REVIEW OF DISABILITY STUDIES: AN INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL
	Volume 13
Issue 4
	

Research Article
Teaching and Care: Cripping Fieldwork in Teacher Education
Susan Baglieri, PhD, & Jessica Bacon, PhD
Montclair State University
Abstract: Providing teacher candidates early and ongoing opportunities to learn their profession by participating in school settings is often posed as a way to improve their preparedness for becoming teachers. Two problems of “fieldwork,” however, are the limited access to settings in which inclusive education is practiced and the milieu of special education in the US that emphasizes ableist assertions of independence, support, and conventional notions of care, especially for youth characterized as intellectually disabled. We present an overview of the establishment of a “cripped” fieldwork experience for early program teacher candidates enrolled in a required undergraduate course. By engaging in qualitative narrative analysis of candidates’ journals, we report preliminary findings on evolving notions of care related to disability and education in self-reported field-based learning.
Keywords: teacher education, care, field experience, field-based learning, disability
Providing teacher candidates early and ongoing opportunities to learn their profession by participating in school settings is widely recognized as a way to improve their preparedness for becoming teachers. Two problems of “fieldwork” however, are the limited access to settings in which inclusive education is practiced and the milieu of special education in the US that produces ableist assertions about learning and independence. Such assertions constrain educational opportunities offered, especially, to youth characterized as intellectually disabled (Cowley & Bacon, 2013; Kliewer, Biklen & Kasa-Hendrickson, 2006; Wehmeyer, 2006). Taub, White, and Ryndak (2014) report the need for development of inclusive education and point out, “when students with complex instructional needs are in general education contexts to learn the same content as their grade-level classmates, [they] experience membership derived from participation in shared activities and can demonstrate progress in the general curriculum” (p. 272). Despite efforts to improve inclusive education, high quality models of practice are rare (Smith, 2010). Fieldwork, in which a teaching intern is placed with an “expert” teacher to observe and become acclimated to the field of practice, is more likely to acculturate new teachers into practices and norms that reinforce ableism and exclusion. Delport and Daikos (2015) suggest that teacher preparation programs look outside of traditional fieldwork in schools to provide candidates with experiences that can lead to new understandings and innovative ideas about youth, families, and communities, rather than learning to reproduce problematic practices embedded in many schools. It is with this idea that we (co-authors) founded the Increasing Access to College (IAC) project.
The IAC was initially formed as a partnership with Growth Program, a day habilitation center for adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities, to develop a college-based experience to be mutually beneficial for Growth clients and university-based teacher candidates. Growth program leaders saw the IAC as a novel opportunity for their clients to experience a college environment. We envisioned the project as one with the potential to co-construct space at the university through which Growth participants might be enabled to envision, perform, and be imagined in their possibilities as college learners. At a time when postsecondary programs for students with intellectual disabilities are proliferating, the intent of the IAC is to provide an initial opportunity to explore university life for students who are rarely recruited or groomed for college admission. Growth IAC participants described opportunities to learn about college life, engage in challenging academic experiences, and interact with college students as highlights of the program. Two clients expressed interest in entering credit-earning programs in the future, while others did not; many participants elected to return to the IAC for continued engagement as part of Growth or other partner programs, and others were satisfied with a one-year experience.
As Growth participants gain from accessing the campus, the IAC also provides a reciprocal benefit of being able to “crip” fieldwork for teacher candidates, which is our primary focus in this paper. “Cripping,” explains Sandahl (2003), “Spins mainstream representations or practices to reveal able-bodied assumptions and exclusionary effects” (p. 37). Our aims in the IAC, then, were to create a context in which partnerships between teacher candidates and Growth participants could be formed as reciprocal learning experiences. In emphasizing engagement with participants as the primary space in which learning could emerge—rather than in internship with teachers or staff—we sought to position Growth clients as agentive. We aimed to set a stage in which teacher candidates could develop dispositions toward reciprocal, instead of authoritative, relationships with people with disabilities.
We are engaged in ongoing exploratory qualitative research on the IAC project for the purpose of program evaluation and development, as well as for scholarly inquiry. Areas of interest in the broader study include participant-reported gains and benefits of the IAC, collaboratively generated perspectives of participant and community stakeholders on desired aims and outcomes for postsecondary education, and the impact of IAC activity on the campus community. Each of these areas inform how the IAC may pursue continued program development with close attention to stakeholders’ interests. This article focuses on the impact of the IAC on teacher candidates, in which a theme of care emerged through our analysis of their journals of self-reported field-based learning. An opportunity to examine the connection of care to relationships and reciprocity as dispositions for teaching unfolded.
