The Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, Episode 253
Jennifer Gonzalez, Host
GONZALEZ: This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to Episode 253 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast. In this episode, we’ll talk about the things teachers can do to help build and sustain disability identities for their students.
Over the past few decades, significant strides have been made in the field of special education to make every classroom a place where students, regardless of ability or disability, can reach their full potential. Most of that work has been driven by a focus on access — working to ensure that students with disabilities aren’t left behind academically. And while this is obviously an important goal, it has sometimes been viewed through a deficit lens, where there is one default way of doing school, and then there are strategies for helping students with disabilities fit better into that default way. While these efforts have succeeded in improving access, they still position disabled students as lacking in some way.
What’s been missing is an approach that affirms and sustains disability as a source of identity and pride.
That’s the focus of my conversation with Amy Tondreau and Laurie Rabinowitz, authors of the book Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom, K-6. Drawing from their own experiences as educators, as well as the voices of over 20 classroom teachers, their work introduces the concept of disability-sustaining pedagogy, an approach that goes beyond access to help students with disabilities take pride in who they are. While their book focuses primarily on literacy instruction at the elementary level, it offers valuable insights and practices for anyone who teaches or works with disabled students.
In this episode, we talk about how this idea builds on the framework of culturally sustaining pedagogy, what it means to treat disability as a cultural identity, and the specific things teachers can do to create classrooms where disabled students feel, as Tondreau puts it, “fully seen and fully known.”
Before we get started, I’d like to thank Alpaca for sponsoring this episode. I’ve been a big fan of Alpaca for a while now — not just because of what they’re building, but because of how they’re helping schools build stronger culture, one small step at a time. You know those long, clunky staff surveys that are kind of a pain to fill out? Yeah. This isn’t that. Alpaca is doing something different. Their semantic pulse surveys are quick, 2-minute check-ins where teachers tap words that describe how they’re feeling — like joyful, exhausted, valued, or stretched thin. No numbers, no sliding scales — just real, honest teacher voice coming through on a regular basis. It’s designed for teachers, but school leaders get clear, actionable insights they can actually use — to figure out where support is needed and where their team is thriving. And once you’re listening, Alpaca makes it easy to take action. Their entire resource library — with hundreds of ready-to-use tools for recognition, celebration, and connection — is completely free and designed to help you turn insight into impact right away. It’s one simple school culture tool: delightful, insightful, supportive, and built to make a real difference. Go to getalpaca.com/pedagogy and get 15% off just for Cult of Pedagogy listeners.
Support also comes from The School Me Podcast. Are you looking for inspiration to elevate your teaching? The School Me podcast delivers practical solutions for today’s classroom challenges. Whether you’re a first-year teacher or a veteran educator, each episode brings valuable insights directly to you from fellow colleagues across the country. Every month, host Natieka Samuels sits down with educators who share their classroom-tested strategies and professional wisdom. From lesson-planning techniques to work-life balance tips, School Me covers what matters most to educators right now. Join thousands of educators who listen to School Me as a part of their professional development regimen. Learn more at nea.org/schoolme.
Now here’s my conversation with Amy Tondreau and Laurie Rabinowitz about how to be a disability sustaining teacher.
GONZALEZ: Laurie and Amy, welcome to the podcast.
RABINOWITZ: Great to be here.
TONDREAU: Thanks so much for having us.
GONZALEZ: Get us started just by telling me a little bit about each of your, what you do in education and sort of what your relationship is to the topic that we’re going to be talking about today. Amy, let’s start with you.
TONDREAU: Sure. So I am an assistant professor of elementary literacy at the University of Maryland Baltimore County. I’ve been here, this is my third year. And before that, I was an elementary classroom teacher in Massachusetts for about 10 years, and then a literacy specialist and a staff developer in New York City while I was doing my doctoral work.
GONZALEZ: Awesome. Laurie, how about you?
RABINOWITZ: Hi. I’m Laurie Rabinowitz. I’m an assistant professor of education studies at Skidmore College, which is a small liberal arts college in upstate New York. And prior to being a peer working with pre-service teachers, I was a special education teacher in New York City. I worked at a local community school in East Harlem. I was also a special ed coordinator there, and I did some work in Brooklyn as a school admin at a school where we had all integrated co-teaching classrooms. And I met Amy because we were in the same doctoral program in New York City.
GONZALEZ: Fantastic. Okay. So we’re kind of going to go back to those days with this first question. We’re here to talk about your book “Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom,” which was published last October. Tell us about the book, how it came about, and more importantly, what is this book and who should be reading it? Yeah, Laurie, go ahead.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, yeah. So the book in part comes out of sort of what we think about as a critical friendship and collaboration which we advocate for all educators to have something that really can sustain you in navigating complexities with a practice. So like we said, we were in the same doctoral program studying somewhat different areas of education. I was working in the field of disability studies in education and Amy in literacy. And we were both at the same time adjunction courses in literacy teaching methods for pre-service teachers in New York City and both at CUNY schools, so both public institutions, although at different CUNYs. And we were essentially teaching the same introductory course, but I was teaching in a special ed program and Amy, you were in a literacy specialist program or a general?
TONDREAU: General ed teacher.
