International Journal of Qualitative Studies In Education

The voices of people with disability diagnoses are crucial to resisting deficit positioning and multiple cycles of oppression across social systems. However, pervasive whiteness in dis/Ability scholarship functions to generalize dis/Ability as a white experience and to enfold dis/Ability into the protective folds of whiteness and white saviorism. In the current study, led by a Black woman with a dis/Ability in collaboration with a white non-disabled critical special education scholar, we share the complex yet asset-based story of Alice, a Black dis/Abled woman who shared her lifetime of experiences within and across educational, medical, and carceral spaces with the first author. Applying womanism/Black feminism and DisCrit as a “theoretical and consiliencatory prism,” we identify elements of Alice’s story that engage in and allow for future anti-Black ableism analysis. Findings emphasize the importance of resilience for transforming intersectional-institutional-oppressive systems and have implications for future research, policy, and praxis for qualitative studies in the field of education.

Teacher education (TE) programs have historically served White women and focused on White androcentric culture. In the late 20th century, they began including multiculturalism and equity-centered (EC) ideals, yet the student body remained predominantly White and female. This study explores how an EC TE program made up of predominantly White women impacts the learning experiences of a solitary Black female. Through narrative inquiry, it was found that the White student body negatively impacted the Black student’s well-being, but the diverse curriculum and instructors played a prominent role and led to an overall positive learning experience.

This paper focuses on an exploration of the use of participatory approaches for facilitating change in schools. Lesson observations, fieldnotes from meetings, and interviews with teachers and children were collected in a study that aimed at exploring how inclusion can be promoted through an engagement with student voice in primary (elementary) schools (5-11-year-olds), in one city in the South of England, U.K. Data analysis highlighted how participatory approaches and methods (student researchers, sticky notes with unfinished sentences, visual methods and observations) allowed students to be actively involved in the research process and led to changes in their schools. We argue that participatory methods can be a powerful means for change, only if they are used in ways that enable sustained dialogues between teachers and students in schools. Of all the methods that we explore, we highlight observation as important in facilitating such efforts.

n recent decades, Latin American countries have experienced increased enrollment, yet many children and youth remain outside the education system, questioning its relevance. In this context, teachers are called to be aware of and value children and youth’s cultural diversity to harness it as the basis for relevant and transformative education. In this article, we analyse the teachers’ and teacher educators’ reflections about their practices sparked by collaborative ethnography experiences with children and youth in Chilean reinsertion and re-entry programs. In the results, teachers and teacher educators reflect on the value of collaborative ethnographies in mobilising transformative reflections about children and youth as active makers of the social world. We also discuss the openings of this methodological approach to reduce asymmetries between adults, children, and youth and the latter’s role as co-producers of teacher professional development programmes.

This article explores the importance of student voice in fostering equity and inclusion within schools. The study explores the efforts of 16 Spanish secondary school students who, through a year of online meetings, developed a guide for students to make their schools more inclusive. The group consisted of young individuals of diverse social classes, abilities, nationalities, ethnicities and genders, among others, who engaged in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) process to collectively analyse and reconstruct their realities, forming a resistance group. Four years on, they stand as a benchmark in activism for inclusive education, where, despite the ongoing oppressive reality, their positions have undergone significant changes. Research, as a tool for educational change, enables students to transition from being “objects” of an exclusionary school to subjects with agency.

English-medium instruction (EMI) is a burgeoning field that has received much attention in recent years. Yet, little has been written from the standpoint of scholars who practice EMI themselves, located in contexts commonly viewed in the EMI literature and policy discourse as populated by faculty and students who are "non-native/non-L1" speakers of English and with assumed disciplinary deficiencies. What is often highlighted is a deficit view of these faculty and students: that they are linguistically and epistemically underprepared, rather than having multilingual, multicul-tural, and multi-epistemic assets. In the form of duoethnography, the paper explores the lived experiences of two EMI researchers/practitioners from Taiwan and Korea, one labeled local and the other international in their respective settings. Through the concept of borderlands, the paper calls for a critical content-first approach to EMI and asks scholars/practi-tioners to become "border-crossers" by foregrounding the multilingual reality inherent in EMI contexts.