Care and Education
Care is a contentious topic in feminist and disability scholarship. Critiques of the labor and conditions of care workers (Duffy, 2005) and lively dialog on interpretations of care ethics are present (Diller, 1988; Hoagland, 1990). Scholars in disability studies critique the ways in which people who use support are positioned in paternalistic relationships of care, limiting their claim to personhood and right to direct the manner of support (Hughes, McKie, Hopkins & Watson, 2005; Kelly, 2013; Morris, 2001).  Literature that addresses care and teaching students with disabilities demonstrates a variety of ways that care is conceptualized in educational practice. At its broadest level, care means building and nurturing relationships among teachers and students that are rooted in love, empathy, and desire for community (Lepage, Nielsen & Fearn, 2008; Hong et al., 2009). Care is also conceptualized as the educator’s desire to advocate for individual students and families or make political change to improve educational equity (Freytag, 2008; Lepage et al., 2008; Woolhouse, 2015). A third way that care is described is as a focus on students’ “progress and happiness” (Humphrey, cited in Woolhouse, 2015, p. 138), which means attending to individuals’ accomplishments and desires in order to aid in transforming children’s views of themselves (Hong et al.; 2009; Lepage et al., 2008). Marks (2011), in contrast, finds that others’ frequent associations of “patience” and “caring” as a primary attribute of special education teachers diminishes the professional and intellectual labor of educators of students with the most complex support needs. While many suggest that a disposition of care is important to teaching, some perceptions of care, especially for teachers of students with disabilities, can be problematic.
Ethics of Care in K-12 Education
Nel Noddings is a frequently referenced theorist who proposes the ethics of care to guide reform in school and curriculum practice (2005a; 2012). Noddings’ (2005a) intent is to offer the concept of care as an alternative orientation to the competitive cultures in many schools. Noddings’ ethics of care suggests interconnectedness, as it may be nurtured through reciprocal relationships, enables children to grow as individuals and in accordance with their individuality. Essential to Noddings’ notion of care is the difference between the virtue of care—caring about something or someone—and engaging in a caring relationship, in which caring is offered and acknowledged in acts of reciprocity. Caring requires that recipients perceive and interpret actions as caring. Caring interactions, Noddings (2005a) describes, emerge through having a consciousness that enables engrossed listening, in which one can “really hear, see, or feel what the other tries to convey” (p. 15-16). Motivational displacement enables us to leave our own purposes and thoughts aside in order to shift thought and action toward furthering another person’s aims or desires. Caring is not a trait or a presumed motivation, but is performed in acts of careful listening and interconnected understanding and action.
Beginning with Gilligan’s (1982) germinal work in feminist ethics, ethics of care and its place in moral philosophy have been debated and refined over several decades. Central concerns relate to a lack of critical feminist consciousness in Noddings’ discussions and lack of universality of both the ontology of the mothering relationship on which an ethic of care is modeled and the impossibility or undesirability for the model to work in varied domains of human experience (Diller, 1988; Hoagland, 1990). In other words, there are questions about whether the specific relationship and context for care experienced between a mothering figure and child can be extended to human relations without such origin and intimacy. The intimacy and interaction required by this construction of care can perhaps relate to interpersonal relationships, but is less feasible as an ethical principle that expands beyond those with whom we are not imminently engaged. Held (2006), Tronto (1993), and Slote (2007), as just some examples, provide additional conceptualizations of ethics of care that respond to some of these concerns.
We do not forward Noddings’s ethic of care as a universal ethical framework, nor do we address the concept as may be imagined for comprehensive school reform. Like others who have applied her work to situations of K-12 teacher practices, we seek to understand how care between teachers and students may be described by reciprocity, engrossment, and motivational displacement. Care and caring are concepts that seem to inform the identities and perceptions made of teachers and the profession of teaching in ways that warrant examination of its meaning in practice (Marks, 2011; Woolhouse, 2015).