RABINOWITZ: Okay. Yeah.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
RABINOWITZ: And we were talking about our courses, and we noticed that the contents of the syllabi, even though they both ostensibly were teaching the same content, were actually quite different. And we started to notice, like, what’s going on here? How could we be at two universities in the same public university system in the same state with really similar standards for teacher preparation but the special education coursework and how to teach reading and writing and speaking and listening and the general education coursework were completely different. And so by way of an example of that, we both at the time thought of our work as balanced literacy approaches. And in my mind, that was drawing actually quite heavily on the National Reading Panel and thinking about the pillars of literacy. And Amy was also drawing on that work but, and Amy you can interrupt me if I’m getting this not fully down, but it’s, she also was speaking a lot about how to read with partners and different structures. What is the workshop model look like?And plus, are we doing it wrong? Like, what’s happening here? And so our work started to come together, and we thought, what happens if special education and general education literacy instruction teacher prep spoke to each other more? And then as we started to integrate those two forms of practice, there was something that was missing from both of our work, and that was culturally sustaining pedagogies. So we joined forces in thinking, how can we draw on the idea that student culture is something that needs to be not just made relevant to curriculum but sustained through curriculum in literacy instruction in elementary schools. And what does it mean to draw across both general education and special education literacy research bases to create a more-informed framework for how we teach all students in inclusive settings. How to read, write, speak, listen, all those beautiful things.
GONZALEZ: Amy, did you want to add anything to that?
TONDREAU: Yeah. I think the other piece of kind of the way the book came to be is in our collaboration with teachers in the classroom. I think that Laurie and I are really committed to, you know, neither of us is in the classroom right now, but we are partnered with teachers who are in the classroom and we want to make sure that their voices shine through. So some of the ideas in the book come from those collaborations and in the book are also, we call them teacher voices. So there are over 20 classroom teacher contributors who wrote about the practices in their own classroom that are included in the book. And so while the book’s sort of main target audience is teachers of literacy who work with elementary students, we think that there’s also a broader audience of teacher educators, pre-service teachers. We did a recent book talk with a political science professor at UMBC, hosted our book talk and he read our book and felt like it gave him new insight into teaching his college students in his political science courses. So we feel like the teacher voices are really valuable in making concrete practices seem attainable, and that the frameworks themselves kind of reach a broader audience of all educators as well.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. So the focus is, I want to give people a little bit of sort of background knowledge because what your work is built on is the idea of culturally sustaining pedagogy. Could you first, Amy, give us, what is culturally sustaining pedagogy, and then how does disability sustaining pedagogy build onto that? Because that’s kind of where your focus is, right?
TONDREAU: Yeah, yeah.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
TONDREAU: I mean both of those are frameworks that we talk about in the book, right?
GONZALEZ: Okay.
TONDREAU: Chapter 1 traces that history of culturally sustaining pedagogy. So we really run through the sort of history and the progression of that terminology and how it’s evolved over time. And then Chapter 2 does the same thing for disability. And so we’re thinking both about kind of the theories that have evolved and the different terms that have been used over time. And we’re also really grounding that in a historical lens in those chapters.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
TONDREAU: So thinking about the history of how students of color have been failed by schools historically, and how students with disabilities have been failed by schools historically.
GONZALEZ: Yep.
TONDREAU: And how some of these newer theories are trying to address that history.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
TONDREAU: But in terms of culturally sustaining pedagogy, so we’re really building on Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work. So she wrote about culturally relevant pedagogy, and part of her work was really shifting from a deficit lens to an asset lens, right? So rather than saying, she talked about switching from “what is wrong with these kids” to “what is right with these kids.” And to learn more about that, she went to teachers of color who were having success with students of color and studied what’s going right here? What are these teachers doing that the rest of us can learn from? And she really distilled that into a few tenets. One is the idea of maintaining high academic standards for all students, believing that all students can be academically successful and focusing on their academic growth. So not necessarily saying, here’s an arbitrary standard, a certain cutoff score, but where were they at the beginning of the year and what growth and progress have we seen? The second tenet is about cultural competence. So the idea that it is valuable for us to learn about our own culture and what are the aspects and elements of that culture as well as learning about the cultures of others, so learning across difference. And then the third tenet is really sociopolitical consciousness or this idea of criticality, so the ability to read the world for power, read for perspective, question dominant norms, and think about other ways of being in the world. Over time, that work got taken up in certain ways, although not as richly as Gloria Ladson-Billings envisioned it. So more recently, Django Paris and Samy Alim gave what they called “a loving critique” of culturally relevant pedagogy. So they honored Gloria Ladson-Billings’ work and also thought about how can we continue to build on this, how can we move forward? And because of the terminology “culturally relevant,” some of the ways that that got taken up in classrooms looked like choosing a book, right, that represents a culture and saying, “This is culturally relevant pedagogy.” We read a book that teaches us about this culture and turning that into a checkbox. Though the idea of sociopolitical consciousness in particular is absent in that kind of approach. And so Paris and Alim talked about this idea of culturally sustaining pedagogy. So not just that we include examples in our teaching or choose texts that are relevant to students, but that we actually think about how can our teaching, how can our curriculum sustain the identities that students bring to us. And so teaching in ways that, for example, if students come to us multilingual, not just occasionally acknowledging words in another language, but how does our teaching actually help them develop skills in English and sustain their home languages, right, rather than expecting them to assimilate to an English-only model.
