introduction

I grew up in a suburban, predominantly white neighborhood in the United States. This context heavily influenced my understanding of the world. I bring this understanding into a four-year teacher education program, my teaching practice, and my masters program in inclusive education. It wasn’t until my coursework in this masters program that I began to critique the education system from a critically inclusive lens. Because of my privileged identities, context, and worldviews, I chose not to engage in anti-oppressive frameworks, or to engage enough to believe I was inclusive. The process of accepting my neurodivergence and engaging in academic coursework was my entry point into anti-ableism, snowballing into critical and anti-oppressive fields.  

Originally, my research focused on identifying ableist practices in schools. This evolved into how abelist practices are influenced by normative beliefs that are often so ingrained that they become difficult to identify. In this ignorance, despite “good intentions”, harm is replicated (Annamma et al., 2013; Baglieri et al., 2011; Price, 2011; Walker, 2021a). This led me to the understanding that forces of ableism intertwine with other oppressive systems, such as racism and classism. Segregated special education settings have long been populated with students from marginalized ethnic and racial groups, immigrant populations, and students marginalized by poverty (Erevelles, 2000; National Council on Disability [NCD], 2019). As Annamma et al. (2013) put it, “racism and ableism often work in ways that are unspoken, yet racism validates and reinforces ableism, ableism validates and reinforces racism” (p.6). 

At the center of these dynamics is normativity, an invisible but powerful force that privileges white, upper-middle class, heterocisgender, neurotypical, and non-disabled identities. It is no surprise that normativity is embedded in North American public education, considering these groups are the demographic it was explicitly built for. Settler colonialism and capitalism are foundational for understanding why our education system works the way it does, and how it influences beliefs about education (Roberts, 2024). In my own context, I began to make connections to implicitly oppressive patterns in my teaching practice and beliefs, and to rethink how I view inclusive education as a whole. Therefore, I have come to understand inclusive education not as integrating students labeled as “disabled” into general education classrooms, but as reconfiguring “physical and social structures to welcome diversity (e.g., of abilities, culture, ethnicity, and gender identity)” (Inclusion BC, 2026, para. 3). 

For inclusive education to actualize, and for diversity to be understood as the norm, scholars call for a paradigm shift (e.g., Slee, 2022; Walker, 2021a).  This paradigm shift calls for an audit of ableism in our school system (Slee, 2022), but ableism is interconnected with other forms of oppression. In recent years, more scholarship has focused on how these systems interact with one another (e.g., Cruz et al., 2024; Naraian, 2021) but less attention is given to the intimate ways that teachers internalize, reproduce, and navigate oppressive systems. This intimacy is key because inclusive mindsets influence inclusive practices. Cruz et al. (2024) found that even when teachers increase their self-efficacy in inclusive methods, they often struggle to understand how what they commonly perceive as “good teaching”, “good student”, and “high ability” are entrenched in white neoliberal, neurotypical measures of success. Even with inclusive practices, exclusion persists because the underlying value system hasn’t shifted. Naraian (2021) explains that teachers are left to carry the stress and guilt of systemic failures all by themselves, without time or support. There is a need for more honest conversations about how racism, ableism, and colonialism operate through schooling.

Limited research has addressed the transformative process of teachers moving beyond the implicitly oppressive notions of education towards a critically inclusive education. Given the need for the shift in underlying belief systems and how oppressive systems function intersectionally, I plan to explore my own intersectional experiences as a white nonbinary, neurodivergent student to analyze how normativity operates in schools through critical autoethnography. Critical autoethnography involves the self (auto), the context/culture (ethno), and the writing (graphy) while explicitly centering critical analysis. 

This study does not aim to center my experience as universal, but to use it as a site of analysis and reflection. The work of BIPOC and disabled scholars and self-advocates is fundamentally reshaping my relationship with anti-racism, whiteness, and dis/ability (e.g., Annamma et al., 2012; Cruz et al., 2024; hooks, 1994; Roberts, 2024; Sins Invalid, 2016; Yu, 2024). Critical autoethnography calls for theory as a collaborator, inviting me to construct meaning in collaboration with the work of BIPOC and disabled scholars and self-advocates (Holman Jones, 2016). It also demands that I do not treat my reflexivity as a one-time disclosure, but as an ongoing, iterative process (Boylorn & Orbe, 2021). Although I can trace a shift from a less inclusive stance to a more inclusive one, I do not yet understand the when, how, or why of that change, nor can I name the themes, patterns, tensions, and nuances that structured it.

Research Question: What is my transformative process in internalizing, perpetuating, and deconstructing normativity in my educational experiences?

By examining my journey from a four-year undergraduate degree in education, to a teacher, and finally to a graduate student and researcher in education, I aim to explore the impact of normative thinking embedded in schools, analyze my own process of paradigm shift, and generate accessible research through a multimodal website. I will analyze a wide array of data, including memories, school assignments, and classroom observations and videos, through Arts-Based Methods (ABM) and Reflexive Thematic Analysis (RTA). By utilizing critical theoretical lenses such as Disability Justice, InCrit, and Neuroqueer theory, I intend to document the metacognitive process required to shift from a deficit-based paradigm toward a critically inclusive paradigm.