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The Stories We Tell: An Examination of the Use of Disability Narratives in Pre-Professional Education
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2024-05
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Educational Leadership
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http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/10161
Abstract
Ethical respect for others is central to culturally-responsive teaching. While a variety of research in higher education has examined the use of narratives to foster ethical respect for different cultural groups, there has been little research on using narratives to foster an ethical respect for people with disabilities. Two questions informed this study: (1) What kinds of disability narratives are available? and (2) What kinds of narratives are used in pre-professional education? Question 1 was addressed by drawing on an examination of the scholarship of other culturally adjacent categories and content analysis conducted on the descriptions of a small sample of seventeen disability-related narratives from across a wide range, for example graphic novels, and fiction such as kid-lit, young adult lit, and adult literature and so on. That analysis established that the historically dominant framing of disability is the pathography, a narrative that focuses on medical diagnoses, problematizes disability and focuses on reductive limitations. Two genres speak to the dominant pathologized framing: inclusion literature and illness narratives. Two counter-narratives embody what it is to experience the body/mind with this particular disability: somebody narratives which are written by individuals with disabilities, and caregiver narratives which discuss the proximate lived experience of an intimate, ally, or caregiver. Within these four classes of narratives, 16 discrete sub-genres were identified as a proposed disability-genre taxonomy. Question 2 was addressed by an employing the genre taxonomy to examine of a sample of nine syllabi and 98 narratives from courses designed for pre-professionals in the field of disability. Two additional subgenres were identified for a total of 17 discrete subgenres. Analysis revealed that narratives appear to be chosen on the basis of authors’ lived experience of disability. Of the seventeen possible genres from which to choose, 80% of the narratives were of one of four genres: endure accept or accommodate illness narratives, protest narratives, liberatory narratives, and self-revealing narratives. Understanding the range of disability-related genres that are available and used will allow researchers to do more nuanced analyses of how narratives are taken up by pre-professionals, will allow professors to make more informed decisions about their curricular choices, and presents new models by which professionals can encourage self-narrative texts written by individuals with disabilities.
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