GONZALEZ: Right.
TONDREAU: And so that’s kind of the evolution of the terminology that we’re really building on. Culturally sustaining pedagogy asks us to think about lots of different identities, so racial identities, linguistic identities, religious identities, and disability is often included in that list. However, as Laurie and I started to work on this book and sort of trace this historical evolution, we found that it was on the list but it was rarely sort of taken up in concrete examples. So when we were seeing research studies or classroom examples of culturally sustaining pedagogy, they tended to focus on race or language or culture, and disability wasn’t sort of fleshed out. And so we really started to think about what would it look like for us to treat disability as a cultural identity that was worthy of being sustained? Because so often in schools, we’re still relying on a medical model of disability.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: We’re viewing it, going back to Gloria Ladson-Billings’ idea, we need to switch from a deficit lens — what’s wrong with these kids — to an asset lens — what’s right with these kids. And so really thinking about how do we sustain the cultures of disability and disabled ways of knowing and being. And so we followed Gloria Ladson-Billings’ approach, right? She went to teachers who were having success and so did we. So we found teachers with disabilities who were working with students, both able-bodied and with disabilities, and asked them about their experiences as students, as teachers navigating a system that wasn’t really built for them. And learning about how their identities informed their practice. And so through that, we developed disability sustaining pedagogy, which is a way that all of us as educators can learn from disabled teachers about disabled ways of knowing and being. So some of it’s the main tenets of what we’re talking about are thinking beyond teaching practices that provide students with access to general education curriculum in classroom spaces. Oftentimes when we’re talking about access or support for students with disabilities, we’re talking about where they are physically, whether they’re pushed in the classroom or they’re pulled out, whether they’re pulled to a table in the back or they’re included with the rest of the class on the rug or something like that. So moving beyond those conversations to thinking about these cultural identities. What does disability culture look like and how do we help students develop pride in those identities, sustain those identities? A second tenet is supporting students and making connections or identifying role models, building community with other folks who have a shared disability identity. So that might be teachers with disabilities, that might be community members, family members, other students. But sometimes where a student might share many of their identities with their family members, for example, their racial identity, their religious identity, it might be shared in a family. A disability identity, that’s not necessarily true, right? So students might not have experiences interacting with other people who have the same disability identity as they do. So this idea of building community for students and helping them identify adults, right, who have been successful and have learned how to leverage their talents and the special, you know, the incredible ways that their brain work and also have learned to mitigate the challenges that their disability may pose. And then the last tenet that I’ll highlight is builds on the idea of cultural competence from Gloria Ladson-Billings, so the idea of learning about our own culture and other’s cultures and really thinking about how that can go two ways for disability culture. So for, again, in common practice, we’re often thinking about how do we give disabled students access to able-bodied ways of knowing and being.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: We’re trying to help them access general curriculum. And so we’re thinking about how do we make that communication go both ways? Yes, that’s still important for students with disabilities to access general education curriculum, but also how can able-bodied students, teachers, learn from disabled teachers, disabled students about their ways of knowing and being? How can we learn from them how their brains and bodies work and develop disability culture and competence?
GONZALEZ: Okay, fantastic. So this is what the book does, basically, is break down these ideas and then share with teachers. And in your book, it’s more specifically early literacy teachers but these are ideas that can, you know, translate into other subject areas, how to actually teach in a disability sustaining way.
RABINOWITZ: Yep. The first half of the book breaks this down in a largely historical and theoretical way, and then the second half of the book is specific practices that are classroom-based.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
RABINOWITZ: So we go from one, from the theory to the specific classroom.
GONZALEZ: Yes, which is the, unless we have other stuff to say about the background, I think that’s where we’re going to actually shift next is to, you know, if I’m listening to this, thinking that sounds great, what do I actually do in my classroom to be more disability sustaining? So I asked if you would give me a couple of ideas that we could talk about here that come from the book. So Laurie, I think you’re going to be walking us through some of those. So yeah, what are some things teachers can do to be more disability-sustaining in the classroom?