Care and Education for Students with Disabilities
Care in education is complex when considering disability and the history of segregated special education practice. The education of students deemed disabled in intellect, emotion or social capacity has been influenced by views of caregiving and beneficence that are constructed with assumptions of incompetence in academic capability (Bredberg & Davidson, 1999; Kliewer, Biklen & Kasa-Hendrickson, 2006; Wehmeyer, 2006). The result has been “a different and separate education for these students,” that is “based on custodial care and teaching self-care skills rather than providing a truly meaningful education” (Marks, 2011, p. 80). Such approaches, Marks (2011) suggests, characterize the labor of educators as “charity work,” rather than work aiming to ensure that “individuals are provided with equity and opportunities to be fully integrated members in our communities” (p. 80). Ayres et al. (2011), in contrast, state the presumption that less reliance on care—or independence—is most desirable to improve quality of life. They argue that the most appropriate education for students with severe disabilities should be focused on functional and vocational skills to enable independence.
Rather than solely emphasize independence, Hughes, McKie, Hopkins, and Watson (2005) and Kröger (2009) draw from disability studies to point out that care, support, and assistance need to include choice and control of supports within a value for interdependence. Different from the view of curriculum described by Ayres et al. (2011), we propose that being enabled to participate in activities one chooses enhances quality of life. Choice in how disabled children and adults direct assistance or select to pursue any given educational, social, or recreational interest may be approached in resistance to the ideal of “compulsory able-bodiedness” (McRuer, 2006) that is accentuated in the practice of special education. Educational opportunities are constrained or withheld for young disabled people when they are directed within an ableist construction of independence and support. Ethics of care instead emphasize interconnectedness and interdependence as a basis for human relations.
In critique of care scholarship that fails to address the perspectives of people with disabilities using support, Morris (2001) asserts:
“Whatever ‘care’ is—whether it is in the form of formal services, cash payments, or personal relationships—if it does not enable people ‘to state an opinion,’ ‘to participate in decisions which affect their lives,’ and ‘to share fully in the social life of their community,’ then it will be unethical…We need an ethics of care which recognizes that anyone—whatever their level of communication or cognitive impairment—can express preferences” (p. 15).
A meaningful shift in educational practice, then, is to challenge assumptions that idealize independence and limit choices. Offering students with disabilities the range of opportunities and experiences afforded to other students is essential for education intended to lead toward satisfying adult lives. Support systems created through a value for interdependence may be created for engagement in expansive opportunities, which may then be targeted and pursued in accordance with students’ goals and expressed desires (rather than in others’ assumptions about their futures). Ethics of care provide a useful, even if tentative, framework to honor and value the interdependence of all lives, which counters the venerated notion of independence that drives and constrains school experiences for students deemed intellectually disabled. Noddings brings attention to ways in which school practitioners may strive to create reciprocal caring relationships, rather than beneficent notions of care, more commonly assumed about special educators (Bredberg & Davidson, 1999).
Cripping Care for Teacher Education
Care in education occurs within relationships of reciprocity that enable teachers and students to direct their energies in concert. We disagree that care is “an interaction between adults and students, whereby the adult does what is best for the welfare of the student,” as Mihalas et al. (2009) describe. Neither is reciprocity in care “giving in” to what every student wants (Hong et al, 2009). “Care ethics,” Noddings (2012) writes, “emphasizes the difference between assumed needs and expressed needs. From this perspective, it is important not to confuse what the cared-for wants with that which we think [they] should want” (p. 773). Simultaneously, Noddings (2005b) acknowledges that there is usually some level of inference in striving to understand another’s expressed need. Yet, engaging through an ethics of care is characterized by engrossment in attending to what is expressed by the other, rather than inferred by oneself. Reciprocity involves the desire and inclination of both/all parties to understand and acknowledge what has been expressed, provided, and/or received, even if fulfilling the need or want is not possible. Care is a relationship between students and teachers to be developed through and for empathy, advocacy, and the shared journey toward students’ self-actualization. An ethic of care suggests that we nurture relationships not as a means or strategy to ease negotiations of needs, wants, and responses, but as a way of relating and honoring shared humanity and desire to support each other’s pursuits and inclinations.
