data focused on the phenomenological experiences of disabled youth provide specificity regarding the embodied of disability and sociocultural conceptions of disability. This specificity works against theorizing of disability as always-already negative and locates the stigma of disability within sociocultural conceptions. In doing so, this study also contributes to the theorization of personhood and relationality in the context of segregation. In spaces of segregation and carcerality, important social relations can be found, and these relations are rich in care as well as in neglect. Another contribution of this study is the focus on school as an important site for sociocultural formations of disability, viewing what happens in schools and through special education as an effect of American culture rather than a product of schooling. By drawing out the mismatch between the ideological projects of U.S. schooling and cultural conceptions of disability, changes to schooling can be based on firmer theoretical ground. These findings also raise implications for educational policy and school-based social work. Specifically, special education policymakers must endeavor to end the reliance on isolated special education classrooms as a pedagogical practice. This requires that our schools are made fully accessible, spatially and socially, so that all students are able to engage within all of the spaces of schools. Through their work in providing psycho-social assessments and evaluations of students’ social and adaptive skills, school social workers contribute to how disability is made meaningful in society. School social workers can become stronger advocates for disabled students by reinforcing the acceptance of disability as part of the breadth of human diversity and working to create inclusive social environments. This will require shifting some professional focus away from teaching normative behavior to individual disabled students and toward school culture and policies. School social workers and educators can work together to develop and extend the concept of neurodiversity as a way to promote and expand disability cultural capital. In addition to providing avenues for disabled students to connect with larger social and political movements for disability pride, this will also help promote an open and clear discussion of disability, in plain language, in schools.

Recommended Citation

Wright, Kathryn Marie, "Exclusion And Education: Disability And Personhood In Public School" (2025). Wayne State University Dissertations. 4190.
https://digitalcommons.wayne.edu/oa_dissertations/4190