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, I mean I think one thing that’s really good that you can do to incorporate this work into your classroom is to create opportunities for students with disabilities to talk about themselves and their identities in your classroom instruction. And that can be in a few different ways. You can be talking about that cultural identity, you can also be talking about the diverse ways that a neurodiverse brain might work or an interesting, cool, complicated body might work, and use all that to think about how we support both those students of learners in the classroom and what other students can draw on to also help themselves learn in the classroom. It’s kind of like a “how we learn” type of instruction, and then use that to create the toolbox of scaffolds that exist in your classroom. And I’ll give a few very specific examples of what that can look like. One example. as a special ed teacher that we know who works in Baltimore, a wonderful educator that we’ve worked with, and in their classroom, they offer the students options for different types of sensory materials in their classroom. That includes a nylon body sock, Velcro dots, noise-canceling headphones, a weighted plushie, smelly erasers. They were describing to us recently how they have scented flowers in the classroom that students can use to practice belly breathing. And so what they do is this instructor has students experiment with all these different tools so they might try one out and then do some reflection. How is this helping me as a learner? What worked for me? What didn’t with this tool? And then take a pause, and now next few weeks try out a different tool and so some reflective work around that, and then try another tool. Do some reflective work, and then everyone in the classroom, students who need support, for example, students who overtly have supports needs for sensory intake or have too much sensory information coming in they need to regulate, or they’re not getting enough sensory information, that might be a student on the autistic spectrum, get to experiment with these tools and see what supports them as a learner. But then other people in the classroom also get to experiment with these sensory tools and see what helps them in a classroom. And I actually do this, so I’m a college professor and I do this in my classroom right now. I have noise canceling headphones just in a bin in the classroom.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: I have swivel stools. And I encourage all the college students to experiment with them. And it’s kind of cool. I was talking to some of my colleagues. There were students who used noise-canceling headphones across the college, and they’ll ask other faculty members in other classes if they can have noise-canceling headphones since it helps them to reduce the amount of sensory input during a lecture, for example. That’s one way that you can be disability sustaining but you’re also building competence across multiple students in the classroom. Another example of that that’s more sort of identity forward rather than accessible forward —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: — is a student that, sorry, a former grad student of mine, a wonderful educator in New York City in special ed. So a middle school science teacher who teaches special education in the science classroom. She was just describing for us that she’s teaching about DNA. And so in teaching about DNA, she did some lecture content, and vocabulary instruction, front loading, and then she did an activity where the students were using pipe cleaners to build strands of DNA. And this is an educator who herself has ADHD. And so in modeling her DNA strand, as she was putting, they were putting beads on for different traits that you might have, she put “oh, I have blue eyes” and then she put one on “oh, I have ADHD” and then all of the students got to build their own DNA strands in the classroom. And so students who had neurodiversity put on just a bead. It wasn’t a huge part of the instruction. It was just an everyday placement in her science, middle school science classroom that people have neurodiversities here, and she embedded it and it’s just part, it’s just part of who she is, and it could be part of who the students were in the classroom.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
RABINOWITZ: In that same way that culture can get placed, just embedded every day in your instruction, she now does that as something she thinks about in all of her teaching.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. That actually answers, partially answers a question that came up in my mind as you were talking earlier about, and I don’t know if you phrased it this way, but I heard it to mean that students with disabilities in your classroom should be, we should be talking about the different ways that they learn. And my first question was, how do we do this without tokenizing the student, putting them on the spot, making them speak for all people who have that particular disability, embarrassing them? How do you avoid all of those traps, basically, of making it a humiliating life experience?
TONDREAU: So I think one of the things that the teachers that we work with really prioritize, one is listening to students and taking their lead, right? So they have, they work really hard to build relationships with students so that they understand what students are comfortable with. Some students are in the middle of a whole class lesson raising their hand, jumping in, they want to share about those identities.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: Other students don’t feel comfortable with that. So part of it is building relationships with your students and knowing who feels comfortable with what. Some of them might want to teach about their own identity. They want other folks to understand and they relish those opportunities to be the expert and to teach others.
GONZALEZ: Right.
TONDREAU: For other students, that’s not comfortable. So for those students, I think Laurie was mentioning we talk about this curriculum of how we learn, and all of us have different ways that, different strategies that help us and different things that bother us or make learning harder for us. In disability sustaining classrooms, that’s sort of an ongoing conversation for everybody. So if we’re engaging in the writing process, we’re sharing, what’s your process like? What strategy did you use to organize your thinking for this writing piece? What organizer or tool or structure worked for you? What did your partner try? And students are like, “Oh, I never thought of it that way,” or “Oh, I might want to try that next time.” If it’s something where they’re engaging in independent work time. Some of the strategies Laurie was talking about in terms of different tools that might support my ability to focus. And we might have a quick reflection after our independent work time or research time where we come back together and say, “What challenges did we encounter during this time today? What distracted you? How could we address those next time?” And so by folding in those ongoing conversations where all students get to share what’s working, what’s not, what strategies we’re using to help us with the challenges we’re facing, it becomes sort of a normalized part of the conversation, just like we’re talking about the content that we’re learning or the skills that we’re learning. We’re also developing these tools for how we learn and how we support ourselves as learners so that, like Laurie was saying, then we’re able to carry those strategies that we developed to different contexts.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: If I know I get overwhelmed in a space where there’s lots of background noise and noise canceling headphones help me, then I know that not just in this classroom space, but I know that next year, I know that in after school programming that I participate in, I know that in all the spaces in my life, and I can advocate for myself —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: — across those spaces.