Assumptions about incompetence in decision-making and fear about presumed vulnerability of students with disabilities are barriers to reciprocal relationships (Cowley & Bacon, 2013). The performance of self-direction and self-actualization of students with intellectual disabilities, Cowley and Bacon (2013) point out, is shaped and narrowed by emphasis on a view of independence that is informed by dominant values associated with compulsory able-bodiedness (McRuer, 2006). First, disabled students are only offered opportunities that seem possible for them to do independently as the basis on which to form aims and desires for adult life.  Second, “self-determination” in schools is promoted as a set of special education skills to be performed by disabled students and then judged as “appropriate” by educators, service-providers, or caregivers. A cripped view of care is instructive in this area. Rather than rely on a notion of independence as aiming to reduce care needs, a value for interdependence expands the imagination of what may constitute education that enables satisfying life experiences. Caring relationships between students and educators enable moments in which individual desires may then be understood and pursued to direct learning toward self-actualization (Gunn, 2012). A proposition for teacher education is to explore ways that teacher candidates can prepare and practice being attuned to learners in ways that resist assumptions and presumptions that have informed educational practice for disabled students.
Study Design: Cripping Fieldwork for Teacher Candidates
Over the past two years we have collected a range of exploratory data on the IAC project for the purposes of program evaluation and research related to inclusive postsecondary education and teacher education. Data sources include field video, transcribed planning and advisory meetings, field notes, informal group, and individual interviews collected during participant observation, artifacts capturing participant accounts of their experiences and learning, and reflection journals of teacher candidates. This article focuses on written journals that capture learning and impressions of fieldwork as self-reported by twelve teacher candidates during a 15-week university-based course.
Participants
In 2016, 31 early-program, undergraduate teacher candidates enrolled in a required course for their dual-certification program in subject-area and teaching students with disabilities.  
The Growth program, a local day habilitation center, arranged for 20 participants and 4 support staff to attend the public university located in a metropolitan area in the Northeastern USA one afternoon per week. Participants from Growth attended the university in consistent groups of 10 participants and 2 staff, each group on a different day (e.g., A-day; B-day).  Twelve teacher candidates were split into groups of five and seven, according to their availability, to team up with groups of ten participants from Growth. The field experience took place weekly for 12 weeks. “A-day” candidates consisted of three women and two men; “B-day” candidates were six women and 1 man. The twelve teacher candidates ranged in age from 20-23; and include one who identifies as Black, all others as White; one self-identifies as having a disability. Teacher candidates in the dual degree program must possess a 3.25 (of 4.0) grade point average for admission, which is one indicator of the high educational achievement of the group overall. All 20 Growth fellows meet eligibility for state Division of Developmental Disabilities services (2008), which indicates their status as people with “severe, chronic” disabilities that result in “substantial functional limitations” in three or more areas of major activities of daily living. Nearly all Growth fellows received K-12 education in segregated special education programs and schools. They range in age from 22-33; eight are women; twelve are men; three are identified as having Latino heritage; two as Black or African-American; and the rest Caucasian. All participants elected to attend the IAC program from a selection of several other community-based activities offered by Growth. Participation in research was voluntary and conducted with approval of the University’s Institutional Review Board.
Methodology and Data Source
The class aims to introduce philosophy of inclusive education. Prior to fieldwork, teacher candidates completed three 2.5 hour class sessions that provided readings and discussion related to medical and social perspectives on disability (e.g. Baglieri & Shapiro, 2012), person-centered planning (e.g. O’Brien & O’Brien, 2000) and examples of college programs designed for students with intellectual disabilities (e.g. Hart, Grigal & Weir, 2010). Care was not a stated theme of course instruction. Explicit instructions included expectations to work in partnership with fellows as peers, not “staff” or “teacher;” to get acquainted with each other to find connections and shared interests; and to participate together in on-campus activities that they sought out. Teacher candidates were encouraged to approach the experience as if they were showing the campus to a friend or prospective student and making plans based on what their guest wanted to do or learn about as they consider the demands and opportunities offered by college.
Graded assignments for teachers included creating a weekly journal, for which options in format were offered, and engaging in a person-centered planning experience, which culminated in a partnered poster presentation of Growth participants’ thoughts and goals related to college. For reflection journals most teachers submitted typed, continuous prose, though some included photos, offered hand-written journals, or used bulleted points to express ideas. A few used online blog services to host their journals. Regardless of form, all weekly journal entries were expected to include a) description of what the group did that week; b) discussion of the teachers’ impressions of the day and learning related to subsequent planning; and c) critical analysis, which meant a discussion of how the week’s experience related to course themes of disability and inclusive education. The journal data set consisted of approximately 89,000 words in 353 pages created by the twelve different teachers who agreed—one month after the end of the course—to enable the use of their journals for research purposes.
