Teaching and Care: Cripping Fieldwork in Teacher Education

Abstract

Providing teacher candidates early and ongoing opportunities to learn their profession by participating in school settings is often posed as a way to improve their preparedness for becoming teachers. Two problems of “fieldwork,” however, are the limited access to settings in which inclusive education is practiced and the milieu of special education in the US that emphasizes ableist assertions of independence, support, and conventional notions of care, especially for youth characterized as intellectually disabled. We present an overview of the establishment of a “cripped” fieldwork experience for early program teacher candidates enrolled in a required undergraduate course. By engaging in qualitative narrative analysis of candidates’ journals, we report preliminary findings on evolving notions of care related to disability and education in self-reported field-based learning.