RABINOWITZ: I also think there is a desire to break down stigma about talking about disability identity too. And I think there’s a number of ways that that can happen. This requires a larger cultural shift. But one of the things that we found that was interesting in the research base around this is the pre-existing research on teachers with disabilities in schools is actually quite negative. Unlike what we’re sort of finding in some of the work that we’ve used for this book and what we’re actually working on now, a lot of that previous research is about how hard it is to be a teacher with a disability and how hard it is to navigate school spaces and how hard it is to disclose that information. So I think we’d be surprised by how many teachers there are with neurodiversities out there that aren’t talking about it with students. They’re not disclosing that identity because there’s so much stigma around it and beliefs potentially that you aren’t going to be able to be a good teacher if you have a learning disability because of what we already believe. For example, you aren’t going to be a good teacher because you have ADHD because our society believes about some of the more opaque disabilities, some of our friends call them, rather than hidden disabilities, but they’re more opaque. They might be harder to see. So I think in school spaces, if you’re an educator with a disability, building allyship with other educators and starting to open those conversations, and if you’re not an educator with a disability, becoming allies with educators that do have disabilities so that more conversations can happen and those folks can start to talk more within your school community about what their identities are. Because once those folks are out there in the community and talking to students about their experiences, they’re demonstrating for students that this is a part of who we are and what we can talk about. And so some examples of that, you can create affinity clubs in schools or mentoring programs where an educator with a disability or an educator who’s an ally to students with disabilities can have a space together where you talk about disability community, culture, pride. And it can be a group that is open to any students who might be interested in that topic. One teacher that I’ve worked with in the past, actually did this in her master’s thesis. She developed disability identity club at the school where she was teaching and did different activities with the students including building their own disabilities superheroes and now you always want to be careful not to get too heavy into a “disability as superpower” trope, but thinking about different tools and supports that she could use if she were a superhero and how they would support her kind of thinking like assistive technology as superpowers. And did with all her students in the club, and some of the students had disabilities and some didn’t, but opening up that conversation. You can have opportunities on a student government in a high school or a middle school for a representative for disability access. Who’s the 504, ADA, IDEA representative on student government?
GONZALEZ: Wow, that’s a fantastic idea.
RABINOWITZ: Right?
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: Because we don’t have, we don’t typically have that representation.
GONZALEZ: No.
RABINOWITZ: You can have a disability advocacy club on your school campus, in your high school or middle school too, so it doesn’t have to just be a community space, but it could also be a space where they’re fighting for access. And that student government, when I bring up, because my, of the beautiful students that I work with at this liberal arts college have started that. They have a student, an ADA rep in our student government who’s been fighting for more access. They just did a whole campaign because you know those button doors that you push.
GONZALEZ: Yes.
RABINOWITZ: They don’t work well on campus, unfortunately.
GONZALEZ: No. They don’t work well anywhere, no.
RABINOWITZ: And our campus is very icy in the winter and all these different things that impede access and then who actually goes to the school. We have limited, you have limited disability representation on the school isn’t accessible. So yeah, I think another way is to be an ally if you’re not a disabled educator to folks with disabilities on your campuses and create spaces so that people can start to converse in community.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: And then that can break down stigma so students will want to talk more about who they are and how they think and how their body moves.
GONZALEZ: Okay. So before we move on, we’ve talked about opportunities to sort of learn in the classroom about all these different ways of learning and knowing. And you had one more example about offering different alternative processes for getting the work done. Let’s talk a little bit about that before we move to the next item.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah. This one is a little bit near and dear to my heart and maybe something I’m learning more about as the more I learn from disabled educators. Because I have a master’s degree in special education, and it was specifically focused on working with students with learning disabilities, we were taught in graduate school and I became a huge advocate of using graphic organizers. And so I would split everything into a graphic organizer. My classroom was full of them in writing instruction. And now I think back, there was, I remember this one student who did not benefit from using graphic organizers, and we were doing test prep, and I was making boxes and bullets, outline, and it was just making the writing process so much harder for this student rather than serving as a scaffold. So one of the things that we’ve learned a little bit from some of the neurodiverse educators that we work with is that not all students from disabilities benefit from or need graphic organizers. I know that that might sound as a shock to some students too, but they don’t all benefit from it, from them. So this particular educator who identifies as autistic was explaining to us that because she has a lot of cognitive inflexibility, it actually makes it really hard to engage in a messy draft. And graphic organizers require you to jot messy ideas down.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: Not fill the thing out completely, just get your ideas down real quick, and then you’re supposed to go back to it. And what a graphic organizer for her does in the writing process is it actually encourages her to write the entire essay into the graphic organizer and it’s extremely laborious and then she rewrites the whole essay, or this is what it would be like for her when she was in school —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: — doing this writing process. So she ended up taking, it took more time —
GONZALEZ: Right.
RABINOWITZ: — than what she would have done if she just went, jumped right into the writing process. So in her writing instruction now, she has more flexibility in terms of types of checkpoints that students can offer. So it doesn’t mean she doesn’t use graphic organizers, but she doesn’t require every single student to use them. It’s an option for students as a checkpoint, but then she has more flexible types of checkpoints for some students where maybe the checkpoint is an oral conversation for that student.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: Or the checkpoint is seeing a few paragraphs of the writing that are fully polished rather than going from that messy draft to a more complete draft to the revision. So understanding the writing process can be different for different learners, and how it connects to neurodiversity and cognitive, you have to be cognitively comfortable and flexible. The same goes for students who may have anxiety, for example, another neurodiversity. Recognizing that that could become a point where you freeze up in the writing process because of the requirement of what we think as the go-to scaffold. So this is something else that we found as a really helpful thing to keep in mind when we’re teaching.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. It really sounds like the blanket piece of advice is knowing your students, being flexible, listening and believing them when they say, “This works for me, and that doesn’t,” and then also offering all of these various options and processes to everybody regardless of what their disability, label, or status happens to be that these are things that could be available to everybody, and if the conversation is fluid and open, then everybody can get what they need and not be embarrassed or ashamed by it.