Data Analysis
As an exploratory study, the research aims are open-ended and are intended to describe and understand the experiences of all involved in the IAC. Established areas of analysis include attention to participant satisfaction and learning—referring to university-based students and IAC participants (all of whom are titled “IAC fellows” in daily operation), partner program staff, participant family members, and campus staff. We are also examining characteristics of the types of campus experiences that appeared and felt inclusive, exclusive, authentic, and/or staged.  The instructor of the course redacted all names and identifying information in order to provide an electronic data set with masked identities for other researchers to analyze. One researcher who was not the course instructor completed a first round of coding for journal data using an iterative process of narrative analysis to develop categories to organize themes emerging through immersion in the narrative data (Miles & Huberman, 1994).
Our primary emphasis in this article is on the content presented by participants and the ways they seem to employ concepts of care to describe their experiences. An interpretivist approach to analyzing meaning acknowledges that understandings brought forth in research are partial and shaped by gendered, raced, abled, and classed discourses that shape human relationships in the broad cultural context of the study. Individual experiences and positionalities within patriarchy, white supremacy and nativism, disablism, and social hierarchy also influence the specific worldviews of researchers and participants.
Limitations
        The analysis presented in this report should be treated as preliminary analysis of one facet of a broader study. Teacher education literature often recommends that teacher candidates and novice teachers write journals to capture or provoke reflection to enable development of practice (Bain, Ballantyne, Packer & Mills, 1999; Coulson & Harvey, 2013; Davis, 2006; Ulusoy, 2016). Journaling in the context of a graded assignment in a graded, required course demands consideration of teacher candidates’ authenticity, especially in relation to their explicit discussion of course themes, as required by the assignment. Caring, it may be noted, was not one of these themes. In other words, care emerged in several teachers’ journals, but was not a concept assigned in readings or as a course theme on which they were required or even specifically encouraged to discuss. We accept that performance of ideas in journals remains meaningful as an expression of learning; we propose that journal-writing can both capture learning and provoke reflection to enable learning (Vanhulle, Vite, Balslev & Dobrowolska, 2016), although we recognize that questions of authenticity may be raised. Future analysis of the fuller data set for the study will enable testing of themes in corroboration with video data and the impressions of other study participants, notably IAC participants and partner program staff. Continued efforts to establish inter-rater reliability in future rounds of coding will also add to confidence in the findings presented in this report.
Findings
In this article, we present examples of self-reported learning about care that the teacher candidates described in their journals. We highlight selected exemplars from some journals to illustrate themes that appeared in varied students’ writing. The themes are: (a) a benevolent or charitable approach to teaching (Marks, 2011); (b) questioning meanings of care; and (c) teacher candidate descriptions of care-related learning.
Entry Points: Hopes Towards Care-Giving
The first journal entry for all teacher candidates was written before beginning fieldwork and captures their hopes, questions, and fears. Some imagined care as something that they would give to fellows, as exemplified by Marisa:
“Our class seems to be composed of compassionate and capable future teachers who truly care about students with disabilities…I know that I definitely want to do a good job because I’m a caring person who wants to make a difference through my teaching…I won’t give up until I feel that I’ve created a good experience for my students.”
In this example, the perception of care relates to duty and is presumed in the work of making a difference for another person. Marisa communicates a somewhat distanced approach to caring, irrespective of individuality and instead focuses on “students with disabilities” more generally. Another teacher candidate, Emma, explains, “I was nervous but excited. I knew this would be the first stop in a long journey to achieve my mission: This was the first chance I would get to have a positive impact on someone's life.” At the start of the experience, Marisa and Emma seem to imagine the aims of fieldwork as a one-directional enactment or impact of care. Care is something that fellows might perceive and receive, and that teacher candidates express as part of a sense of mission.
Ava similarly describes her intentions for the project, but does so by explaining a goal that is more mutual and interdependent. Ava states, “One of my goals for this fieldwork experience is to really connect with the fellows. I hope by the end of the semester, the fellows and I will share a bond from the time we have spent together. I hope the fellows will learn that I care about them and want the best for their time at MSU.” Ava, like Marisa and Emma, expresses a desire to give care to the fellows, but unlike other teacher candidates, Ava describes that she hopes to share and connect with fellows, indicating a desire for mutuality beyond a one-sided expression of care. At the outset, then, teacher candidates express ideas of care as both benevolent and mission-driven, as well as hint toward imagining alternative caring relationships that are reciprocal in nature.
