Living Pedagogies of Voice: Co-Creating a Decolonial Project to Reimagine Special Education
Special education in the United States often enacts a colonial logic that reifies remediation-first models, positioning disabled students of color as intervention-recipients and foreclosing their agency as producers of knowledge. Specialized academic instruction (SAI) classrooms frequently reproduce these dynamics through deficit-oriented practices that determine who is recognized as “capable.” Yet little research examines what becomes possible when special education relinquishes interpretive authority to disabled students of color themselves. Grounded in Chicana feminist epistemologies, Pérez’s (1999) decolonial imaginary, disability justice, and DisCrit, I theorized Pedagogies of Voice—a framework that redistributes interpretive authority from institutions to students, treating student voice as epistemic ground in both research methodology and classroom practice. The study employed a two-phase qualitative design. Phase 1 consisted of six codesigned encuentros with a disabled Latina high school student, using plática to coconstruct curricular structures. Phase 2 examined the enactment of this curriculum with 10th-grade SAI students. Data sources included classroom dialogue, student-authored artifacts, and reflexive analytic memos. Findings revealed that redistributing interpretive authority produced cascading shifts across methodology, pedagogy, and student identity. The focal student was positioned as coanalyst, shaping analytic themes. Classroom practice was reoriented around inquiry, multimodal expression, and dialogic accountability. Students engaged texts as structural critics—reframing institutional labels and articulating new self-concepts while navigating inherited schooling language. I advanced a fundamental rethinking of special education by demonstrating that redistributing interpretive authority reorganizes instruction, expands what counts as rigorous knowledge, and creates conditions for students to position themselves as interpreters of schooling rather than objects of remediation.
special education, pedagogies of voice, decolonial education, Chicana feminist epistemologies, DisCrit, disability justice, codesign, epistemic justice, disabled Latinx students, antiableist pedagogy, LatCrit, testimonial injustice, epistemic redistribution, student voice, multimodal literacies, relational pedagogy, nepantla, decolonial imaginary, plática, testimonio, encuentro, SAI, specialized academic instruction, racialized ableism, deficit thinking, remediation, knowledge production, qualitative research, interpretive authority, crip time, access intimacy, misfitting, intersectionality, Chicana feminism, borderlands, community cultural wealth, IEP, transition planning, secondary education, high school, teacher research, classroom ecology, instructional sequencing, Bilingual, Multilingual, and Multicultural Education, Chicana/o Studies, Curriculum and Social Inquiry, Disability and Equity in Education, Disability Studies, Education, Ethnic Studies, Junior High, Intermediate, Middle School Education and Teaching, Language and Literacy Education, Latina/o Studies, Race and Ethnicity, Social and Behavioral Sciences, Social Justice, Special Education and Teaching
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations