9. Disability Studies in Education with Dr. Suzanne Stolz

January 21, 2022

Suzanne Stolz, Ed.D. serves as an Assistant Professor at the University of San Diego. A former high school English teacher, administrator, and leader of disability programs, she has expertise in online instruction, curriculum design, mentoring, school culture, Universal Design for Learning, and disability studies in education. Her research, related to conceptions of disability and disability pedagogy, often includes reflection about her experience as a disabled student. She has created disability curriculum for high school students, for out-of-school time programs, and for disability mentoring. She advises a student organization, Alliance of Disability Advocates, and also has served on the board of the Society for Disability Studies. Suzanne is especially passionate about working with preservice and inservice teachers to rethink their conceptions of disability and create inclusive school communities. Annually, she leads a fellowship program for general education teachers who want to become leaders of inclusion at their school sites.

In this episode, Suzanne distinguishes between Disability Studies in Education and Special Education, and shares why it's important that we educate ourselves with a Disability Studies lens.

Links Mentioned

Johnson Fellows Program

Teacher Leaders for Inclusion

Teachers for Inclusion Learning about Disability Culture

National Endowment for the Humanities

Stay Connected with Diana

Diana's Website

Free Resource - 5 Keys to Going Beyond Awareness

Beyond Awareness: Bringing Disability into Diversity in K-12 Schools & Communities - Diana's Book

Ed Roberts: Champion of Disability Rights - Diana's Children's Book

"Beyond Awareness" Digital Course

Diana's TEDx Talk

Beyond Awareness Facebook Page

Diana on Instagram

Credits and Image Description

Intro and outro music courtesy of Emmanuel Castro.

Podcast cover photo by Rachel Schlesinger Photography.

Podcast cover image description: Black and white photograph of Diana, a Spanish-American woman with long, wavy, brown hair. She is wearing a flowy, white blouse and smiles at camera as she leans against wooden building. Photo is colorfully framed with gold and orange rays of seeming sunshine on top half, and with solid sage green color on bottom half. Text reads "Beyond Awareness: Disability Awareness That Matters, Diana Pastora Carson, M.Ed."

Johnson Fellows Program https://www.sandiego.edu/soles/learning-and-teaching/johnson-education-fellows.php Teacher Leaders for Inclusion https://www.lead4inclusion.com/ Teachers for Inclusion Learning about Disability Culture https://www.facebook.com/groups/201578786622476

Episode Transcript

Diana Pastora Carson:
Welcome to the Beyond Awareness: Disability Awareness That Matters podcast. Here, you will find a safe space to learn and grow with leaders in education, Disability Studies, disability advocacy, and diversity, equity and inclusion conversations. Specifically, we look at how disability fits into diversity, equity and inclusion, and how to frame disability awareness. In the context of educating K through 12 communities, this podcast serves educators, parents, and community members who strive to learn and or teach about disability in a research-based and respectful way. Moving beyond simple awareness and diving into inclusive and socially responsive conversations. Thank you for joining us today. Now let's go Beyond Awareness.

Diana Pastora Carson:
I'm so excited to have my friend and colleague Dr. Suzanne Stolz with us here today. Suzanne, welcome to the podcast.

Suzanne Stolz:
Thanks so much for having me.

Diana Pastora Carson:
So Suzanne, would you introduce yourself, tell us your story, and why you're passionate about bringing Disability Studies into education.

Suzanne Stolz:
I am a disabled woman who grew up with my disability, and I grew up in a small community where I really stood out out as being different among my peers and among my siblings. And I had a really great childhood. And I was always interested in becoming a teacher, but, in that, I also experienced a lot of things that were really uncomfortable and, you know, emotionally painful as a child who felt like I was misunderstood a lot. And so as I got through school, I decided I wanted to be a teacher. I kind of had the sense that I would do that for a long time. But I really kind of had the idea that I was going to teach people to understand disability differently than what I saw in my community.

Suzanne Stolz:
And the way I thought I would do it, I think was quite different than how things have rolled out and how I've actually done it. And one of the things that I think happened was as a child, I very much wanted to separate myself from special education. And anytime I had anything to do with special education, I was really uncomfortable. And so I distanced myself from it. And when I became a teacher, I became a general education teacher, mainly because I thought I needed to separate myself. And it wasn't until later on that I learned ways to really bring what I wanted to do together with folks who work in special education. That's kind of where I started my thinking about all of this.

Diana Pastora Carson:
And where are you now? What do you do?

Suzanne Stolz:
So now I am a professor of education at the University of San Diego. And I get to work with pre-service teachers and inservice teachers, mainly teacher courses related to Disability Studies in Education, and also related to other forms of diversity, equity social justice in schools.

Diana Pastora Carson:
You mentioned Disability Studies in Education, and I'd really like for us to focus on that for some teachers who have been in teaching for a while and never heard of it, and even newer teachers who've never heard of the term Disability Studies in Education. And I want to read the purpose from the American Educational Research Association's website. It says "The DSE, Disability Studies in Education Special Interest Group per the mission of the Disability Studies in Education SIG, special interest group, is to promote the understanding of disability from a social model perspective, drawing on social cultural, historical, discursive, philosophical, literary, aesthetic, artistic, and other traditions to challenge medical scientific and psychological models of disability as they relate to education." Okay. Now that's a lot to absorb all at once, but I'm wondering if you can put that in layman's terms. What is Disability Studies in Education and how is that different from special education?

Suzanne Stolz:
Yeah. So you listed off a whole lot of different areas that feed into Disability Studies in Education. And one of the things about Disability Studies is that it is interdisciplinary. And so, whereas historically, people have thought about disability really in terms of medicine or in terms of impairment Disability Studies in Education really flips it and says, wait a minute, this is also about how we interact with people, how the world interacts with us. So of course it is social, it is cultural, it is political, it is aesthetic, I think is one of the terms you use. So it's part of art, it's part of culture,and it really shapes the way people think. So DSE really is a way of shifting, saying wait a minute, there's so much more for us to think about here than just what happens in terms of a person's body and the way, you know, their body operates.

Suzanne Stolz:
So special education really came out of a need that folks with disabilities were not being included in schools. They were not being served in schools. And so there was legislation to say, actually, now we are going to have this thing called special education to make sure that students with disabilities are served, right? And so, but a lot of training and a lot of what went into special education really came from a medical model, thinking about how we can accommodate people. How can we help students who are outside the norms fit the norms, do what is normal and Disability Studies really makes us think a little bit differently, question what those norms are and why we ascribe to those norms, and really push the boundaries bringing art in, giving us different ways to think about how the world could work, how people can function in different ways, what social interactions can look like. That's kinda in a nutshell, how I think about the differences, really thinking about the culture and the social pieces of people's lives.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Thank you. That was really helpful. So when you are with your students in your teacher education classes, what do you stress with them? How is what you teach them in teacher prep programs different from what is normally taught in special education teacher prep programs?

Suzanne Stolz:
Yeah. I guess what I do is I tend to ask people what their experience has been and who they know or what, what personal experience they have with disability. So they really start to look at what their own conceptions of it are. So I think a lot of what I do is about relationships. And part of that is bringing in the voices of more disabled people, right? Often within special education, there are experts, there are doctors, or there are psychologists, or there are special education teachers who speak for disabled people. And so, in the courses I teach, I tend to really draw from the voices of people with firsthand experience and get people to think about what those experiences are and how they might differ from the traditional ways that we've been taught about disability.

Diana Pastora Carson:
And when you bring in people to speak in your classes, people who are disabled, what is it that they focus on? Are they focusing on their impairment? You know, what's different about their body or their mind? Or is it something else that they're focusing on?

Suzanne Stolz:
Yeah, I think it's more about focusing on what their experience has been in general, how they feel that they have been a part of classes they've been in, how they've been a part of their own families or their own communities or how they felt like they haven't been part of their own communities. So I think if people do want to share about their, of course, they can share that experience, but I really think giving people a chance to get to know disabled folks on a deeper level, without it just being about what's different is really what's important. And, you know, you mentioned bringing people in. Some of it is bringing people in, and some of it is reading the works that so many disabled scholars have done that really, really push at a lot of the issues that, you know, have been talked about within Disability Studies for the last 30 or 40 years, but are still not mainstream. And so I find that in classes and with teachers, a lot of folks haven't had access to, to this content, knowing who disabled artists are.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Yes.

Suzanne Stolz:
And so that's something I think that surprises and really excites teachers because I think teachers want to see potential in all of their students. And if they haven't seen models for how that works within disability communities it's really helpful for them to get models.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Absolutely. So you're talking about really amplifying the voices, the messages, the art, the music, the whatever people who are disabled, who have the lived disability experience, you're bringing that into your classroom in a variety of formats and giving your students the opportunity to really get to know people on a deeper level.

Suzanne Stolz:
Yes, that's right.

Diana Pastora Carson:
So when you do that, I know you touched on this a little bit. Are there any examples of the impact that doing this has had on your students, on your adult teacher ed students?

Suzanne Stolz:
A couple that I can think of... Well, for one, I'll talk aboutstudents who are, yes, I say students, but a lot of them now are teachers, right? So I have kept in contact with some teachers who really bring this thinking to their K12 schools, meaning that they choose to read books with their students that include disability experience, in which they talk about the characters in books and their experiences. This is very different than what I remember as a studentI can point to a lot of books or stories that we read that involved disabled characters, but we never talked about it. It was just like, it was there and there was silence. You don't talk about, oh, this character in the Glass Menagerie had a disability and why was she socially isolated? Instead, you read this story and you question what, what her mother was doing.

Suzanne Stolz:
Wait a minute, what was going on with this character? So teachers who have had disability studies in education are actually bringing the questions or they're changing, you know, whose perspective we're actually looking at, whose perspective is important and whose voices can actually be heard. So that's one example. Another example though, is students who have come into my class having grown up with a disability, but never felt comfortable claiming that as part of their identity and because they grew up in a system of special education in which it was all about, well, we're gonna make accommodations and we'll do this quietly. And you know, you can fit right in with your peers. But they had not had an opportunity to hear about disability in an asset-based way. And so I've had a number of students who have after a few weeks of engaging with this content coming and saying, actually, I know exactly what you're talking about because I have this experience.

Suzanne Stolz:
And for some that's really exciting. And for others, it's kind of, you know, scary like, whoa, I'm learning something here about myself that I haven't confronted, or I haven't been allowed to confront before. And I guess when I say scary, what I mean is that some students experience kind of a coming out experience with this, like, wait a minute, is it safe to tell you that I've had this experience? So I find that really exciting. And especially because these are folks who are going to go into classrooms and are really going tochange the way their students think about disability and they'll be able to be models in schools. I mean, that's something that we have given very little focusto is: where are the models of disabled adults in K12 schools?

Diana Pastora Carson:
Yeah. And that speaks to what you were talking about earlier is who gets to determine what's normal, right? And if you have the models of people who are people in authority, people who are educators people who are decision-makers who have voices at the table and voices that matter, then you have that empowered model for yourself to not have it be so scary to come out, to embrace your disability experience.

Suzanne Stolz:
Right. You know, it makes me think too, Diana, about my first experience with Disability Studies in Education. I was a high school teacher and I had experienced some employment discrimination related to disability. And I happened to be looking at a magazine around that time. And I found an invitation to apply to an NEH Institute for teachers that was about integrating Disability Studies into Humanities content in K12 schools.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Nice. What's NEH? I'm sorry to interrupt.

Suzanne Stolz:
NEH is National Endowment for the Humanities.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Okay. Thank you.

Suzanne Stolz:
Yeah. And so as a high school teacher, I applied to that and I just thought, how exciting is this? Like, I've been, I've been experiencing discrimination and this description kind of talks as if these people know something about that. And so I was accepted to this and went to this 5-week institute that was hosted by some Disability Studies scholars who are really well known Linda Ware David Mitchell, and Sharon Snyder. And so they hosted this in Chicago and there were 20-some teachers invited to this from across the country. And we were given so many different texts to read things that are part of, some that are part of our curriculum, but aren't always talked to, spoken to in the ways that Disability Studies asks questions.