Reflecting on Experiences: Questioning Meanings of Care
Progressing through the weeks, many teacher candidate’s reflections became focused on the significance of particular interactions. A detailed entry from Marisa’s journal offers an example of how she used a particular situation—a critical incident, perhaps—to raise questions about how care may be enacted and received. We break the journal entry into parts interspersed with commentary on Marisa’s contemplations of care. The scene begins with a description of two Growth program staff members’ interaction with a Growth fellow, Jaiden:
“The two [program staff] with us were talking casually with one another, and reminding themselves how they always had to be prepared for everything and anything. [Jennifer] distinctly called out [Jaiden] and said, ‘See, you didn't have a spoon with you. If I wasn't prepared, you couldn't have eaten.’  [Jaiden] responded with a smile, grateful for the fact that he had someone to rely on...”
Marisa describes an experience in which she overhears a conversation between Jennifer and another Growth staff. She highlights Jennifer’s comment, which emphasizes Jaiden’s reliance on Jennifer to eat because he has forgotten a spoon. Marisa interprets Jaiden’s smile as gratitude for “someone to rely on.” It is this interaction and her interpretation of how Jennifer and Jaiden are positioned in a relationship of carer to cared-for that enables Marisa’s reflection. She continues:
“I felt like these professionals viewed themselves as responsible for these fellows. I got the sense that these fellows were helpless, that they were dependent, that they required extra care. There is a major difference between someone who requires a different type of educational method than one who is seen as entirely helpless. At the same time, I felt like the fellows were open to the idea of being helped. None of them rejected the extra support…”
As she reflects on the interaction, Marisa negotiates varied possibilities for understanding the meaning of the staff discussion and actions, as well as how meaning is being made about disability. Marisa notes that the fellows were positioned as needing “extra care” and then differentiates between simply needing an educational tweak or different method and being viewed by others as “entirely helpless.” Because Marisa hedges her wording with “as seen as” rather than stating that the person is helpless leads us to believe that Marisa is beginning to think through a critique of how it is the positioning of the fellows that cause them to be dependent on the staff, rather than actual dependency. Marisa also poses the possibility that the relationships of caregiver/cared-for are welcome and not necessarily resisted by fellows (even as they are positioned as dependent). Jaiden’s forgotten spoon is turned into a hyperbolic expression of his need for care. Jennifer uses the interaction to reify his need for “extra care” that requires her and other staff to be “prepared for everything and anything.” Jaiden’s presumed appreciation of the spoon is interpreted as acceptance of paternalistic care, ending the cycle in which his dependence is reified.
Marisa, however, continues the reflection to question the positionality ascribed to Jaiden in this interaction:
“The [program staff] have good intentions to help these fellows out, but… they have been trained to deal with these fellows in a professional manner… These people are viewed [by them] as different, so different, in fact, that they need to be dealt with more like subjects and less than humans.”
Here, Marisa considers the impact of the training and professionalization of program staff and teachers. The “good intentions” of staff to “help” are in contrast—denoted by her use of “but”—with a “professional” manner, which she italicized in the original entry. Marisa connects the ways that “training” programs that prepare people to work in disability fields frame the person with a disability as a “subject” in need of care. Her reflection echoes a view of care that is “demonstrated by forcing students to achieve the skills and acquire the knowledge that has been prescribed for them… [by] making students do what is thought to be good for them” (Noddings, 2005a, p. xiv). Nodding’s ethics of care instead advocates for a version of care that requires being responsive to the authentic desires of those being cared for.
