Critical Special Education: Navigating Special Education Realities and Working Toward the Ideals of Disability Studies in Education

There are two divergent perspectives about how best to understand and serve students with disabilities: Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education. These fields represent distinct epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical ways of understanding education for students with disabilities. Researchers, teachers, and teacher educators are faced with navigating these polarized fields while trying to articulate their own professional identity. Unfortunately, neither perspective alone addresses both the practicalities of navigating existing structures, policies, and practices, and the visionary anti-ableist ideals that will meaningfully address inequities for students with disabilities. In this conceptual paper we offer an alternative, a Critical Special Education framework, which represents the continuum between the two fields. We describe the siloing of Traditional Special Education and Disability Studies in Education, identify the need for an alternative, and outline the tenets of Critical Special Education. This framework leverages aspects of the existing special education structures to reduce harm in the here and now, while simultaneously striving toward the ideals of Disability Studies in Education and creating more just and humanizing education for students with disabilities.