RABINOWITZ: Yeah, and I would also add to that is being a researcher and inquirer yourself. There’s a lot to learn out there. We’ve recently learned about the concept of rejection sensitivity dysphoria which I was, I personally as a special ed teacher was unfamiliar with and can now map onto my practice, and that comes from more of a research base, but that’s the idea that people with ADHD tend to, not always, have hypersensitivity to rejection. So if you are in the classroom teaching, and you don’t call on a student and that student has ADHD, they may be more sensitive to that, and it can cause a larger emotional reaction. So if you have that information, you might be more aware of how you’re calling on students in the classroom, or how that student might be perceiving an interaction from you. And that student might not yet, especially if you’re speaking in early grades, might not be aware that that’s something that they experience.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: So that does come from learning from research and from teachers with ADHD sharing that that’s part of their identity. So part of it is learning from the student and part of it might also be learning from some of the research and thinking about how you can map it onto the students that you know.
GONZALEZ: That’s interesting. Okay. So Amy, we’ve got another one, another practice that teachers can put into practice. I’ve said “practice” twice. What is that?
TONDREAU: So I think that one of our go-to moves as teachers is to modify the curricular materials that we’re using. And we’re thinking specifically of being more representative of disabled identities and experiences. Very often, disability is invisible in curriculum or there might be sort of one text, one experience that students might have where they read about perhaps Helen Keller or a historical figure who has a disability.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: And so there’s very little sort of contemporary representation or representation that shows disabled people sort of going about their everyday life and having conflicts with friends or interacting with family. And so really thinking about how we can bring those representations by either choosing texts or modifying curricular texts. So one of the things that Laurie and I love is the practice of remixing or rewriting texts. So we know that students engage in this kind of process in youth culture, in pop culture all the time. The practice of making memes, the practice of dueting TikToks or stitching Reels is a remixing practice. And so these are often skills that students bring to the classroom that we can tap into. So thinking about, and often teachers are sometimes really restricted in the texts that they can choose in their classroom. A lot of literacy curriculum right now is pretty prescriptive and teachers are being held to using them with fidelity. So if that’s the situation that you’re in, one of the ways that you can invite disability representation into your curriculum is inviting students to rewrite or remix text. So that might look like taking some craft moves from a postmodern picture book. So postmodern picture books are the ones that, often the most common ones are “Fractured Fairy Tales.” So “The True Story of the Three Little Pigs,” here it’s told from the wolf’s perspective. But there’s a lot of great ones. They’re becoming more popular. Some of our favorites are “The Blobfish Book” which is a nonfiction text about deep sea creatures, and then there’s an animated blobfish that’s inserted on the pages. And as we’re going through the animals, the blobfish is saying, “Where’s the blobfish? When are we going to get to it?” And he’s got protest signs like “More blobfish.” And then we get to the blobfish and the facts about the blobfish are how it was voted the ugliest animal, and the blobfish is devastated, and then the other deep sea creatures write him a letter and cheer him up about how much they love him. So there’s these multiple storylines that are happening in this text. So there’s all of these craft moves in those picture books that we can invite students to use on any text. So we’ve used it, for example, a narrative about Christopher Columbus and the greatness of his discoveries, and we can put characters in that question those claims. But we’ve also used it, a storyline about a lot of leveled readers or decodable texts might have characters in experiences that don’t match students’ identities or students’ experiences. And so we can have them insert characters that represent themselves into these texts. And we can use the practices of just crossing things out. On social media there’s often, there was a trend like “fixed it for you” and took headlines, we took redlines and crossed things out and made it more representative or a different perspective.
GONZALEZ: Right.
TONDREAU: So students can do the same thing —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: — in their text, and that allows us to get at that sociopolitical consciousness that Gloria Ladson-Billings talked about, that ability to question the way things are. That’s one way that we can get disability identities into curricular texts.
GONZALEZ: Yes, instead of trying to find just the right kind of representation, now we can create it, have students create it in the classroom. I love that. That’s a great idea. Okay.
TONDREAU: We’ve also done it with phonics materials. Oftentimes phonics curriculum comes with sound cards that include guide words.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: And these aren’t always things that students know or are familiar with. Or it’s more common now too to have images of the mouth making certain sounds to give students the physical depiction of how to make those sounds. Including photographs of your students making those [crosstalk] as the touchpoint. Asking your students what the guide words could be, especially if it’s something that’s very different from their own experiences and identities.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: It’s another way to get their identities included. We also really love putting texts in conversation with each other. So Laurie and I have found recently a whole bunch of books where the main characters love bacon. So “Roll with It” is a good example, “From the Desk of Zoe Washington” is a good example, “Honestly Elliott” is another one. So anyway, they have this shared interest —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: — where all the characters, a lot of the storyline in “From the Desk of Zoe Washington,” she wants to be on a kids cooking show. So it’s a main part of the storyline.
RABINOWITZ: “Aven Green Baking Machine.”
TONDREAU: “Aven Green Baking Machine” is another one.
GONZALEZ: That’s cute.