Suzanne Stolz:
And so I remember reading these things and learning, like hearing other people articulate some of the things I had been feeling and I never really had the words to say, or the words to, you know, why it, why does this particular thing bother me? Or why am I so drawn to issues around this? And all of a sudden it just really clicked. And I thought, oh my gosh, this is something I can talk about. This is something, you know, I had for a long time, not talked about my disability experience because I had seen that it wasn't something that was valued. And so in this new context, I realized there was so much valuable there, and so much valuable about what I knew and what I, what I had experienced.

Diana Pastora Carson:
So what do you think...you said, I can, I can talk about this. I can speak about this. What about those teachers out there listening, or family members out there listening who want to have these conversations, but they're not sure that they're having them the right way. You know, they're, they're not sure that they're equipped. What can they do to better immerse themselves in Disability Studies concepts?

Suzanne Stolz:
Yeah, I think there are some resources now that are really great for beginning to learn about this. One of the resources that I would love to talk about is a resource that I've been working with somecolleagues to put together. And it's a website. One of the projects that I get to do in my job is to do a summer institute for teachers who want to become leaders for inclusion at their school sites. And this program is called the Johnson Fellows Program. But through that work, what we found was that for the time of being in the program, folks would come in and they'd get really excited about Disability Studies work. And then they would go back to their schools and want to look for more and they'd search online and find pretty much everything was special education-related. And so we created a website and it's called Teacher Leaders for Inclusion.

Suzanne Stolz:
And what we've included on this site are some learning modules for teachers. We have included a whole lot of resources as faras artists, as far as disabled dancers, disabled poets a lot of links to exploringthat world, disability culture. It also has some sample lesson plans that folks have been creating. And we're just really starting to build a repository of lessonsdone by teachers who are using the Tenets of Disability Studies in Education. So, and then there's also someshort stories about work that teachers are doing. So I think that's one way to get started. And I think other ways, it's really just to be open to having conversations withdisabled folks in your own community, finding out what's important to them, finding out what their experience has been, finding out what their hopes are, what their dreams are, what a better world would look like for them.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Yeah...What an accessible world look like, for access to all the things that we all want for our own life quality. Yeah. Great. Thank you so much, Suzanne. So how can people reach you? I know you said that you have the Teacher Leaders for Inclusion website. Give us that address.

Suzanne Stolz:
Do you want me to say that?

Diana Pastora Carson:
Yeah. Say that and I'll put it in the show notes as well.

Suzanne Stolz:
Okay. So that site is www.Lead4Inclusion.com. So it's Lead 4 (the number 4) Inclusion.com.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Great. Is there any other...?

Suzanne Stolz:
So other places that you can reach me...I have a Facebook groupthat I started when I beganteaching teachers. And it is called Teachers for InclusionLearning about Disability Culture. And I have a group of about 300 teachers who are interested in this so far, and we share resources with each other and folks ask questions. And as a community, we respond to each other.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Wonderful. Any last words of wisdom, Suzanne?

Suzanne Stolz:
No, thank you so much for this opportunity. Really great to talk to you. And I'm excited to find out if there are teachers out there who want to connect and learn more.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Thank you for tuning into this episode of Beyond Awareness: Disability Awareness That Matters. If this was helpful to you, be sure to subscribe, rate and review this show on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify. You can also follow me, Diana, on Instagram @dianapastoracarson and on Facebook at www.Facebook.com/GoBeyondAwareness. Or you can go to my website for more information at www.DianaPastoraCarson.com. My books include Beyond Awareness: Bringing Disability into Diversity Work in K-12 Schools and Communities, as well as my children's book, Ed Roberts: Champion of Disability Rights. They can both be found on Amazon. For your free Beyond Awareness resource called the "5 Keys to Going Beyond Awareness," simply go to www.GoBeyondAwareness.com/keys. This podcast transcription and podcast guest information can be found in the show notes. Intro and outro music has been provided courtesy of Emmanuel Castro. Thank you again for joining me. Be well, be a lifelong learner, and let's be inclusive. See you next time.

Diana Pastora Carson:
Latin Pop Music