My Scholarly Commitments & Work

New Book! Just Published!

My commitment is to push the margins of the normal and accepted and help and support others to name that which they know to be problematic.

Key Publications:

Naraian, S. & Schlessinger, S. (2021). Narratives of Inclusive Teaching: Stories of becoming in the field. NY: Peter Lang.

​Schlessinger, S. (Forthcoming). Female special educators of color: Negotiating a triple bind. In D. Hernandez-Saca, C.M. Voulgarides, & H. Pearson (Eds.), Understanding the Boundaries between Disability Studies and Special Education through Consilience, Self-Study, and Radical Love. Washington, DC: Lexington Press.

Schlessinger, S. (2018). Reclaiming teacher intellectualism through and for inclusive education.
International Journal of Inclusive Education, 22(3), 268-284.

Naraian, S. & Schlessinger, S. (2018). Becoming an inclusive educator: Agentive maneuverings
in a collaboratively taught classroom. Teaching and Teacher Education, 71, 179-189.

I believe in inclusive education as a vehicle for rethinking taken for granted educational systems, structures, and practices that systematically exclude particular populations.  I believe in the want and capacity of all individuals, teachers and students alike, to learn, create, and be makers of their own knowledge.  I believe that teachers are politically positioned to either perpetuate the status quo or act as agents of change, working to disrupt theoretically challenged yet discursively accepted notions of a normal center.  My commitment as an educator is to in all of my work, research, teaching, professional development, and life, push the margins of the normal and accepted and help and support others to name that which they know to be problematic and to work counter-hegemonically. 

When speaking of inclusive education one has to be careful to be specific as there are a variety of understandings attributed to this word.  First and foremost, I will say that I do not imagine inclusive education to be an inclusion classroom or any particular space or service delivery model at all. Rather I conceive of it as a stance toward teaching and learning that is inquiry driven and contingently responsive to the needs of the students in the classroom regardless of the classroom makeup.  As such, inclusive education can exist in any service delivery model from general education through to the segregated self-contained classroom.  It is a way of considering curriculum and instruction that in many ways debunks the need for a variety of service delivery models.  Secondly, when speaking of inclusive education, I do not mean a way to provide educational opportunities to students with labeled disabilities alongside their “typical” peers. Rather, I mean recognizing the diversity of experiences, talent, proclivities, and needs present in every single classroom and providing a universally designed education to all students that does not stigmatize but naturalizes difference as highly valuable to the growth and learning of the entire community.  Finally, when I speak of inclusive education I  do not mean theory nor do I mean practice, but rather praxis wherein all decision making in practice is informed by and reflected on through a framework that assumes student capacity and attempts to understand and support student learning.  

I come to this work from a variety of experiences. I began my career as a New York City teacher certified to teach adolescents with disabilities.  In that work I almost immediately noticed the disproportionate representation of Black and Latino boys in my special education classes and how few of them seemed to have a disability other than a poor education.  As a classroom teacher, I also personally participated in many of the structures of schooling that I now critique.  Because of this I recognize how special education discourse is at work on all of us and that even the best of teachers with the best intentions sometimes simply do not have the language or the frameworks to make sense of the problems they see in their teaching contexts.  These problems, my own lack of language and frameworks with which to qualify them, and my overall frustration with what felt like my inability to effect any change, led me to academia where I hoped that some letters after my name might make my voice louder.  My doctoral experience and my introduction to Disability Studies in Education, helped me to see just how much I did not understand and how much I had to learn.  Among those things, and perhaps the reason I have fallen so deeply in love with the work of DSE, was the clear spotlight on the parallel and intersecting oppressions and exclusions of schooling and the problematizing of disability as material and yet socially constructed.  As a teacher in higher education and the professional development field, I continue to struggle through, rethink, and reframe my understandings of the markers of difference and the pedagogies of difference even as I work to expand mindsets and transform practices of the educators I work with.  I remain committed to enacting a praxis of inclusivity at all levels of education as I and the teachers I work with act to reimagine the possibilities of the classroom for all students.