Kelly and Chapman (2015) use several case studies to describe the complicated and often adversarial, but sometimes allied, relationships that are created between disabled people who require assistance and their caregivers. The authors explain that frequently professionals see themselves as allies and as being helpful, however they are not always interpreted as such by those receiving care. In one of the cases, Shauna, who has a physical disability, explains that she prefers to hire untrained attendants from unexpected places, like a local video store, instead of from professionalized services, which emphasize medicalization of disability and compliance. Shauna feels that hiring people she can train herself is a better way to subvert the power imbalances she may experience with her hired attendant. Similarly, Kröger (2009) states that many disability activists would rather hire assistants with no qualifications because “professional education has been accused of creating a patronizing attitude and prejudice among care workers” (p. 409). Similar to these authors, Marisa is beginning to identify—in practice—problematic roles that are embedded into professional training programs, particularly where there is little say by the disabled clients in the training or hiring of caregivers. She references Kalyanpur and Harry’s (2012) critique of the role that professional expertise plays in alienating families during education planning throughout her reflection. Marisa’s contemplation of the professionalized roles that Growth staff exhibited may suggest that cripped fieldwork is supporting her to “spin” an understanding of the care practices she sees as problematic rather than helpful.
Marisa is beginning to understand that the deficit-oriented perspective that staff like Jennifer use to respond to disabled adults, like Jaiden, mean that the type of care that is given is subjugating rather than humanizing:
“Upon further thought, I wondered what the most reasonable approach for having people diagnosed with a disability be more accepted in society [sic]. Perhaps the best way to do that is through constant exposure and experience with people with disabilities. That enables society, including professionals, to understand these people at a more personal level. It allows them to be seen as human, and not as problems in need of solutions. The approach should not be how to make a student with a disability function in a normal society, because that already carries the negative connotation that these students will have difficulty doing so, but instead, it should be an accepted fact that these people are just as capable of functioning in a society. I believe we also need to grant these people more independence, so that they can learn how to deal with situations, which would, in turn, open up job opportunities other than bagging groceries or baking groceries.”
In this paragraph, Marisa considers alternative possibilities for supporting the development of a caring and humanistic approach towards understanding people with disabilities. She concludes that one approach to reach this goal is to increase the inclusion of people with disabilities in society, which would in turn change the perspective one takes on the “other.” She also advocates against an assimilationist approach to inclusion. In other words, Marisa does not feel the best way for one to learn to “care” for another is to require them to become more “normal,” but instead we should adapt and adjust our social arrangements to be more flexible and open to different ways of being. She concludes that social acceptance of fellows may begin with their increased independence.
Of the concept of independence and care, Kröger (2009) states that, “Disability research emphasizes rights, justice and independence whereas the ethics of care writers want to go beyond individualism and rights-based thinking and underlie the collectivism and interdependence of all people” (p. 406). Various scholars advocate for the development of reciprocal and interdependent notions of care that support the independence and rights of the person with a disability with the acknowledgement that care and support may be needed (e.g., Morris, 2001). The approach to reaching this balance must be humanistic in order to understand the needs and desires of the person who is being assisted. It appears that Marisa is beginning to grapple with these complex ideas as she develops relationships with and observes the positioning of fellows, such as Jaiden. The fieldwork experience provided an opportunity for her to contemplate and raise questions about varied meanings of care, as aligned with theoretical concepts related to care and conceptions of ability.
Ending Points: Toward Caring Relationships
Teacher Candidates expressed notions of care throughout the journal entries and although some candidates held onto particular notions of care consistently over the course of the journals, there were clear, even if subtle, trends that suggest shifts from “giving” frameworks of care to one of mutuality and reciprocity. Learning through perceiving one’s own relationship with fellows as peers and friends was clearly expressed. For instance, Olivia describes that when she began the work she had approached:
“The project very scientifically… In other words, I was looking at the whole fellowship opportunity as a student would look at yet another college assignment. However, at risk of sounding cliché, I could never have imagined how deeply personal and fulfilling this experience would end up being for me… I did not anticipate making such profound connections with everyone involved. In fact, as the weeks went on, each session felt less like an assignment and more like a hangout among friends.”
The relationships that were created are described, as well as the notion that Olivia developed a caring attitude for the wellbeing of the fellow as a whole person. Similarly, Ava describes her progress from being nervous to developing:
“…A deep sense of caring for the well-being of the fellows…. I went from being worried about what they would be like to being insatiably curious about their personalities, backgrounds, strengths, and weaknesses. I can’t help but think of how much better society would be as a whole if everyone could have the experience that we are having. I think people would be a lot nicer and more empathetic towards people with disabilities if they got to know them on the level that we are.”
She extrapolates the development of a caring and empathetic relationship to the larger goals of societal inclusion through exposure to caring relationships. As Olivia describes “profound connections” and Ava notes becoming “insatiably curious” about fellows, they illustrate dispositions of receptivity and engagement toward individuals with significant intellectual and developmental disabilities that characterize caring relationships, beyond beneficent orientations to care.
