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Implications for Conducting Special Education Research Drawn From the Reflexive Accounts of a Deaf With Disabilities Professor and Three Student Researchers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 July 2020

Steven Singer ,
Kimberly Cacciato ,
Julianna Kamenakis  and
Allison Shapiro
Steven Singer*
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey, USA
Kimberly Cacciato
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey, USA
Julianna Kamenakis
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey, USA
Allison Shapiro
Affiliation:
The College of New Jersey, USA
*
*Corresponding author. Email: singers@tcnj.edu
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Abstract

A Deaf with disabilities (DWD) male professor, 2 hearing female teacher candidates, 11 parents (4 of whom were immigrants), and 6 DWD children sought to better understand the experiences of parents of DWD children by conducting an ethnographic study (Singer, Kamenakis, Shapiro, & Cacciato, in press). The research team recorded reflexive journals as a way to analyse their methodology. In this essay, we reflect on 3 themes developed from the reflexive journals: (a) researcher positionality, (b) negotiating power in research, and (c) language variation in practice. We discuss our experiences and contextualise these accounts within relevant scholarship, attempting to locate some amount of resolution to the very human experiences upon which we reflect. We provide key takeaways for doing research with and among people with disabilities in special educational settings, particularly focusing on people who communicate in nonnormative ways. We conclude with a culminating discussion of the significance of creating emancipatory special education research.

Keywords

special educationreflexivityDeafdisabilityDeaf with disabilities
Type
Original Articles
Information
Australasian Journal of Special and Inclusive Education , Volume 44 , Issue 2 , December 2020 , pp. 73 - 87
Copyright
© The Author(s) 2020

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Footnotes

†

This manuscript was accepted under the Editorship of David Paterson.

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