TONDREAU: And so in “Roll with It,” the main character loves to bake and also is a wheelchair user. She has cerebral palsy I think, if I’m remembering correctly. And then “From the Desk of Zoe Washington,” she loves to bake. She is a Black girl in a multiracial family, a blended family. She lives with her mom, her grandmother, and her stepfather, and her dad is incarcerated. And so these two characters share so much, and then also have different cultural identities that shape their experiences.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: And so asking students to think across those books —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: — and asking them to think about, what would these two characters talk about? What do you think their friendship would be like? If they wrote letters to each other, what would that look like? “Honestly Elliott” is another one where the main character has ADHD, and he loves cooking, but he looks down on baking. He thinks that following exact recipes and the exact measurements of baking doesn’t work, doesn’t have the artistic flair of cooking.
GONZALEZ: That is a thing, actually, in the culinary world too.
TONDREAU: Yes, yes. He has a male chef mentor that he looks up to who has cultivated that thinking for him.
GONZALEZ: So interesting, yeah.
TONDREAU: So if you put Elliott in conversation with the characters from the other book, what would they, what would they argue about?
GONZALEZ: Right.
TONDREAU: What reasons and debate would they give for baking or cooking? That allows us to think with intersectionality.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: Because [inaudible]’s at play there, ability/disability, race, are all a part of the ways that those characters move through the world and experience their settings. And so we really love the opportunities for students to think creatively that way, and then, again, engage in that metacognition of where is my identity represented in these texts? What voices aren’t we hearing? And developing, again, that two-way cultural competence. I’m learning in some ways about myself and I’m learning about experiences outside of mine as well.
RABINOWITZ: I think one of the reasons, let’s go back to this plane that Amy made earlier around how typically when we think about culturally sustaining pedagogies, you think about disability as an access point. What Amy’s talking about feels so relevant to us because often the remediation curriculums that you’re given, like the phonics curriculum that Amy’s bringing up, these are specifically designed tools to work with students with disabilities and more often than not, they don’t actually represent students with disabilities. So they’re tools for them but they, but only as access or only as remediation or only as to get to whatever we think of, I’m using air quotes for whatever the school determines was typical instruction, but they’re not in them. We did a talk in the fall, and we asked a group of literacy educators in their remedial reading instruction kind of materials, their phonics curriculums that you might use to support students with reading disabilities. Is there ever a story that has a character with a reading disability in it? And nobody, it was like 50 teachers in the audience, nobody could give an example of one. So remixing allows you to take some of those materials that might be specifically designed for students that you’re working with and insure that their identity exists within that material at the same time as you might be providing some specialized instruction which could be, is often quite important for those students too. So you can infuse the identity in through this process.
GONZALEZ: Yeah. Yeah, that’s a great point. Amy, you had one more piece on this one too.
TONDREAU: Yeah. I think the last thing I’ll add is that there are incredible texts out there that are written by folks with disabilities themselves. So thinking about how we integrate children’s literature written by disabled authors is another key point, that I started off with this idea of characters with disabilities in their everyday life and what are their experiences like and contemporary representation. So books like “Good Different” by Meg Eden Kuyatt or “El Deafo” by Cece Bell show characters in their everyday life in contemporary settings, experiencing friendships and family and school and gives us that insider insight often based on the author’s experiences that can sometimes open up some of those conversations. Laurie was talking about the power of disrupting stigma and inviting spaces for students to share about these experiences, especially if you are a teacher who identifies as able-bodied, bringing in these voices of disabled authors into your classroom is a way to give those identities space in the curriculum.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. What we’ve talked about so far is choosing or modifying materials so that we can build more representation. We’ve talked about creating opportunities for students with disabilities to talk about themselves or identities the way that they learn and have a much more sort of open exchange in the classroom of different ways of learning. And then also creating affinity clubs or mentoring programs so that we can build more disability culture and community and pride. One last one is about listening to and partnering with disabled educators. So tell me about that and the value of that.
TONDREAU: Yeah. I think Laurie started to allude to this earlier where the idea of learning from the people in your life so that we know a lot of educators who have disabilities, neurodiversities that haven’t just felt comfortable disclosing them with their colleagues.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: So thinking about what opportunities you have in your school to make it a place where people feel comfortable discussing those aspects of their identities and being willing to learn from the folks in your life who have disabilities, asking for their insight, asking what school’s like for them and what worked for them and what didn’t. Many people that we talk to have very vivid memories of things that didn’t work for them, and then experiences where teachers did things that were really meaningful to them and that stuck with them for years.
So opening up some of those conversations. And we’ve also talked to a lot of teachers with disabilities who feel like when they are asking questions in their school setting, and they’re genuinely asking questions for clarification, they are often read as argumentative or disrespectful because people perceive that their questions are challenging hierarchy or questioning other people’s judgment or professionalism. And so I think if we’re able to open up those conversations with our colleagues, it also might reframe some of those interactions —
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: — where we, where we’re able to approach those questions and approach those interactions with, from an inquiry standpoint and try and understand where other folks are coming from. And I think the other thing is bringing in disabled people to the classroom, trying to think about guest speakers or asking them to come in to Zoom in when you’re asking for folks for, and it might be specifically around their disability identity or just making sure that you’re including if it’s career day and people are coming in, thinking about do you have someone who identifies as disabled, showing them living and thriving in their career. That students with similarly, we talked about having mentors, seeing adults with disabilities as people we look up to and people we value in our communities. And also thinking about access to school events. So when you connect with community organizations or people in the community who have disabilities, or families of your students who have disabilities, when you’re planning conferences, when you’re planning graduation event, when you’re planning different events, having people that you can ask, what should we be thinking about so that everybody is welcome and able to access this school event so that we can make sure that everybody in the community is included.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah.