Discussion
Based on their writing, teacher candidates increasingly understand care as interactional as they developed relationships with disabled early adults over their fieldwork with the IAC. Marisa notably pays close attention to interactions in order to contemplate care, while other exemplars highlight connection and concern for the wellbeing of fellows. Many other journal entries describe instances where teacher candidates and fellows learned about and alongside each other through exploring the campus, similarly suggesting relationships as key to the experience. As teacher candidates developed relationships with fellows, their contemplations about care and their interactions with fellows deepened. We do not suggest that teacher candidate learning was necessarily linear, despite our organization of a progress narrative here. We do propose, however, that the length and character of the fieldwork allowed space for relationships to develop that is not typically possible in school settings that are more likely to be structured by less flexible curricular goals and traditional student-teacher positionalities. Time and depth of experiences seem to play a factor in teacher candidates learning—Olivia, for example, marks change “as the weeks went on” and Ava’s sense of getting to know the fellows “on the level that we are” suggests unexpected depth.
Preliminary analysis indicates that teacher candidates direct their varied feelings and orientations in ways that did not always indicate clear or expected correlations between feelings, orientations, and ideas for action. Engagement in peer relationships did not interrupt all dominant discourses that influence paternalistic perspectives in disability and education. Thematic analysis is adequate to laying out the ideas that are present, yet the journals illustrate a mélange of many possible orientations and actions related to common disability tropes that influence perceptions of care, as well as other evidence of learning emerging in the data, which require additional analytical approaches to disentangle. We noted that some teacher candidates began to see their roles as advocates, as they gained a desire to create more opportunities for people with disabilities to participate in campus life. Other teacher candidates pondered questions about discrimination and social justice.
Further research may consider differences and potential contradictions between care literature and orientations of justice, as applied to educational practice and teacher learning. Noddings (2005a) has argued that care and justice orientations are quite different, but can be mutual. Barnes, as cited by Kröger (2009) calls for “an approach to social justice capable of incorporating care as well as rights” (p. 406). Kelly and Chapman (2015) claim that in order to change adversarial relations between caregivers and those who are cared for, it makes “strategic and political sense for some activist and scholarly efforts to work towards changing the norms that govern professionalism” (p. 59).
Continued exploration of care and relationships in teacher education can yield further understanding of how caring relationships relate to social justice education. Central to our proposal, however, is the need for continued research to understand the caring relationship in teaching, with particular attention to the ways that narratives of dependence configure meanings of care in teacher education and practice in work with learners deemed disabled. We propose that at least some teacher candidates shifted from an imagined role as caregiver to reflection upon the relationships built with fellows. It is important to consider how this learning experience may influence their identities and practice as novice educators.
Conclusion
In this study, we present findings that illustrate the potential for teacher candidates to shift ideas about early adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities as recipients of benevolent care toward more relational notions of care through engagement in field experience that emphasized peer relationships. Teacher candidate journal entries provided insight into how they conceptualized care as part of a beginning student-teacher identity and the types of field experiences that spurred them to contemplate, reflect, and raise questions about the nature of care interactions and positionalities of disabled individuals. As several teacher candidates initially described images of a one-sided, benevolent provision of care, we saw these notions shift as teacher candidates and fellows developed relationships and learned together. While we caution that our findings are preliminary, we propose that the “cripped” fieldwork experience, characterized by peer roles and a college rather than a K-12 or disability-only setting, enabled teacher candidates to engage with and imagine disabled individuals differently than would be possible in contexts like schools or day centers that enforce medical models of disability and discourses of dependence apparent in segregation.
Susan Baglieri, Ph.D., Susan Baglieri is an Associate Professor in the Department of Secondary and Special Education at Montclair State University. Her research interests include disability studies, inclusive education, and teacher education. She is co-author of the 2017 book, Disability Studies and the Inclusive Classroom, now in its 2nd edition.
Jessica Bacon, Ph.D., is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Early Childhood, Elementary and Literacy Education at Montclair State University, where she teaches classes on inclusive education and disability studies. Dr. Bacon has published research on topics in disability studies, educational policy and standards-based reforms, and parent and self-advocacy in K-12 and higher education.
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