RABINOWITZ: I would also add, I would imagine there might be some listeners who are like, “Well, I don’t know any disabled educators that I can partner with in this work.” I would imagine that might crop up as a question.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: And to loop back to what Amy was talking about earlier in terms of using children’s literature written by disabled authors in your classroom, those can also serve as professional development tools for yourself to learn about disability. In the courses that we teach, we have our students often read these books. I do book clubs with my students. Pre-service teachers may read books that have characters with disabilities written by disabled authors. And the amount that I’ve learned and my students have learned about things like masking, for example.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: And that has come through children’s literature. So it’s, they’re fun to read. Any teacher at any age or grade level can be reading these books, and they often tell stories of what it’s like to be in school as a student with a disability. And because they’re written by disabled authors, they can teach us a lot about those authentic experiences. That’s just another tool where those books can be useful no matter the grade level that you’re working with.
GONZALEZ: Right. You don’t have to actually have these people in your school or in your community. Yeah. And literature’s always been wonderful for that, for learning about broader experiences. So the book is “Sustaining Cultural and Disability Identities in the Literacy Classroom.” You have an instagram that is @sustainingdisabilityidentities. There is eventually going to be a website, which we will put over on Cult of Pedagogy. Before we go, I have another question for you that I did not prepare you for. I just wanted you to sort of think about this off the top of your heads. If you can sort of imagine, if many, many teachers in many schools got ahold of this book, read it really carefully, and really started to implement the stuff that you are suggesting and proposing, what would be sort of your vision, how would schools look and feel different if people were really putting this into practices or into practice? Laurie, I’ll start with you. Actually, whoever wants to go first, but I could pick on you. What would be sort of your, how would things feel different?
RABINOWITZ: Can I have a second of think time?
GONZALEZ: Absolutely, yes, yes. Amy, do you want to go instead?
TONDREAU: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: That was a special ed teacher move there.
TONDREAU: I love that question. I think, I think it draws some things across what we’ve been talking about. One thing is we would talk about disability in a way that isn’t connected to shame. We would talk about disability as a part of our identity, as, you know, some of us are artistic, and some of us are, Charlotte’s DNA example comes to mind.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: We have lots of traits and disability is one of those. And we can talk about that without feeling like we have to worry about who we’re disclosing to and when. And I think that results in relationships that are different because people feel fully seen.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: People feel known in classrooms, and I think in a lot of spaces right now, where I just mentioned masking. There are teachers and there are students who are trying to hide this part of themselves because they feel like it’s something that’s shameful.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
TONDREAU: And it’s not, and I think if we were really doing this work, if we had disability sustaining classrooms, then those teachers and those students would feel fully seen and fully known and feel like that part of them is valued.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. I love that.
RABINOWITZ: All right, I’m ready now. Thank you.
GONZALEZ: Okay.
RABINOWITZ: Well, one thing is that, so I teach college, first year and second year students who are probably going to become teachers. And I teach the history of the disability rights movement in one of my courses, and the vast majority of my students have never studied it in high school. They didn’t learn it in their AP US history classes or their regular US history classes, and they didn’t learn it in middle school. So I, and that is something we talk about in the book, I would want that schools teach disability history when they teach history. It’s American history and everyone, everyone should learn it. I know we didn’t talk a lot about that, but you should, you should be integrating the story of people with disabilities who are the largest minority group in the United States into everything you teach. The other thing that we find, because we are, we talk to disabled adults who are teachers who came to our school systems, many of the folks that contributed to this book cannot name someone in their life that was a mentor for them as someone with a disability who also had a disability, and many of them cannot name a disability community that they’re a part of. So I would want students with disabilities, if this book were to be implemented, to be able to come away as an adult and say, this was someone who mentored me, and this is a community that I’m a part of and I continue to be a part of as an adult because it sustains me.
GONZALEZ: Yeah.
RABINOWITZ: And the fact that those things don’t exist, we want them to exist for everybody.
GONZALEZ: Yeah, yeah. Thank you both so much for writing this book and sort of championing this, this whole approach. I think everything that you have mentioned, I’m sort of ticking off in the back of my head, like, nope, that was not part of my teacher prep. Nope, I didn’t know about that. And so this really is a big gap I think in a lot of teachers’ knowledge, and so I think this is going to start to fill that in a really positive way, so thank you.
RABINOWITZ: Thank you for having us.
TONDREAU: Yeah, thanks so much.
For a full transcript and a link to the resources mentioned in this episode, visit cultofpedagogy.com, click Podcast, and choose episode 253. To get a regular email from me about my newest blog posts, podcast episodes, courses and products, sign up for my mailing list at cultofpedagogy.com/subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and have a great day.